007 - On Faith
I’m just trying to navigate the space between my higher self and lower self, who I want to be, who I believe I should be, and who I actually am.
Hi, how are you? Hope you’re doing okay this week. It’s 10PM here in Melbourne, which is always the existential hour for me.
I have just finished watching the new season of Ramy a few days ago and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. If there was ever a show with an honest insight into conflicting desires, I don’t know a better one than Ramy. Ramy is a show that has always been about the relationship to faith and to the greater questions of identity and purpose. I’m not raised in an immigrant Arab family in America, but I can definitely identify myself with the characters and experiences so well. There was one scene when Ramy said this to his cousin in Egypt, “I’m like both. I wanna pray, I wanna go to the party, and I’m breaking some rules, I’m following others.” When I heard that, I felt seen.
My relationship with God and faith has always been complex. I don’t know if I can call myself a religious person. I often joke to my friends saying that I’m a “fake Muslim” whenever I see their shocking face when they found out I drink and eat pork. On the one hand, I do believe in higher power and I’m genuinely seeking spiritual strength and connection to my faith in this deeply messy and sometimes wondrous world. On the other, I have always had internal struggles in aligning this belief and action and the lengths I will go to close the widening gap between the two.
When I was a kid and growing up into adulthood, I didn’t understand yet never questioned the existence of God. My parents are Muslim so I automatically raised in a Muslim household. Islamic scripture hangs on our walls, my parents and I will pray together in our living room and I went to Islamic school through elementary to junior high. During Ramadan, I would fully engage with the whole thing and do all the rituals that I know by heart, like attending the mosque daily to pray tarawih, attempting to read and finish The Quran in 30 days, and trying to only do and think good things.
I remember we had this magazine called “Hidayah”. It features morality tales in which virtue is rewarded and wickedness punished. The graphic visuals of the cover vividly display the horrible fate awaiting those who sin, accompanied with gruesome headlines like ‘Man with no faith tormented in the tomb’. This kind of magazine was sort of a scary reminder for me to stay in the righteous path. I’d spent the majority of my childhood feeling nervous that something was watching me, taking notes of every good and bad thing that I did or crossed my mind.
So, I sort of grew up with this belief that when we do “bad things,” we need to remedy them with “good things.” This kind of thinking has been implemented in my brain and affects how I do things (sadly) until now. My attempts to close the gap come through a series of prayers, ritualistic cleansing, and selfless acts on behalf of the poor and neglected. After a night out partying and consuming forbidden things, the next morning I will double down in washing myself, making sure to scrub the guilt away from my body to appear “clean”, before bowing down to God.
When I was in 8th grade, I had a major crush on this guy a year below me and one day I saw him in the counselor office writing something. I watched him there like a creeper and once he left, I managed to grab the pen that he used before and kept it as a memento for myself. It was stupid and weird, I know. Then a week later, I failed my math exam. My mind started to think that this happened because I stole a pen. It’s God's way of speaking to me for sure.
I would often think that when something bad is going on in my life, it would be a punishment from God, for my sins, therefore I need to redeem myself, so that I can find a way out of this problem. This theme of repeated cleaning and purging was my desperate attempt to balance the scales of what should be done and what I should not have done, a matter of conflicting desires. I know this might not be the right way to live, but maybe it’s because I fear God. I do fear God because God is unknown and I don’t understand it. I don’t understand life but I know and recognise that I’m small and that there is something bigger than myself bonding us together.
Despite being raised Muslim, I have never feel like I have a “connection” to God. It’s strange really. Part of me feels grateful that I have this relation to God, something that I can lean on to tell me I’m okay, something to help me make sense of things. But as I got older, I started to question everything. Why did we need a reason to be good? Why do I have this concept in my mind that by doing good deeds and acknowledging my mistakes, it can tip things in my favor and grant me access to Heaven in the afterlife? So much of my life I was saying, I want to do this the right way, however somewhere along the way I broke those rules and then started to question God, faith, and whether I am on the right path? I will ask myself, “why does God put me on this planet? What exactly is my purpose?”, a question I keep coming back to on dark days, on days I feel like I have nothing.
I think sometimes my relationship with God was based on a need basis, like when you’re just asking for the stuff you need or when you are in deep shit. As I have been living away from my family in the last four years, I can’t help but feel like I’m slowly drifting away from God and my faith. I remember during my first Eid Fitr prayer abroad, listening to the takbir for the first time, I bursted into tears. I’m sad of not being able to celebrate Ramadan and Eid with my family, but beyond that, laying a particular sadness about a wholeness I cling to and desire for, feelings of guilt and longings for righteousness.
There is one word that you will hear a lot during season 3 of Ramy, which is “Maktub.” This Arabic word translates as “it is written.” But as you will also learn in Ramy, it also poses this question: if God made the choice, do I still choose? Do we truly have free will? Is life predestined? What about all the bad decisions and mistakes that I made? Are we making choices that we believe are our own but are in fact made of us? It’s something that goes through my mind a lot. As Muslims, we say “Insha Allah,” which means “God willing,” but is it already been willed by God? I honestly have no idea.
I sometimes wonder whether this dreadfulness and despair that I often feel in my life has something to do with my crisis of faith. I used to try not to think about who I was, I just wanted to think about who I wanted to be, which is to be a good person. I’m trying to navigate the space between my higher self and lower self, who I want to be, who I believe I should be, and who I actually am. But why does it feel like this journey of enlightenment only leads me deeper into a mountain of self deflection? What is exactly the scale of righteousness that I’m seeking? What is the purpose of this pain, to the lives I have been given? I wish to know.
Anyways, I wish for you flowers and sunshine, gentle breeze and clear skies.
x
Gita
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