We three kings...

Hajj is one of those things that I can’t ever say I even remotely related to on any level.  The idea of traveling to one of the few countries I never wanted to visit and perform forced rituals sounded so devoid of anything close to what I wanted to do to show religious devotion even if it was with fellow co-religionists.  I’m not a ritual-phobe, but I am a person who likes to do things with meaning for myself, with flexibility and without fear.

I’ve read several books about Hajj, including a couple by Americans, notably one by Michael Wolfe, which was interesting, but still did nothing to sway me from seeing the Hajj as more than an ancient collection of old pagan rituals transformed into Islamic ones throughout the years.

Recently, however, I started reading Asra Nomani’s Standing Alone in Mecca. The author shares a lot of the same fears and skepticism I share and still moves on to find meaning behind the rituals she finds herself performing through her past experiences.  I looked into my past to find connections and remembered advice from my not too distant past. 

The pastor at the church where I grew up at often asked me to look at the symbolism in the things I found in the Bible to search for deeper meanings and the truth within myself. I remembered when he declared in church that the wise men searching for Christ were definitely not Christian, and may not have even been monotheist. The point of the three men looking for the star in the east was not someone looking for Christ as a religious figure, but rather people looking for something higher than them, which should be the constant struggle in all of us. I wanted to get over my arrogance and began to apply this logic to what I was reading.

I started relating to the story of Hajar and her struggle in the desert, but in a whole other way than the author.  She was relating because of her status as a single mother.  I was relating because of my status of a seeker in a proverbial desert of seemingly endless nothing.  Abraham to me was the well-meaning, but quite like many believers of Islam who help people come to Islam and then just dump them in the desert.  I saw Ismail as my Islamic faith.  Ismail’s name quite appropriately means God hears.  As I’ve been traveling to and fro between mountains of information and disinformation, I have found my “zamzam” in people who are fellow searching Muslims, in my past experiences when I was a Christian, in a Hindu woman I met in the book store last night and in books I’ve been reading. 

I believe I’m starting to find a needed connection to the rituals of my religion and to Hajj, which is considered a pillar of my faith.  Maybe I won’t ever find meaning in the literalness of the journey, but I’m beginning to find meaning symbolically.  I might not be a proverbial wise man, but I’m working on my journay anyway.