This Friday is Eid. It’s the big Eid, the one when people commemorate Abraham’s audacious obedience to God by displaying his willingness to sacrifice his son on the mountain of God.
So, naturally, there’s sheep everywhere. Bless them. Small flocks gathered under trees in empty lots, standing meekly by while men exchange bills and drink coffee. Huge herds, picking their way across highways brought to a standstill by their number, taxi drivers chain-smoking patiently as the last muddy lamb frolics across the X20. A small pickup has even been making its way through my upscale neighborhood, it’s bed weighed down with fat black and white sheep. Yesterday, the driver and his teenaged son led one particularly stout one down the ramp and into the bougainvillea arched front gate of my neighbor’s home where I can still hear it occasionally bleat from their back garden as it waits for Friday. Sorry, dude.
Even from the dentist’s office on Monday, I could see a huge herd streaming through an empty field. I don’t know why it struck me funny in the moment. I was sitting there in an air-conditioned high-rise office, staring out the wide glass window and holding a pack of ice to my cheek. I could hear the neat clicks of the keyboard the dentist was typing on behind me as she hummed slightly to the latest hit from Cairo playing on the speaker overhead (“Do you know this song?” she had asked me while she carefully wrenched out the pieces of my broken root moments before, “The music video is so good.”) The city skyline rippled on the left, the saline lake that borders the sea on the right. And then a long stretch of undeveloped land stretching out in front of me, peppered with industrial waste and wildflowers. And about 50 sheep, prodded gently forward by their shepherd in the heart of this sprawling capital city.
Only two days left of school. Only five days left of Bryan being gone. Only a couple weeks before we head back to the US for a visit. This week we have been to high school graduations and goodbye parties and my Whatsapp inbox is full of messages from people I’m so excited to reunite with soon. Always something ending and something beginning. And is anyone else wondering how the heck is it June already?
One ending I reached this past week was completing the Spiritual Exercises. This nine-month process has been so rich and I am endlessly thankful for my spiritual director and the community with whom I got to walk. I would be lying if I said I ended the daily formation practices with the same gusto with which I started into them. But I think that’s probably ok. I’m guessing Ignatius intended for the Exercises to bleed into real life anyway. And they have. They’ve left a forever mark on the way I show up in it all.
Oddly enough, one of the most impacting pieces I am walking away with is the “First Principle and Foundation” – basically Ignatius summary thoughts on what it all means. A simple document on why we’re all here. What the heck we’re supposed to be doing.
I know, the “First Principle and Foundation” sounds about as exciting as plain whole-wheat toast (which, someone recently dubbed as “the most serial killer thing” about me – I could eat plain toast all day long). Regardless, it somehow hit the mark with me. I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life in me. Yes, that.
You can read the traditional translation here. But I put it in my own words a while back and they’re just below too.
Eid Mabruk everyone! Finish strong. Start with peace. Thank you God for sheep.
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The First Principle and Foundation:
We were made for love and from love, and to love we will return. The task before us is to release into that love fully, to realize it in our lives as thoroughly as possible.
All things work together and are held together in and for this love. Everything is usable for love if we let it be. So we must figure out how to hold on and how to let go, for the sake of love.
Take a step back from it all, create a little distance so that we can see, hear, feel, and sense God and how he is moving in everything. The distance allows us to be less affected by matter and matters of this life. To be more tender only to the Spirit.
Because all is love, we can rest full-heartedly into the life God has given us. We don’t have to yearn for the Good Life in any form.
All is grace. All is gift.
Far From My Mountain 