Skip to main content

This Is Us


As difficult as it has been to live within the confines of the current quarantine, the creativity that has arisen to honor and celebrate special people and occasions has been heartwarming. Birthday drive-by parades, prom photos from home, visits with neighbors from porch and sidewalk. Public health guidelines make most of our usual celebrations off limits for now. But they cannot suppress natural human joy.

 Today’s story comes from our Muslim neighbors at Dar Al Taqwa. When I saw it on Facebook I immediately asked to share it here. 



A message from the Dar Al Taqwa Board of Directors:

 Greetings to our beloved community and wonderful neighbors!

 We at Dar Al Taqwa want to wish everyone a beautiful Memorial Day weekend and an Eid Mubarak to our Muslim friends and families!

 This weekend marks the first of our high holidays, Eid Al Fitr, that celebrates the culmination of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

 Due to the pandemic, we decided to turn COVID into a 'COV-EID' for our community members who have been unable to celebrate our holy month and holiday the way we normally would: together.

 Over the last few months, we've all had to adapt our celebrations. We've seen and heard street parades, car honks, and loud music as community members have celebrated birthdays and graduating seniors. While at any other time this might have been considered noise, it has reminded us that JOY cannot be quarantined!

 Working with Jason Levinson Entertainment, we hired clowns, jugglers, stilt walkers, and a unicyclist. Even Pikachu made a grand entrance! We provided pastries and goody bags, and to uplift the spirits of children and families as they drove through this parade, we set up a speaker playing holiday songs in the back of our property next to our building. To cap off the end of our festive 'drive-thru,' cars were sprayed with a fun bubble foam machine!

 We are so grateful to everyone for their patience, support, and cooperation as we all do the best we can during these very difficult times. We also were happy to thank our first responders, police officers, and essential workers with pastry boxes to show them how grateful we are for their hard work and dedication, today and everyday. We are appreciative of their hard work that allows us to stay safe and celebrate!

 Thank you and greetings of peace!!
*****

Learning about this event at Dar Al Taqwa is both a window for me into the culture of a religious community different than my own, but also a mirror of the deep yearnings I feel to be connected to others. We have the opportunity to see ourselves in every single quarantine celebration. Each one is an expression of the human spirit we all share. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more