#interreligious

Why are Palestinians asking for money?" — Let’s talk facts. 🇵🇸

I’ve seen this question popping up, and it’s time to address it with pragmatism and ground-level reality. When you see families from Gaza sharing crowdfunding links, it’s not a "choice"—it’s a desperate response to a total economic collapse.

Here is the practical reality of why financial aid is a matter of life and death right now:

1. Total Economic Paralysis

Since October 2023, the economy in Gaza hasn't just slowed down; it has ceased to exist.

Unemployment: Private sector unemployment is effectively at 100%.

Destruction: Factories, farms, and small businesses have been leveled. There is no "going to work" when your workplace is rubble and the streets are a conflict zone.

2. War-Zone Hyperinflation

When supply chains are cut off, the price of surviving skyrockets.

The Cost of Living: Goods that used to cost a few dollars (like flour, clean water, or basic hygiene products) now cost 10x to 20x their original price on the black market due to extreme scarcity.

Cash Scarcity: Most banks and ATMs have been destroyed. Accessing what’s left of your own savings often requires paying predatory fees to middlemen just to get physical cash.

3. The "Exit" Tolls

For many, the goal isn't just to buy food—it’s to get their children to safety.

Coordination Fees: To cross the border (when possible), "coordination fees" charged by private agencies can range from $5,000 to $10,000 per person. For a family of five, that is a fortune no average person has sitting in their pocket, especially after losing their home.

4. Infrastructure is Gone

There is no public water, no power grid, and no municipal services.

Those moments were our secrets in crowded rooms. (They have no idea about me and you.) Last Saturday, I raised pieces of parata to her lips, with laddus she bought for me before getting on her five-hour flight across the country to visit me at the apartment I rent. We hadn’t seen each other in a year. We were in a rush to head out, so I fed her while she cooked the paratas and I watched the eggs. We chatted casually. I was going to see her off at the airport. She’s 26 now. I’m 25.

Arnadí, also known as carabassa santa ("holy pumpkin"), caramull ("brim") or cassoleta de Dijous Sant ("Holy Thursday little casserole") 🍰

It's a cake made of chestnut and pumpkin eaten during the Holy Week in some areas of the València area and the Central Valencian Country.

The most widespread recipe uses toasted or boiled pumpkin, boiled sweet potatoes, lemon peel, almonds, pine nuts, egg yolks, sugar and cinnamon.

The origin of this dish is unknown, but it's documented in the area since at least the 1600s. Some food historians point that it might be related to an Amazigh (=indigenous Northern African) dish called sellou (سْلّو), tquawt (تْقاوْتْ), sfouf (سْفوفْ), zammitta (الزٌمٌيطة) or bssisse (بْسيِسْ), depending on the region, which is eaten for Ramadan.

An Amazigh sellou. Photo by picturepartners.

The sellou is made of almond, cinnamon, wheat, oil or butter, and other spices that vary depending on the region. It has the same shape as the arnadí and is also decorated with almonds.

Another noticeable similarity is that both are eaten during their religion's holy time: Ramadan for Islam and the Holy Week for Catholics. They're both very important religious celebrations based on the lunar calendar and based on fasting or restricting food (for Ramadan, Muslims can't eat during sunlight hours and, for the Holy Week, Catholics aren't supposed to eat meat and eggs and have to eat simple humble food). Both religions view it as a way of sharing compassion with poor people and to distance themselves from Earthly desires, and in the case of Christians also to get closer to Jesus' suffering. Even though most people in historically-Catholic countries don't follow these religious rules anymore, it's still common to eat the traditional dishes of the time.

To get ready for the hours of fasting or reduced food intake, both communities have the tradition of eating high-calories, high-energy dishes, such as the arnadí and sellou.

The arnadí, in its current recipe, can't date back to the Middle Ages, when the Valencian Country was conquered by Islam and received Arab and Amazigh population. The reason is simple: its main ingredients (pumpkin and sweet potato) would not reach us until after the colonization of the American continent, where these species are from. But it can be possible that arnadí/sellou was made of almond paste at the time and, centuries later, they were changed for pumpkin and sweet potato paste, which is cheaper and it turned out to taste even better.

I just love the idea of someone you can easily talk with for hours about theology, unafraid of judgement because you already know where your beliefs differ

It’s always interesting to me when folks show surprise (or, occasionally, utter shock) at my speaking in terms that point through the transitory nature of religious convention. Recently this arose with a new student, and I subsequently reflected on it in light of my solemn monastic profession. For those who are unfamiliar with that rite in Catholic Christian tradition, it is the final vows that monastics make, often referred to as ‘life vows’. A universal and prominent component of this rite is a ceremonial death-and-burial, in which the candidate for solemn vows lies in full prostration on the ground, is completely covered with a large black funerary shroud and left there for a portion of the ceremony, while the Liturgy goes on without him or her.

In my own experience of this, one of my monastic students, Br. Aidan, placed a traditional Scottish tartan over my body, symbolizing my ancestral inheritance; then an old Eastern Orthodox funeral shroud printed with an icon of the crucifixion (very similar to what is depicted on the ‘Great Schema’ of some Orthodox monastic Elders), which was gifted to me and our community years ago by a dear former seminary professor; and finally the black funeral shroud. Those first two layers were dearly held things that were in one sense an integral part of my ritual death, but at the same time things that, because they were so dearly held, I knew I also had to die to in that process. The essential symbolism of this act of ritual burial is that the monastic is finally, sacramentally, then and there, once and for all, dying to the phenomenal world and to every other possible path of experience that would otherwise be open to him or her in this lifetime. 

In my understanding,—and I’m confident this reflects the understanding of the ancient tradition, too—the fully vowed monastic is, if nothing else, one who is fully immersed in the process of dying absolutely to the false construct of ‘self’, as well as to every phenomenal, worldly attachment, in order to enter non-dual union with the Divine Ground. Obviously, undergoing the symbolic sacramental rituals of a rite like Solemn Profession does not magically make it so—: they don’t suddenly bring one to full awakening in non-dual awareness; rather, the outward dimensions of the rite further the depth of the process toward awakening that has been unfolding throughout many years of previous formation, ascetical and contemplative practice. They also ‘energetically’ close doors that might otherwise have remained open, narrowing one’s focus even further on the authentic aim of the monastic (and, in this case, the contemplative) life.

When I was ordained a Buddhist monk in 2003, the same essential feeling was impressed upon me: a ‘dying’ in pursuit of total freedom by means of renunciation—: real renunciation, which is not a rejection of anything, but a seeing through all things, and a releasing of one’s delusional grasping at phenomena. This is a recurring theme of what might be called the ‘perennial wisdom tradition’.

Fully entering a life of renunciation means inwardly dying to all concepts—about anything and everything, including God, metaphysical dogmas, and all the other elements of cultural-religious convention. Why? Because one has discovered (or must come to discover), in dying to ‘self’ and all phenomena, that all such things are contrivances of the human mind, cultural constructs, and they are not God, or even adequate representations of the ineffable Mystery we point to with that term. As St. Eckhart reminds us, we will have to eventually die to God as well—that is, to all our concepts about God—since we know for certain that nothing we can say about that eternal Mystery is actually true, and no image, idea, belief, or conditioned experience can truly reflect it. (This is also beautifully laid out in St. Dionysius’s treatise, Mystical Theology.) Hence, the jñāna yogīs of Vedāntic tradition commit to perpetually cutting through all thoughts and appearances with the sword of discernment, saying with everything: neti, neti: ‘not this, not this’. Nothing that’s created or conditioned can be the Mystery we’re seeking.

One who has gone down to the grave and touched the depths of self-surrender has effectively died to everything. There’s no holding certain things back or choosing ‘favorite pets’ as exceptions to the rule; that would only mean more attachments and thus more distractions from what is ultimate, from what ancient Hermetists sometimes called the One Thing. This invokes for me a motif found frequently in the sayings of the Desert Mothers and Fathers about not keeping back even a little bit of money in one’s cell as a ‘safety net’. Holding on even to one little thing is not full surrender. (In the present context, the monetary dimension of the motif is metaphorical, of course, pointing to the holding back of certain select attachments, favored ideational constructs, beliefs: whatever we want to continue to imagine can give us ‘security’.) That kind of subtle, devious jockeying against the authentic aim of illumination or awakening only reifies the false duality of the state of delusion and needless suffering—what Hindus and Buddhists call samsāra. Therefore, nothing can be carried over into contemplative life from the life of attachment to phenomena: no contrivance of mind, nothing framed by human thought. And this unequivocally includes even the most ‘sacred’ thoughts and personally prized religious ideations, which are, at the end of the day, still just made of thought—and thought itself isn’t made of anything at all.

There should be no surprise, then, when those of us who have thusly died—not just ceremonially, but in actuality, in the way we live and speak—teach or otherwise express ourselves in language and behavior that reflects the fact of that kenosis. A perennial hope of monasticism in the great religious traditions—and of many non-monastic schools of mystical training as well—is that the sharing of the fruits of this emptying would be for others not a source of fear and unwelcome destabilization, but rather an inspiring witness, to help in some small way in the universal project of apokatástasis, or, in Buddhist terms, bringing all sentient beings to enlightenment, to realization of their own true nature. Without the compassionate intention to create the conditions where that might be so, probably none of us would bother to teach or even remain much in contact with ‘the world’ at all.

Those who say ‘yes’ to this path of emptying—which is to say, legitimate contemplatives of any variety—will have to progressively shed more and more attachments, until finally nothing remains but that which was never created and never dies, cannot be spoken, and cannot be thought. 

So, my friends, a humble invitation: Don’t be shocked by speech or actions from such persons that doesn’t conform to the normative, mainline doctrine of the particular religious context(s) in which they happen to presently reside. Moving beyond those constraints is an expected and hoped for stage of the path toward perfect freedom. There is a golden thread of wisdom running through many of the world’s religious traditions, the essence of which is transcendent of each and all of those traditions. This may be new information for you, and it may threaten some of your dearly held assumptions about reality—and that’s okay. I would simply encourage you to sit with that, explore it further, and be open, rather than rigidify and resist. And it’s sometimes useful also to recall that, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, all of the things we hold most dear are constantly moving, rapidly changing, conditional, and always provisional. This includes, of course, all the culturally constructed artifices of religion we like to imagine are somehow trans-human, magically pure and unaffected by the conditioned vicissitudes of phenomenal existence.

Once upon a time I had a Pāli saying of the Buddha, rendered in Devanāgarī, tattooed on my arm—well, technically I still do, but because the lettering had been put on too small (I was young and didn’t yet know enough about tattooing), it now lives underneath a Pictish motif. This saying is still very significant for me, and I think of it often. It translates roughly to: ‘All conditioned things are impermanent, subject to rise and fall. Once they arise, they must cease. And their stilling is bliss.’ I think that just about summarizes the situation perfectly.

Along the way, provisional reality must have its day, of course, and it must be embraced to the extent that it helps us (somewhat paradoxically) to eventually let go of it. In the realm of the relative, we still need to strive for the goal, we still need self-discipline, we have to have some structure or pattern of life, we need some legitimate wisdom teachings to follow, and, above all, we must practice. But we do well, firstly, to adopt those provisional forms that actually help us rather than hinder us by weighing us down with needless, extraneous dogmas or unhelpful thought-forms; and, secondly, whatever we do embrace and utilize, we do well to simultaneously know it as utterly transparent and ephemeral. Not this, not this…

And if in your travels you happen to hear something that has in it the harmonious notes of wisdom, but challenges your beliefs and assumptions, I encourage you to listen—to listen with the ear of the heart.

Song Of Our Maker (Aled Jones with Sami Yusuf)

The song weaves together the popular Sufi song ‘Fiyyashiyya’ with the much-loved English hymn ‘All Creatures of God and Our King’. The lyrics of ‘Fiyyashiyya’ come from the writings of the 17th century Moroccan poet Sidi Othman ibn Yahya Cherki and it remains today one of the best-known and loved traditional songs throughout North Africa.

The words of ‘All Creatures of God and Our King’ were translated from the Canticle of the Sun, written in 1225 by St Francis of Assisi and set to music by William Henry Draper in 1919.