For the first time in a generation, the heavens have conspired to remind humanity what it claims to believe at the start of Ramadan, the Year of the Horse, and Fat Tuesday, all while coinciding with an annular solar eclipse.
Tonight, as the crescent moon appears in the twilight sky, the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims will begin observing Ramadan — a month of fasting from dawn until sunset, of prayer and charity, of turning toward the divine.
Tomorrow morning, Catholics and many Protestant Christians will file into sanctuaries to receive ashes on their foreheads, marking the beginning of Lent — 40 days of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving leading to Easter.
The two sacred seasons arrive almost simultaneously this year, a convergence that occurs roughly once every 32 years, when the lunar Islamic calendar completes its slow drift through the Gregorian year.
In the Philippines, in Uganda, in Trinidad, in communities where Muslims and Christians live side by side, they will wake on the same morning to the same call: abstain. Reflect. Give. Draw closer to God.
One might think this cosmic coincidence would prompt declarations of shared purpose from the pulpits and minbars of New Jersey, from the seats of power in Trenton, where decisions about whose lives matter are made.
One might imagine the governor issuing a proclamation, the legislature pausing to note that the capital city’s remaining Muslims and Christians — those who haven’t fled the hospital deserts and the crumbling infrastructure — are embarking together on a journey of spiritual renewal.
One might imagine many things.
Elsewhere, leaders have seized the moment. In Trinidad and Tobago, the prime minister issued a message calling the overlap “rare and significant,” noting that while the traditions differ, both observances draw on “reflection, discipline, compassion, charity, and justice.”
In the Philippines, Bishop Jose Colin Bagaforo of Kidapawan described the shared beginning as “a grace” that invites Muslims and Christians “to slow down, to return to God, and to walk together in faith.”
He quoted scripture from both traditions — “Blessed are the peacemakers” and God’s invitation to “the Home of Peace” — and reminded the faithful that fasting, in both faiths, “opens our eyes to suffering and enlarges our compassion.”
In Uganda, where the convergence happens once every three decades, religious leaders urged believers to extend their fasting beyond food to include “hate speech, false information, and online hostility.”
In Nigeria, interfaith media practitioners called on Muslims and Christians to use the season for “moral rebirth, compassion, and bridge-building across faith lines.”
Here, in the capital of one of the wealthiest states in the richest nation on earth, the convergence passes without notice from those who govern.
The irony would be comic if it weren’t so revealing. The same week that Lent and Ramadan begin together — offering a rare opportunity for interfaith solidarity and shared reflection on the needs of the poor — Trenton’s last remaining emergency room access point for its east side closed abruptly, its doors shuttered with flyers posted in the wrong language, its patients sent on longer journeys past empty buildings where care used to be.
The shared values of both traditions — care for the vulnerable, charity for the forgotten, compassion for those who suffer — find little expression in the policies of those who hold power over the capital city.
Bishop Bagaforo, speaking to his flock 8,000 miles away, might as well have been addressing the corridors of the Statehouse when he said, “Love of God is proven in love of neighbor, especially the poor and the forgotten.”
He might as well have been describing the logic of hospital closures when he warned that peace requires “right relationship with God, with one another, and with creation” — and that “when forests are destroyed, waters poisoned, and land abused, peace is broken.”
The same could be said when emergency rooms are closed, when lives are weighed against spreadsheets, when the capital’s own residents are sent to the margins so others need not look upon their suffering.
The timing of this convergence matters precisely because it is rare. The Islamic calendar shifts backward each year; the alignment with Lent happens only once every three decades. By the time it occurs again, today’s faithful will be older, some will be gone, and Trenton’s hospitals — what remains of them — will be dust.
For now, tonight, Muslims will gather for the first Tarawih prayers of Ramadan. Tomorrow, Christians will receive their ashes. Both will fast. Both will give to the poor. Both will seek the divine.
And in the capital city, the poor will wait longer for ambulances, the divine will seem farther away, and those in power will offer nothing — not a proclamation, not a prayer, not a policy that suggests any life matters beyond the ones they live themselves.
The heavens have aligned. The faithful have responded. The powerful, as always, have found other things to do.