Tom Facchine – Spiritual Growth Through Acts of Worship

			When you're a pilgrim, there's certain things that you can't do. And those things, it's interesting
because there are things that you normally are allowed to do. So for example, a normal Muslim, we're
not allowed to eat pork, we're not allowed to drink alcohol, we're not allowed to gamble, right?
These sorts of things normal. When you're a pilgrim, you're also not allowed to remove hair from
your body, clip your nails, apply perfume, or fragrance, hunt, right? Or even be intimate with your
spouse. These are things that suddenly become off limits to you. Somebody could ask why? Well, first
of all, there's a principle that's very important here and that nothing comes for free, that you've
		

			got to pay for it. Somehow. If you want spiritual enlightenment, you want spiritual developments,
you want a relationship with Allah, your creator, you want a relationship with God, you're gonna
have to pay something, you're gonna have to give it up, give up something, right? We can't, we
don't, we can't be entitled, there's, there's no free lunch, when it comes to these sorts of things.
We have to put in the work. And we have to give up things when it comes to pilgrimage. It's an extra
level of piety, it's an extra level of righteousness. It's something that is not just your normal,
everyday, bare bare minimum level of religious practice, this is something extra, you want to be a
		

			pilgrim, you're going to have to give up something extra. And this is a theme that we find when it
comes to Ramadan and other acts of worship that we have that temporarily depriving ourselves from
things that are normally permissible for us is kind of a scaffolding, or it facilitates spiritual
growth. We're against instant gratification. And we're also against constant gratification, right?
If you spend every day of your life, just feeding yourself, the second that you get hungry, or even
most of us before we get hungry, then you're not going to appreciate food, you're not going to be
grateful for food. So we have to actually actively proactively deprive ourselves of these things
		

			once in a while, so that we re connect ourselves with appreciation, we cut and squash our sense of
entitlement and so that we clear the space, right? They say that the empty vessel is the one that
you can pour something into, right? If the vessel is already full, it's not gonna fit anything else.
So if we empty ourselves, then we're going to be able to experience something else. We're going to
be able to develop something else when it comes to our spirit or relationship with a lot if we're
just constantly full all the time. There's not going to be any room