Tom Facchine – Virtues of Ramadan 2022 – Fasting

			One of the virtues of Ramadan is that fasting Ramadan is one of the pillars of Islam. For something
to be a pillar of Islam, it Allah is telling us that this practice is so fundamental and
foundational and essential to our submission, that our submission really isn't worth very much
without. Because worship at the end of the day is about gratitude. And gratitude is not something
that we get to define. It's something that Allah gets to define. Imagine if you cooked an amazing
meal for your spouse. And then your spouse was like, Well, I'm going to show you my gratitude by
going and taking a nap. And you can go clean up everything by yourself. That might be a definition
		

			of gratitude to them. But that's not how you want to see gratitude, you would like them to help you
clean up, you would like to maybe be complimented or have other people know about your amazing
cooking skills, right? The point is that you get to decide what gratitude looks like. And we live in
a moment in time where we're a little bit
		

			skewed towards the personal experience. And obviously, the personal experience is very, very
important. But the personal experience doesn't upstage or it doesn't take over, or doesn't replace a
lawyer's ability to define what gratitude looks like to him. A law says that if I gave you all of
these things, I gave you your life. I gave you your wealth, I gave you all your relationships, all
your abilities, all your happiness and memories. This is what I want. This is how it looks to be
grateful to me. Fasting the pillars, right, Hajj, pilgrimage, you know, all these sorts of things
that are the pillars of submission. That's what a loss of Hannah Huhtala has told us. It looks like
		

			to be grateful. And specifically the pillar is are the absolute bare minimum of what it takes to
truly submit