“There is a Crack In Everything, That’s How the Light Gets In”

A Ramadan Lesson: On Sorrow, Rumi, Leonard Cohen, and Intentional Design

Sweetness curated: A golden yellow and blue cup, crafted with love by small hands on a long-ago Mother's Day, now cradles the sweetener for my daily coffee ritual. Its colors remain vibrant even as its creator has grown, its slightly uneven edges somehow perfect for this new purpose. What once held childhood pride now holds small promises of sweetness—a beautiful evolution of utility. In this simple, imperfect vessel, I find the thinness between my child's past offerings and present becoming, between ordinary object and sacred keeper of memory. Every morning as I reach for a sugar packet, I touch not just paper and sweetness, but the enduring echo of a love that continues to fortify our home, contained in an oddly shaped, strange, yet utterly, beautiful vessel.

In the quiet before dawn, I place my mother's crystal bowl on the table, gifted to her by her sister when I was a small child. Its faceted sides are chipped in two places, each mark a story of hands that I adore. The bowl is nothing special by conventional standards—not Tiffany glass, not featured in design magazines, certainly not "Instagrammable" by today's standards. Yet as I fill it with fruit for suhoor, I feel the weight of its significance, how it carries my Khala's love for my mother, reflects what they both saw as beautiful, within its curved crystalline, and now flawed, pattern.

This Ramadan, I've been thinking about what makes a space integrated, even sacred.

Decades of devotion rest in a crystal bowl—metal, stone, and wooden tasbihs (prayer beads) worn smooth by countless prayers. Each bead carries its own story, its own whispered dhikr (remembrance). Together in this vessel that has witnessed decades of Ramadans, they create a landscape of faith: imperfect, enduring, and catching the light in unexpected ways. A thin place made visible.

Thin Places and the Hunger that Thins Our Souls 

Ramadan has always felt like the ‘thinnest’ of months to me—when the veil between the seen and unseen worlds seems more permeable. The Irish mystics spoke of thin places as locations where heaven and earth come closer together. In our tradition, we might recognize this in barakah—divine blessing that can inhabit spaces and objects, flowing through generations like water through cupped hands.

In Ramadan, this veil between worlds is pierced. 

But there is another kind of thinness, another unveiling, that Ramadan brings: the thinning that happens when we are emptied out.

When hunger hollows us, when thirst parches us, when fatigue slows our steps—we become thin places ourselves. Our defenses wear down. Our carefully constructed facades begin to crack. And in those cracks, light enters.

I said: what about my eyes?

He said: Keep them on the road.

I said: What about my passion?

He said: Keep it burning.

I said: What about my heart?

He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?

I said: Pain and sorrow.

He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

― Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi

It’s not that we seek out sorrow, grief, or repentance. Rather, when we are afflicted—whether by the intentional discipline of fasting or by life's unexpected trials—these veils are removed. We see more clearly. We feel more deeply. We exist between worlds. Beyond this world.

Filtered Faith

Even as our hearts break over the the incomprehensible suffering and ravaging impacts of war, hunger, and injustice, scroll through any social feed this month and you'll find an incoherent display of what it means to ‘do Ramadan’. Streaming through our screens, we see a parade of fanciful iftars, elaborate Ramadan decor, and perfectly plated dishes. (My own posts amongst them.) You'll see lists: Best Ramadan Recipes. Celebrated Muslims. We applaud our community’s success stories: meteoric career trajectories, the keynote address, the glittery awards ceremony after parties, all wonderful, hard-earned, and worthy of celebration.

Heritage in play: My Nana's intricately carved wooden chess set from Pakistan, brought home in the early 1980s. Its surface bears the beautiful scratches of countless matches rather than the pristine shine of an untouched heirloom. Now it rests among our favorite coffee table books—not as a museum piece behind glass, but as a living artifact that has earned its place in our home through use, memory, and the silent wisdom of pieces moved by three generations of hands. A game board transformed into a thin place, where time folds upon itself with every glance.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with celebrating beauty or achievement, I worry that we've begun to apply the logic of the algorithm to our spiritual lives—elevating only what appears ‘ascendant’, or even at times, perfect. 

Many of us, despite our inborn Gen-X/millenial skepticism, are now fully latched onto climbing the ascendant ladder of success. We are ambitious, successful, and aspire to be better. And while these are laudable qualities in balance, the "Instagramization" of success has infiltrated even our holiest month. The most aesthetically pleasing suhoor is daily clickbait on my feed. The most impressive taraweeh stamina. The most photogenic mosque visit.

What is my Ramadan, if it’s fed and sourced by an algorithm?

What if our focus on climbing the ladder first, better, best, we obscure ascension of another sort?

What gets lost in this curated perfection of spirituality?  

The Broken Vessels of Light 

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ consistently reminded his community to care for the vulnerable amongst us, the widow and the orphans—those existing at society's margins, those whose lives weren't shiny or triumphant.

“Be good to the orphans and needy, speak nicely to the people and help the poor.” (2:83, Al-Baqarah)

We are a faith community that lifts up all of its parts—the broken as well as the whole, the struggling as well as the successful, the grieving as well as the joyful.

In my home, I've begun to notice how certain objects serve as reminders of this wholeness. The prayer rug with its worn, frayed center, where my mother's forehead met the earth thousands of times. The cotton potholder with the burn mark from that Ramadan when I was too distracted by conversation to notice the pot boiling over. My mother in law’s Quran, its worn pages a reminder of her dedicated, daily reading. These imperfect things are portals to understanding. Their broken parts and pieces remind me that perfection is not the point—presence is.

The Empty Chair: Loss as an Honored Guest 

What if our homes during Ramadan became places where all states of being were welcome? What if, alongside our celebrations, we created space for vulnerability, ugliness, loss, grief, resilience, and empathy?

I think of the friend who came over after work last week, still raw from the grief of divorce, who wept openly at my table as we waited to break our fast, wondering who would include her now. I think of my neighbor who cannot fast this year due to illness, who feels disconnected from the community's rhythms. I think of the elderly uncle who sits quietly in the corner at the mosque, rarely approached, his contributions to the community largely forgotten as younger, more dynamic leaders have emerged. I think of his wife, who despite serving countless teas and decades of volunteer hours at the masjid, is not remembered in community iftar invites.

Sorrow, grief, ugliness, too, are part of our Ramadan landscape. These, too, are worthy of our attention and care.

Time's gentle archive: A wooden bookshelf where my teenagers' childhood stories still stand at attention, their spines slightly faded but memories intact. Between well-loved pages rests my daughter's handcrafted yellow ceramic figurine—its imperfections perfectly capturing her creative spirit years ago. Beside these treasures, a 1980s adhan clock marks the hours not just with time, but with calls to prayer that structured our family rhythms years ago. Three generations of devotion, creativity, and wonder share this humble space, transforming an ordinary shelf into a thin place where past and present collapse into one another, and the barakah of everyday living accumulates in plain sight.

Designing Absence as Presence 

How might we create homes that function as thin places —as a place of unveiling— during Ramadan? Some possibilities:

• Display objects that carry difficult memories alongside those that evoke joy—the hospital bracelet from a health crisis, the wedding photo with the spouse now gone, the falling apart picture frame that was all you could afford at an earlier point in your career.

• Create a corner for —and a practice of— lament as well as gratitude in your family prayer space—a place where tears are as welcome as prayers, where questioning is as sacred as certainty.

• Invite those who may feel excluded from conventional Ramadan celebrations—the recently divorced, the single parent, the unemployed, the ill, the newcomer, the questioning, the differently observant, those grieving.

• Make room for silence amidst the festivities—moments where nothing needs to be achieved or produced or shared, where being is enough.

Golden Seams: The Luminous Art of Being Broken

There is a Japanese art form called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The philosophy behind it is that breakage and repair are part of the history of an object, not something to disguise.

I wonder if our spiritual lives might benefit from a similar approach. What if the breaks—our failures, our doubts, our losses, our weaknesses—were not flaws to be hidden but distinctive marks to be honored? What if they were, in fact, the very places where divine light enters most powerfully?

Anchored memories: This seascape of vibrant blue waters and graceful sailboats—some docked, others dancing on waves—once greeted every visitor at my childhood home's entrance. Through the years and across multiple moves, it has voyaged alongside my family, never relegated to storage or forgotten walls. Its frame may show the subtle marks of time, but the blue remains as deep and promising as ever. Now hanging in our current home, it serves as both window and mirror—a thin place where I glimpse my childhood self each time I pass, where visitors see merely art, but I see the constellation of homes that have shaped me. In its painted harbor, past and present drop anchor together, while the boats forever promise journeys yet to come.

This Ramadan, as I hold my mother's chipped fruit bowl, I am reminded that it is often in our broken places that we find the deepest connection—to ourselves, to others, to the divine. It is in our emptiness that we create space to be filled with something greater than ourselves.

Our homes, with all their ordinary objects and everyday rhythms, can become thin places when we allow them to hold our whole selves—our ambitions and our failures, our joys and our sorrows, our certainties and our doubts. Our homes can create an aesthetic environment designed not merely for beauty, but for spirit, opening the door to curiosity, the remembrance of sorrow, and perhaps most of all, creating a pattern that unveils another world.

In doing so, we create openings to belonging—not just for ourselves, but for all who enter our doors.

May your homes be blessed this Ramadan with the barakah that comes not despite brokenness, but through it.

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