This time around, I devote my entire sermon to the final verse of Surat al-Kafirun; "to you, your religion, and to me, mine." The sermon is titled, "Everyone Has a Religion," and can be found on the Islamic Center's main page (or here, at the podcast link; see 7/17.)
I had an absolutely wonderful time speaking at a conference sponsored by a number of centers at the University of California-Berkeley. This conference will be made available via webcast and Berkeley's iTunes channel. When this is released, I will be sure to let you know; for anyone interested in Islam and new media, this represents a really amazing discussion with participants from the Bay Area, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and of course New York City.
The Bay Area itself is unbelievably gorgeous. Turns out all the hype is true. One smart thing this region did is not overrun all its waterfronts with freeways, like New York has unfortunately. Of course New York is a lot more crowded, dirtier, and also more caffeinated; but beyond that, the natural landscape of the bay area is far and away more moving and compelling than anything in New York City. I recall at one point we were driving south on the Golden gate Bridge, and so to my right I could see the bay opening up into the Pacific, the sun almost setting over the horizon, and a fully loaded tanker ship slowly moving into the distance, and I remember thinking that the Pacific looked so absolutely enormous, so gently and overwhelmingly sublime, that I felt as if that actually gigantic ship were about to disappear into nothingness.
I have a strange attraction to water; I can actually sit down by an empty beach, or along any kind of waterfront (of course, it has to be a nice one), and there, in silence, I could probably spend hours simply staring into the distance. I find it has a calming influence, as if it simply sucks out all the stress and anxiety and negative energy inside ourselves and takes it into itself. It is a kind of paradise, or at least the kind of serenity that every side of Paradise should be surrounded by. So the only downside, I imagine, to living in the Bay Area -- other than fun at events like earthquakes -- is that I simply may never get anything done. As a New Yorker, I would either collapse into internal anarchy, or melt away into someone else entirely. Because the frenetic and nervous energy of the East Coast makes it seem as if everyone on the West Coast is sleeping. But it seems like a very happy sleep.
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