Shared Fasting, Shared Turning: 

Multifaith Convening for Healing, Resistance, and Justice

We gather in a moment marked by deep grief, fear, and urgency. As communities of faith, we are living amid ongoing violence and injustice, and many of us are asking how we sustain the spiritual strength, courage, and clarity needed to remain engaged in the work of healing and resistance over time.

This year, a sacred convergence invites us to gather. Lent, Ramadan, and the Bahá’í Month of Fasting overlap in our religious calendars—each centering practices of fasting, repentance, prayer, and generosity. These practices are not incidental. They are ancient, embodied ways that communities return to what matters most and re-orient themselves toward sacred virtues of justice, compassion, and hope.

Across the world’s faith, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, fasting is not primarily self-denial for its own sake. It is a formative discipline—a pedagogy of restraint that resists domination, consumption, and spiritual numbness. Fasting trains communities to live without assuming entitlement, to recognize dependence, and to stand in solidarity with those whose hunger is not chosen.

“Shared Fasting, Shared Turning” brings people together not only to learn about these traditions, but to draw upon them collectively—to ask how fasting and repentance might feed resistance rather than weaken it, and how spiritual discipline can fortify our commitment to justice in a time when many feel under attack or threatened.

Participants from Christian, Muslim, Bahá’í, and others whose traditions include fasting as a spiritual discipline will reflect together on questions such as:

• How does fasting help to center our lives on that which we hold to be the Divine?
• How does fasting deepen our capacity for courage, clarity, and solidarity?
• How can repentance be understood not as retreat or self-blame, but as a communal turning toward a more just future?
• What spiritual practices help us calm fear while strengthening resolve?

MnMN member, Distinguished Fellow at Augsburg’s Interfaith Institute, and former Presiding Bishop of the ELCA shares the story of his grandfather. “My grandfather lived in a small town in South Dakota where a train reached a dead end. When the locomotive could go no farther, it took a community—each person placing a pole into a shared platform—to turn it toward a new direction. In this spirit, repentance is understood not as reversing course, but as acknowledging that the way we are living has reached a dead end and choosing, together, to turn toward a shared vision of justice and dignity for all.”

One image guiding this gathering comes from a small town where a train reached a dead end. When the locomotive could go no farther, it took a community—each person placing a pole into a shared rotating platform—to turn it toward a new direction. In this spirit, repentance is understood not as reversing course, but as acknowledging that the way we are living has reached a dead end and choosing, together, to turn toward a shared vision of justice and dignity for all.

Convened by the Minnesota Multifaith Network, Rabata Cultural Center, Islamic Resource Group, and the Minnesota Council of Churches, this gathering creates space for honest conversation, theological difference and dialogue, and shared commitment. Resistance is not imposed as a single definition, but emerges organically as participants explore how their faith traditions sustain moral imagination, collective action, and long-term engagement for justice.

By coming together around our shared practices of fasting and repentance, we strengthen relationships across faith lines and deepen our capacity to move—together—toward the world we believe is possible.

All are welcome.