COMMENTARY: When Ramadan and Lent Begin on the Same Day

Mindanao already knows what the world is still learning

This week, something rare is happening across Mindanao. Muslim families have entered Ramadan — the month of fasting, prayer, and renewed surrender to Allah. And Catholic families received ashes on their foreheads on the same day, beginning forty days of penance and reflection toward Easter. Both communities are hungry. Both are reaching, simultaneously, toward something larger than themselves.

Ramadan and Lent have not opened together like this in years. I do not think it is an accident that they are doing so now.

Mindanao is home — in its negotiating rooms, its evacuation centers, its parish halls and masjids — and I have learned to pay attention to what the season is telling me. This year, it is telling me something quiet and clear: that we – Catholic and Muslim alike – are engaged in the same fundamental act. We are fasting. We are praying. We are being asked, by the most sacred obligations of their respective faiths, to empty ourselves so something greater can enter.

In the Islamic tradition, sawm — the fast of Ramadan — is one of the five pillars of the faith. It is not merely abstinence from food. It is a discipline of the whole self: the tongue, the eyes, the heart. Zakat, the obligation of almsgiving, intensifies during this month. Ramadan is, at its core, a formation in solidarity — with the hungry, with the vulnerable, with the neighbor you might otherwise overlook.

In the Christian tradition, Lenten fasting, prayer, and almsgiving serve an identical formative purpose: to loosen the grip of self-centeredness and reorient the person toward God and neighbor.

Two different faiths, two different calendars — but the same posture. Humility before the divine. Generosity toward the human.

Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti — “All Brothers and Sisters” is meaningful to me. He was not writing a diplomatic document. He was making a theological claim: that the major faith traditions, at their best and truest, move their adherents toward one another. He called this social friendship — not the shallow tolerance of looking past difference, but the deeper solidarity of recognizing a brother and sister in the stranger. He signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration on Human Fraternity with Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb not as a gesture but as a conviction: that the God each of us approaches, from our different angles of faith, does not live only inside our own walls.

We have been living this argument for generations, often without the language to name it.

I think of the Catholic communities in Pikit and Kakar who opened their barangays to Muslim families fleeing conflict — not as a program, not as a project, but because the person at the gate was hungry and afraid. I think of the Bangsamoro leaders who sat across from Christian peace advocates through years of exhausting negotiation, sustained not by diplomatic protocol but by a shared conviction — rooted in their faith — that this work was a moral obligation. I have been in those rooms. I know what it cost people to stay in them, to believe when the process gave them little reason to. What I witnessed was not strategic patience. It is faith. It is sabr.

Social friendship is not a summit, it is an iftar you show up to. It is a Catholic neighbor bringing dates to a Muslim family at sundown. It is a Muslim colleague pausing to ask how your Lenten prayer is going. It is small. It is specific. It is the ordinary miracle of one faith community being moved, by the interior logic of its own convictions, toward the other.

To my Catholic sisters and brothers as we move through these forty days: Lent is asking us to go somewhere. Fasting without solidarity is just skipping lunch or intermittent fasting. Prayer without attention to your Muslim neighbor — the one who is also awake before dawn right now, who is also asking God for mercy and guidance, who is also reaching toward something they cannot fully name — is a narrower prayer than God is calling you to. If these weeks do not carry us toward the other, we have missed what the season is for.

And to my Muslim sisters and brothers in the Bangsamoro, I say simply this: the Catholic sitting across from you this Ramadan is fasting too. That shared hunger is a language older than our divisions. It is worth speaking.

Mindanao is not a finished story. It is always beginning. Its peace is fragile, its wounds still open, its promises still only partially kept. I do not offer easy comfort about that. But if there is something this island teaches the rest of the country — and the world — it is that communities of different faiths can choose, when their convictions run deep enough, to move toward one another rather than away.

Two faiths. One day. The same sky.

This is not a coincidence. This is a calling.