#the real answer is ambition has oddly never been one of his flaws

[soldsouls]

after speaking to Raphael about the Crown of Karsus, you can ask Luci why he doesn't seem interested in it, and he's like "because I don't have lava rocks for brains"

[lonelyopinions]

A Story of Healing, Forgiveness, Adversity, Wisdom, and Improvement

This is the story of a young man who needed to find where he belonged. A man who felt out of place everywhere he was until he realized what his life was missing. He had to reinvent himself several times before he got it right, but he eventually *did* find his peace. His story is as true as it needs to be for others to benefit and learn from his experience.

It’s also the story, to one degree or another, of everyone who has found themselves in a similar situation.

I hope this helps all of them. Hold on. Things will work out for you.

His name is not important. What his story can teach others is.

Although he did not at first realize it, he was born into a broken and abusive household. His parents never really meant to harm him -- but, as is so often the case, well-intentioned people often hurt the ones closest to them not out of malice, but simply because they are flawed. His mother, to be precise, was the product of a severely abusive home, herself. She also had had a major head injury and, probably, a variety of mental illnesses. Thus, although quite clearly very well-intentioned, his mother often was an extremely anxious, alarmist, and controlling woman. After the young man had become more mature, he would realize that his mother’s behavior was caused not by her being evil, but simply by the fact that she had been quite damaged.

Her husband, the young man’s father, was almost completely dominated by his mother. This was not because the young man’s father lacked a spine or courage or sense (in later years, the man would recognize that his father had all of these virtues and many more in abundance), but rather because his father was not terribly wealthy, and his mother, for the most part, owned most of his family’s money. Throughout their troubled and often horrid marriage, the young man’s parents were constantly fighting, mostly about money. Beyond that, though, his mother was actually fighting for stability and control -- something that, for a person with serious mental health issues, was ultimately very important.

This domination by his mother led to some very unhealthy dynamics in his household.

The young man had an elder brother and a younger sister.

His brother went on to become very ambitious, headstrong, tough, and dedicated. Despite this, his brother had some serious flaws. Perhaps because of this brother’s good qualities, his brother was also often very judgmental, arrogant, and, on occasion, cruel. The young man had, through the stupidities and insecurities of youth, done serious harm to this brother on occasion, and he and this brother fought often and bitterly. Although there was often intense hostility and sibling rivalry between the young man and this brother, this brother would also go on to do quite well, eventually being accepted into a prestigious college after a superb high school career. When he thought back on his early life, the young man would later realize that his brother’s toughness and drive probably came from the severe adversity his brother had had to go through in the absence of caring and attentive parents. The young man would thus eventually come to view his brother with a combination of respect and admiration, and would beg forgiveness from this brother.

The young man’s younger sister did not have the elder brother’s drive and ambition, but had also gone on to make a life for himself. The young man was glad that his siblings had made lives for themselves.

The young man’s own life turned out to be far more troubled.

Although there was never much point in rebelling against the authority and power of his two parents, the young man would spend most of his adolescence fighting a hopeless battle against their unfair rules and restrictions. Not only were these rules and restrictions damaging and dangerous, but they were also so extremely unfair.

Even as a youth, the young man knew that rebellion was ultimately futile. His parents simply had all the power and money, and he had no legal right to insist that they behave fairly or to request that they justify their behavior. Still, he rebelled anyway, if only because his parents’ behavior was so outrageous that it almost demanded rebellion. In the end, he defied his parents simply because not doing so would have made him submissive psychologically.

Perhaps because of this, the young man had a very troubled adolescence. He would often skip classes, run away from home for significant periods of time, and neglect his homework. He was also diagnosed with clinical depression around age 15, and his life at home quickly deteriorated into chaos. As his behavior and mental health declined, his mother’s behavior became more and more histrionic, intense, controlling, domineering, and bullying. These problems led him to do very poorly in school, and he would spend the later years of his adolescence just surviving one crisis or another. Although he would eventually graduate from high school, his performance had been very mediocre, and he had lost a lot of potential to these problems.

Due to these and related issues, the young man would spend most of this adolescence and 20′s simply coasting through life, jumping from one menial job to the next while taking a very light load of college courses. Far too much of his life was spent “just getting by”, without a clear idea of what a meaningful or happy life would be like or a clear idea of how to create such a life.

As it turned out, in addition to his troubled childhood, the young man also had another, insidious problem that prevented him from gaining a strong sense of meaning or purpose from any particular career path or area of study.

Perhaps because of his unusually troubled childhood and life, the young man had, very unfortunately and unwisely, become a “deep thinker”. Although he recognized that this had certain great advantages in helping him think clearly and carefully, he also had a certain odd indifference and apathy towards many of the things his peers and friends found interesting. It wasn’t that he could claim that the things his peers wanted in life were bad -- they just were missing something. It wasn't as though status, money, sex, fun, and prestige were bad -- it was just that the young man was searching for something else.

This would cause the young man a great degree of trouble during his adolescence and early adulthood. Not only would he never feel a strong attraction to any particular area of study, but he would often avoid socializing and interacting with his peers due to this odd feeling that something was profoundly missing from these social events.

It was due to this and similar problems that the young man would ultimately waste his 20's. Before he knew it, he was on the cusp of his 32nd birthday, with few accomplishments to show for it and very few interests. The man often wondered why he was so indifferent toward most of the world and the people and things in it. His life had become a pathetic, apathetic, grey shell of an existence. Would this be the rest of his life, drifting aimlessly from one distraction to the next without any real profound sense of meaning or direction? He hoped not, and because there was still hope that this would not always be the case, he continued surviving -- but never living. In a fit of desperation, he turned toward contemplation of his problems and philosophy as both a consolation and a self-diagnosis.

And that's when it happened. He suddenly had an epiphany. That's when everything changed.

He realized in a sudden flash of insight what his life had been missing. Finally, after so many years of aimless searching, he had his answers. Things finally made sense.

He had been contemplating the many problems he had gone through in his life when it struck him. Without quite knowing what had prompted him to this realization, he slowly came to a conclusion about what his life had been missing -- the something missing that he had never found.

It was simply faith in humanity.

This point needs to be clarified. For most of his life, the young man had been a die-hard pessimist. This was not because he considered pessimism to be edgy or intellectual or cool, but rather because so much of what others deemed so deserving of worship was, ultimately, not what they thought it was. For some people in the young man's life, they had preached the value of their religious beliefs and devotion to God. For others, patriotism and nationalism were their bedrock. Still others simply tried to live as happy and pleasurable a life as possible, thinking these goals were the main reasons for the majority of human civilization and progress. And yet others claimed that he should help his fellow man.

But the young man had seen through each of these. When it came to religion, the young man felt he had very strong reasons to be an atheist. When it came to patriotism, he knew that, while serving other individual people might be worthwhile, his country had done horrible things in the name of national pride, prestige, and power. And, oddly enough, even living life for the pleasure and happiness that one could get from it rang hollow. Happiness, he had realized, was not a result of pleasurable, exciting, or comfortable surroundings. Happiness, instead, was a byproduct of living a good life that one was content with. Perhaps some people could live life happily with only creature comforts, fun, and hedonistic pleasures. However, the young man and most of the human race required something more -- a sense of meaning. He realized that all the luxury, fun, and free time in the world would not satisfy him. At least, not by themselves.

It was service to humanity that appealed to the young man the most -- but eventually it, too, was promptly dismissed. The young man had, once upon a time, been idealistic. He had earnestly believed that the world could be saved -- if only enough people combine their efforts behind a common cause and work toward furthering that cause.

Pessimism and experience would eventually leave the young man disillusioned from this dream. Although many people in the world had shown him the potential for good in human behavior, it had always seemed to him that humanity's potential for immorality was far greater. Furthermore, when people were charitable or generous toward strangers, it was often due to an underlying assumption that the stranger was, in general, someone fundamentally good and worth helping – which, the young man reflected, was not necessarily true, by many people’s standards of the word “good”. Add to this the fact that people had a right to their own opinions and very frequently chose to believe senseless or irrational things or make senseless or irrational choices. Bettering the world was, the young man reflected, a very hard thing to do on any notable scale.

However, in a sudden moment of clarity, the young man saw the flaw in his previous beliefs. Although large scale change might be too hard of a thing to hope for (large scale changes were usually caused by large numbers of people mobilizing), the young man saw a quite different and far more reliable and compelling reason for morality. On the level of individuals¸ a great deal of good could be done. As the young man thought about this more and more, he realized that his biggest regrets in life were the times where he had hurt others out of his own insecurities, and that the proudest moments of his life were the instances where he had encouraged or helped others. Helping other individuals on a day-by-day basis, the young man realized, was worth the effort. For some strange reason, the young man had gotten the foolish and pessimistic idea into his head that only large scale changes in humanity mattered – that, since society at large wasn’t going anywhere, it was ultimately pointless to try to change things.

Now, though, the young man saw the error of his ways. He had a new purpose in life, and a new reason to be the best person he could be, and it had nothing to do with believing that human beings were all God’s special snowflakes, or with denying the hard truths of this world. Going forward, the young man would pay attention to the good that could be done in the world, from the daily decencies and kindnesses toward the people in his life, to the small acts of humanity and generosity he could accomplish. He felt, for the first time in a long time, like he was moving forward and like he had a purpose worth working toward and fighting for.

It was true that he had lost a lot of time.

But he would catch up, he realized.

[hufflly-puffs]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Chapter 2: In Memoriam

“It was stupid, pointless, irritating beyond belief, that he still had four days left of being unable to perform magic … but he had to admit to himself that this jagged cut in his finger would have defeated him. He had never learned how to repair wounds and now he came to think of it – particularly in light of his immediate plans – this seemed a serious flaw in his magical education. Making a mental note to ask Hermione how it was done, he used a large wad of toilet paper to mop up as much of the tea as he could, before returning to his bedroom and slamming the door behind him.” – Let’s be real: without Hermione neither Harry or Ron would have survived a single day on their journey. And remember that Harry originally had planned to hunt down the remaining Horcruxes alone? Even now, knowing that both Ron and Hermione will join him, he is utterly unprepared. It is not just the fact that he doesn’t know how to heal a cut (how is it possible they haven’t learnt that by now?). When they are attacked during the wedding and have to flee only Hermione was smart enough to pack in advance and have everything ready and always at her side (yes, I’m talking about the magical handbag). Sure, Harry packs things as well, but it obviously didn’t cross his mind that they might have to escape immediately, or to use a spell on his rucksack, giving it more space, or to pack such things as a tent. I think it is fair to say Hermione is the real saviour of the Wizarding World.

“Harry had spent the morning completely emptying his school trunk for the first time since he had packed it six years ago. At the start of the intervening school years, he had merely skimmed off the topmost three quarters of the contents and replaced or updated them, leaving a layer of general debris at the bottom – old quills, desiccated beetle eyes, single socks that no longer fitted. Minutes previously Harry had plunged his hand into this mulch, experienced a stabbing pain in the fourth finger of his right hand and withdrawn it to see a lot of blood.” – Serves him right for being so messy. I mean if he had never completely emptied his trunk in six years this also means the thing hasn’t been cleaned for so long. Just… yuck.

“As he neared the bottom of the pile of newspapers, Harry slowed down, searching for one particular edition which he knew had arrived shortly after he had returned to Privet Drive for the summer; he remembered that there had been a small mention on the front about the resignation of Charity Burbage, the Muggle Studies teacher at Hogwarts.” – Harry will leave later that day, which means it is now the next Saturday Snape had told Voldemort about. In the Skeeter interview it is mentioned that Dumbledore has died roughly four weeks ago. The timeline for Charity Burbage is then that she shortly after Dumbledore’s death resigned, then some time later wrote an article for the Daily Prophet, before the Death Eaters or perhaps Voldemort himself took her and then killed her. At first I thought her resignation was forced by the Death Eaters, but the timing would not be right for that. So she did resign voluntary, perhaps thinking Hogwarts was no longer safe without Dumbledore there or unsure if the school would re-open again.

After reading Dumbledore’s obituary Harry realizes how little he knew about Dumbledore and his life and how odd it seems to imagine him as a young man or student. I think we all have problems to imagine our parents or grandparents (Dumbledore was a parental figure for Harry) as anything other than that, to imagine they had a life well before us, that they were young as well, or in Dumbledore’s case fallible. The natural distance between a teacher and a student resulted in Harry never asking about his private life; it would have felt disrespectful. And even though Dumbledore is dead by now his ghost follows Harry on his journey and oddly enough we learn much more about Dumbledore now, post mortem, than in the previous six books while he was still alive.

“Albus never attempted to deny that his father (who was to die in Azkaban) had committed this crime; […]” – There is a very personal reason why Dumbledore was against Azkaban in his current form. He never denied that his father committed a crime and he would have possibly agreed that his father deserved some kind of punishment as well, but not Azkaban, not the Dementors, not the prospect of losing your soul (though we don’t know for sure if Percival had been convicted to the Dementor’s Kiss as well). The punishment should always fit the crime and no crime justifies to lose your soul.

“Those of us who were privileged to be his friends benefited from his example, not to mention his help and encouragement, with which he was always generous. He confessed to me in later life that he knew even then that his greatest pleasure lay in teaching.” – Sounds a bit like Hermione, doesn’t it? And of course Harry taught classmates DADA for nearly an entire school year as well. But guess who later became a teacher? None of them.

“Dumbledore’s future career seemed likely to be meteoric, and the only question that remained was when he would become Minister for Magic. Though it was often predicted in later years that he was on the point of taking the job, however, he never had Ministerial ambitions.” – Of course Dumbledore did not become a teacher just because he enjoyed teaching but also because he realized that he is unfit for any kind of power. Power is what corrupted Grindelwald and later Voldemort, what had almost corrupted Dumbledore as well. Of course being the headmaster of Hogwarts gave him some power as well, but not in the way any political tenure would have given him. And he later tells Harry that does are best suited for power who never desired it; people like Harry.

“He died as he lived: working always for the greater good and, to his last hour, as willing to stretch out a hand to a small boy with dragon pox as he was on the day that I met him.” – Obviously Elphias Doge doesn’t know the exact circumstances of Dumbledore’s death, but there is some truth right here. Right before his death Dumbledore had offered his help to another boy in need: Draco.

“He had never thought to ask Dumbledore about his past. No doubt it would have felt strange, impertinent even, but after all, it had been common knowledge that Dumbledore had taken part in that legendary duel with Grindelwald, and Harry had not thought to ask Dumbledore what that had been like, nor about any of his other famous achievements. No, they had always discussed Harry, Harry’s past, Harry’s future, Harry’s plans … and it seemed to Harry now, despite the fact that his future was so dangerous and so uncertain, that he had missed irreplaceable opportunities when he had failed to ask Dumbledore more about himself, […]” -  We do learn a bit more about Grindelwald and his relationship to Dumbledore, but there is still a blank space concerning the time Grindelwald rose to power, which by now the “Fantastic Beasts”-movies will cover. Given his friendship/romantic feelings towards Grindelwald I wonder how open Dumbledore would have been if Harry had ever asked him about him, if he would have told him about his own guilt and responsibility. In the obituary it is mentioned that Dumbledore hardly ever spoke about his family, especially his sister, so it is possible Harry wouldn’t have gotten an answer anyway. The shame about what he had done had made Dumbledore silent.

“Skeeter was certainly quick off the mark. Her nine-hundred page book was completed a mere four weeks after Dumbledore’s mysterious death in June. I ask her how she managed this super-fast feat.” – Look Rita Skeeter is a horrible person and all, but writing 900 hundred pages in 4 weeks? That demands respect.

“‘Oh, Aberforth is just the tip of the dungheap,’ laughs Skeeter. ‘No, no, I’m talking about much worse than a brother with a fondness for fiddling about with goats, […]” – You know what, I actually don’t wanna know exactly what Aberforth did with those goats.

“‘Oh yes,’ says Skeeter, nodding briskly, ‘I devote an entire chapter to the whole Potter–Dumbledore relationship. It’s been called unhealthy, even sinister. Again, your readers will have to buy my book for the whole story, but there is no question that Dumbledore took an unnatural interest in Potter from the word go. Whether that was really in the boy’s best interests – well, we’ll see. It’s certainly an open secret that Potter has had a most troubled adolescence.’” – The thing about Skeeter’s book is, no matter how nasty it is, in clearly written with the intention to destroy Dumbledore’s reputation, there is some truth in it. Skeeter did not make up his relationship with Grindelwald for example, though she obviously portrays everything very biased. The same goes for Harry’s relationship with Dumbledore, but the thing is, it was unhealthy. Dumbledore did manipulate Harry. And Harry is someone who has blind faith in the people he cares about. He put Sirius pedestal and he does the same now with Dumbledore. It doesn’t help either that he feels responsible for both deaths, that he thinks they both died protecting him. However, also through Skeeter’s book, Harry is forced to look different at Dumbledore, more objective, to start to question him. Dumbledore is neither a villain nor a saint, but just as Snape, just as Harry, a rather complex character.

“‘Well, I don’t want to say too much – it’s all in the book – but eye witnesses inside Hogwarts Castle saw Potter running away from the scene moments after Dumbledore fell, jumped or was pushed. Potter later gave evidence against Severus Snape, a man against whom he has a notorious grudge. Is everything as it seems? That is for the wizarding community to decide – once they’ve read my book.’” – So the public is not informed about the exact circumstances of Dumbledore’s death. I wonder why, as he was a very public figure and a crime was committed, plus the fact that there is an eye-witness. Why is Harry’s testimony not enough to justify an investigation against Snape? Is it because the Ministry is infiltrated by the Death Eaters? Of course once the entire Ministry is under Voldemort’s control they will tell their version of the truth: that Harry was somewhat involved in Dumbledore’s death and later accused Snape.

“He had imagined it, there was no other explanation; imagined it, because he had been thinking of his dead Headmaster. If anything was certain, it was that the bright blue eyes of Albus Dumbledore would never pierce him again.” – This is such a red herring. At this point I really thought that Dumbledore would somehow come back. Of course we will see him again (in Harry’s mind), but this line suggests that perhaps there is more to his death, that it was all part of his plan and he survived somehow. Even Harry starts to question Dumbledore’s death later. And then he will see those bright blue eyes, but they belong to Aberforth. Just as Snape will see Lily’s eyes again, but they belong to Harry. Familiar, but not the same.

[glittergummicandypeach]

‘Ramy’: A TV show for those who still care about religion

(RNS) — When he found the joke, Ramy Youssef had been searching for it for four months. It was the summer of 2015. He was back east visiting his parents in his native New Jersey and had driven his mom’s car out to Brooklyn to perform a quick stand-up set.

“I just started talking about what I was doing. I was like, ‘I’m fasting Ramadan.’” There were about 10 people in the crowd. “Oh your parents make you do that?” a guy shouted out. “I was like, no, this isn’t about anyone making me do this. It’s what I want to do.” Then the comic blurts out, “I believe in God. Like, God, God. Not yoga.”

“And there’s just this like, pop. Like a laugh,” Youssef explained during an interview over Zoom.

On the drive back to New Jersey, he said, he listened back to his set on his iPhone and then shot off a text to fellow comedian Jerrod Carmichael. “Dude, I think I found a joke.”

The first thing people tend to notice about “Ramy,” the A24/Hulu series written, directed and produced by Youssef, is that it’s the first American television show about a Muslim family. The show lives and breathes in the specificity of a millennial male raised in an immigrant Arab community in New Jersey, but what the show tries to reveal is something not spoken of much in public, and certainly not in Hollywood: people’s actual relationship to faith and to the greater questions of purpose and meaning.

The show is the product of the auteur-vision of 29-year-old Youssef, who has spent the last decade working as a comic and actor in Hollywood. It’s a culmination of what grew out of that first joke, and in two seasons has a firm grasp on a new comedic language for which to approach and to talk about spiritual matters in the generally secular, irreligious landscape of comedy and television. It’s only able to do this because it’s written from a deeply autobiographical place of ruthless self-interrogation, which allows the character’s questions to come through the screen with an authenticity that’s hard to ignore.

The character Ramy Hassan began as a fictionalization of Youssef’s own spiritual and emotional experiences more so than anything else. Oddly enough, Youssef didn’t build Ramy to be liked. He had an idea that Ramy would act as a representation of our lower selves, those purely egoistic unthinking qualities of our beings that irrationally oppose and battle our higher aspirations.

Actors Hiam Abbass, left, and Amr Waked, right, play the parents of Ramy Youssef's title character in “Ramy.” Photo courtesy of Hulu

But he’s not one-dimensional either.

Ramy is a well-meaning, earnest but immature seeker, and if he possesses any heroic quality, it’s his refusal to give up on his soul, despite his own seemingly constant moral failures. No matter how far he falls, he never loses the aspiration to be good, even when surrounded on all sides by forces that we recognize might stamp out that light of ambition if it were us in his shoes.

We see his world established in the pilot episode: On the one hand, he is a conflicted participant of a hedonistic culture of partying and sex, but on the other, he feels a spiritual strength and connection to his faith, despite elements of a closed-off, illogical conservatism. This all makes Ramy Hassan a most unusual protagonist, a character whose motivation is seeking a genuine connection to God.

“I’ve always felt like a very honest seeker, and I wanted to make work that felt like that. (Work) that felt self-examining,” Youssef explained. He came out to Hollywood at 19 years old, and in the first six or seven years appeared on a few TV shows and was doing regular stand-up, but he felt a yearning for his work to be representative of what was going on inside of him in a spiritual sense.

A poster for the Hulu series “Ramy.” Image courtesy of Hulu

He began by talking about his guilt on stage, mostly around premarital sex. Growing up and into adulthood, Youssef never questioned his faith, but he did start to doubt himself in it when he began to slip up.

“So much of my life I was saying, I want to do this the right way. I’m not going to have sex until I get married,” he said. “Somewhere along the way I broke those rules and then started to feel like the way the setup was around me that I should leave (the religion). And that made me really sad because I didn’t want to let go.”

The more a question scared Youssef, the more valuable it became for him to include it in his stand-up. If he got up on stage and didn’t feel vulnerable, or the most scared he’d ever felt to say something, it ceased to feel like the work he was supposed to be doing.

Taking a difficult feeling and then extrapolating the jokes and stories from it became Youssef’s art. “I’m putting myself under the microscope. And then, and then I started to think, oh, this will be really cool because I want these conversations to come up. I want this kind of self-examination to happen in our communities,” he explained.

Once he realized he could be a force to instigate real conversation and examination, Youssef brought together a team to build a show around this idea. “I actually have this vehicle where I can create this character for everyone to examine. You know, this character is not built to be liked.”

The show depicts a religious environment where every character except for Ramy seems content with the various mismatches between their beliefs and their practice of their faith. These are treated as humorous idiosyncrasies rather than as tragic character flaws — which allows them to serve as metaphors for the audience to pick up on unexamined faults and difficult questions we otherwise might be too ashamed to see and too afraid to ask.

In the first season, Ramy Hassan meets an earnest but simple white convert in the mosque who points to the moral lesson that undergirds the entire season: “You’re all like, I do these things and I don’t do things, so I’m this kind of person, right? It’s a trick of the devil, bro.” With this line and its characteristic non-chalance of Youssef's writing, the minor character delivers a deep spiritual lesson gleaned from the inner tradition of Islam: that to identify oneself with one’s actions is poison to the spiritual path. One will either despair because they see themselves as a sinner, or will be self-satisfied because of their pious works. The Sufis say a sign that a good action was not accepted by God is that one remembers he or she did it.

Season 2 proves Youssef’s vision for art can translate into stories outside of his own personal narrative. We are introduced to Shaykh Ali Malik, played by Mahershala Ali, the first person on the show who practices faith in a way that appears strong yet still relatable. He is a religious character who feels human, without being hypocritical. Ali plays a Sufi teacher whom Ramy latches onto in the beginning of the season, and he shows what a balanced approach to religion might look like.

Actors Ramy Youssef, left, and Mahershala Ali in Season 2 of “Ramy.” Photo by Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu

“Islam is like an orange,” Shaykh Ali explains to Ramy early in the season. “There’s an outer part and an inner part. If someone only got the rules and rituals, they might think Islam was tough and bitter … the rind without the flesh is bitter and useless. The flesh without the rind would quickly rot. The outer Shariah (religious law) protects the inner spirituality, and the inner spirituality gives the outer Shariah its purpose and meaning.”

Ramy offers up an entirely different set of questions in the second season. Ramy’s character appears better in some ways — he is, for the most part, no longer engaging in premarital sex, for example. But he’s swapped out that particular vice for a fairly regular diet of porn and candy. He tries to follow the instructions of his teacher but still continues to lie and not take responsibility for his actions.

Whereas the first season felt like an encouragement to the would-be religious, Season 2 seems like a parable for the religious: You might think you’re better because you’ve changed your circumstances, but without the self-examination and rigor Shaykh Ali represents, when tested, you will fall.

All comedy relies on tension; there has to be an inhale and an exhale. What Youssef has discovered is that the inhale can be used to take deep dives into the soul to bring out what was already there.

“It’s not about giving answers. I’m not in a position to do that. I would be idiotic if I tried to do that through any of the forms I create, but can I bring people closer to their questions? That seems to me to be my audience — people who need that, who want that, who are excited by that. Anyone who feels like they solidly have the answer probably hates my work.”

The first two seasons of “Ramy” are just the first few chapters for what might become a modern-day epic, an illogical and soulful morality tale for people who have questions they’ve been too afraid to ask or who are still interested in the future and health of religion in America. It’s a bizarre hagiography of a ridiculous man. Were Ramy Hassan a literary character, he’d be the Don Quixote of the spiritual path, marching forth in his mission with unending enthusiasm, undeterred by his own repeated failures.

This content was originally published here.