There were mornings in Cotabato when the air itself seemed to pray.
Before sunrise, the city held its breath. The call to prayer unfurled from the minaret—long, liquid, unhurried—threading through the damp air above the Rio Grande. It slipped past capiz windows and over corrugated roofs, through coconut fronds and electric wires, as if blessing everything equally: sari-sari stores, tricycles, the narrow lanes still wet from the night.
Not long after, church bells would answer.
We lived within earshot of both.
In those years, faith did not arrive in argument. It arrived in sound.
On Ash Wednesday, Mama would press our uniforms and remind us not to wipe our foreheads. “Let it stay,” she would say, “so you remember.” Papa would stand quietly by the door, already dressed for work, rosary beads hidden in his pocket like a private anchor.
At Mass, the priest would dip his thumb into ash and mark our skin: Remember that you are dust… The words were not frightening. They were steadying. Dust was not an insult. It was origin.
Outside, the sun would rise over a city that was also preparing for another kind of fasting. Muslim neighbours spoke softly of the coming moon. In some years, Lent and Ramadan overlapped. In rarer years—like the one we are about to witness again—the ash and the crescent began together.
I did not know then that calendars could converse.
I only knew that in Cotabato, restraint was a shared language.
By mid-morning the market would thin. Those fasting would move more slowly, conserving strength. Those not fasting would lower their voices in respect. Water glasses were turned discreetly away. Even laughter seemed mindful.
It was not sameness. It was proximity.
Mama, active in parish work, would prepare simple Lenten meals — monggo, dried fish, vegetables sautéed with garlic. Papa, who worked long hours, never complained. He believed in discipline the way other men believed in luck.
In the late afternoon, as the heat settled like a shawl over the city, the mosque would fill again. At dusk, dates and water would break the fast. We sometimes received small plates from neighbors — sweet, fragrant, generous. On Good Fridays, Mama would send back bibingka or pansit in quiet reciprocity.
No declarations. No speeches. Just shared hunger and shared courtesy.
Years later, when people ask about interfaith dialogue, I do not think first of conferences. I think of those streets in Cotabato where two devotions rose and fell within the same sky.
There is something deeply human about beginning a season of restraint together.
Lent teaches us to let go—of pride, excess, the illusion that we are self-made.
Ramadan teaches surrender—of appetite, ego, forgetfulness of God.
Both insist that hunger can be holy.
Now, in the small hours before dawn, I sometimes wake and listen to the quiet of our present home. There is no minaret nearby, no bell tower within range. But memory has its own acoustics. I can still hear the layered sounds of Cotabato: the call, the bell, the river.
In 2026, Ash Wednesday and Ramadan will begin on the same day again. The ash will fall. The moon will be sighted. Two paths, distinct yet converging in discipline.
At sixty-five, I understand something I did not as a boy:
The power is not in coincidence. It is in convergence.
To fast is to admit dependence.
To pray is to admit longing.
To give is to admit that what we hold is not entirely ours.
Cotabato taught me that faith need not erase difference to cultivate reverence. It only needs humility.
In those mornings long ago, when the ash still darkened our brows and the crescent still thinned the horizon, the city did not argue about who was right. It practiced remembrance.
And perhaps that is the quiet invitation of years when Lent and Ramadan begin together:
To remember we are dust.
To remember we are dependent.
To remember we are neighbours.
In the small hours, before the world resumes its noise, that is enough.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. South of the 8th Parallel is a reflective civic column written from the vantage point of a Mindanao-born senior who has lived the arc from Ozamiz to Cotabato, Davao, Manila, Cagayan de Oro, and now Taguig. The 8th Parallel North is the line of latitude eight degrees above the Equator that runs across Mindanao, placing the island firmly in the tropical belt and slightly removed from the country’s political center. Rooted in memory yet attentive to policy, the column examines Mindanao’s concerns—governance, development, peace, inequality, migration, faith, and aging—with the steadiness of lived experience. This is not a view from the capital looking south, but a life shaped by the South looking outward, seeking perspective over noise and endurance over spectacle).
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