Who guides you through the darkness of land and sea? Who sends the winds as joyous news, heralding His mercy? Is there any god besides God? Exalted is God, above the gods they join with Him. Who brings about Creation, then renews it, Who sustains you from the heavens and the earth? Is there any god besides God? Say, ‘Bring your proof if what you say is true.’ Surah 27:63-64
What a gracious gift of life, to know that in the midst of deep darkness, however it appears, a wind full of glad tidings of grace will guide you. A gift from the Creator of All who “makes the night as a robe for you, and sleep as repose, and makes every day a resurrection” (Surah 25:47). When you are in the midst of your own trials and tribulations, God prepares a way of emergence and provides for you in ways that you could never imagine.
This isn’t always easy to trust. And let’s be honest. We will never be able to fully grasp who God is. We are caught in a Zen koan, of sorts, which invites believers to hold two contradictory statements together until a new awareness arises. Through prayer and desire, we are in a relationship with the Divine, trust that it is the Creator who guides us, even though we cannot fully name what we mean by the Divine.
How does this work?
Words are what we have in naming. Within our feeble attempts, we will never be able to fully grasp words and phrases like Eternity or Truth or Light of the Heavens and the Earth. In my studies in world religions, I have come across names for the Divine that I think express our limitations to name God: Absolute Thatness; Such-ness; Essence-ish; And-ness, or uNkulunkulu; a name my Zulu friends sometimes use, which means Big-Big which defies description. I cannot pronounce it very easily which reminds me of the sacred gap between the worldly here and the heavenly there.
We cannot grasp the unfathomable, the “how or who” of God’s being. So be it.
Maybe our limitations are designed that way, inviting us always to lessen the gap between our finite selves and infinity, not by naming, but rather by committing to a relationship which will always involve mystery and trusting in al-Ghayb, the Unseen, that which is beyond us.
We surrender to the power of prayer and meditation, listening and receiving. Here is our stability and our security. We see through prayer and we trust that we have the capacity to “know God” by our walk in faith, through our experiences, through our remembering, through our acts of justice, kindness, and beauty.
This Reverential Awareness is referred as Taqwa in the Qur’an, a piety grounded in mindfulness, of being God-conscious. A life of beauty to manifest as best we can our connection, our cosmic entanglement, our relationship, our friendship, our link with God, and our desire to reflect, like mirrors, God’s justice and graciousness, which give rise to mercy, compassion and love.
In surrendering, we become all this: A people who live by faith.
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One day, one of the residents of the jail I visit weekly, left me a handwritten note thanking me for providing as he said Robert Frost called, “a momentary stay against confusion” where “for an hour and a half a week he could feel respect, even love.”
He was leaving prison the next day. In his note he wrote, “I am reminded of the last scene in the film, Saving Private Ryan, when in the cemetery, he turns to his wife and asks, ‘Am I a good man? Have I lived a good life?’ When we pose that question here in this dehumanizing, castrating, ego busting place, you – every Tuesday – answered ‘Yes, yes, yes, Absolutely, yes.’ Thank you, dear friend.”
We can plumb the depths of life’s mystery by sharing all the ways we can be a help to each other.
In so doing, we get closer to understanding the Source of all Life.*
* “And on Earth there are signs of God’s existence, visible to all who are endowed with inner certainty, just as there are signs thereof within your own selves: can you not, then, see?”(Surah 51:20-21).
Day 20: Reflection
In the Qur’an, we are told that “the garment of God-consciousness, taqwa, is the best garment of all” (Surah 7:26). How do you wear the garment of God-consciousness?
