 "Have you [Prophet] not seen how God sends water down from the sky, and that We produce with it fruits of varied colors; that there are in the mountains layers of white and red of various hues, and jet black; that there are various colors among human beings, wild animals, and livestock too? It is those of God’s servants who have knowledge who stand in true awe of God. God is almighty, most forgiving.” -Sura Fatir What does it mean to “have knowledge” of God? Particularly when that knowledge is tied to the many colors of nature, of flora and fauna, of rocks?
Is it enough to claim “this diversity is because of God,” and leave it there? Do we need to go further and say “this diversity reflects the range of God’s power?” Do we need to take it a slightly different direction and name that “this diversity is intended by God?” Do we need to name all of the above and embrace that “this diversity is loved by God?” Whatever of those (or other) implications we may draw, they are incomplete if they do not also include the latter part of that sentence - ”… who stand in awe of God.” Because having the knowledge of what life has been created in all of its diversity and varieties, and whether it is intentional or loved, means nothing if we do not embody that knowledge. If the variety of fruits is because of God, how does that shape how you/we thank them? If the many hues of the mountain reflect the range of God’s power, how does that shape how you/we honor them? If the various colors among humans, animals, and livestock is intended by God, how does that shape how you/we sustain them? If the mosaic of Creation is loved by God, how does that shape how you/we love…all of it? And if we sometimes fall short of what that knowledge calls on us to do/be, how do we start again, knowing that there is always the grace to return to a place of awe?
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 “And among humankind is one who pays for distracting tales, intending, with no knowledge, to lead others from the path of Allah, and make a mockery of it. There will be a humiliating punishment for him. When Our Signs are recited to him, he turns away with disdain as if he had not heard them, as if there is heaviness in his ears. In that case, share with him the tidings of painful punishment.” -Sura Luqman Content warning: COVID pandemic mentioned)
What causes someone to ignore the truth? And not just ignore it, but actively invest in convincing others to listen to something else? We are five years into a pandemic that has been so poorly handled, so violently ignored and prolonged, it is terrifying to think about what could come next. Scratch that, we know what is coming next…or rather coming back. And there is absolutely no rational reason for it. The truth is that we have ways of caring for ourselves and each other that work. That there are people who have dedicated their lives to the sacred work of community health, and have provided methods that cost us little to nothing in exchange for our collective safety and wellbeing. Methods that have clearly demonstrated their ability to effectively save lives. Why then do some ignore this truth? Why are they so against the idea that we all have the power and responsibility to sustain community care? Why are so many of us willing to let our neighbors die in the name of protecting the lie that our individual choices have no impact on each other? Ignoring our interdependence does not make it any less real. Telling ourselves the false story that our survival is not mutually dependent doesn’t change the fact that if one of us falls, we are all weaker for it. Whether we are talking about vaccines and masks; food and water; shelter and welcome; rest and joy - pursuing and creating access to all of these avenues of care create more resilience. More access and inclusion. More collective capacity. Acknowledging and living out the truth that we must take care of each other is how we create communities with love at the center.  And when he [Moses] arrived at the waters of Midian, he found a group of shepherds watering their flocks, and beside them two women who were keeping their flocks back. So he asked them, ‘What is the matter?’ They replied, ‘ We cannot draw water for our flocks until the shepherds take their sheep away - our father is a very old man.’ So he drew water for them, then returned to the shade, and said, ‘Oh my Lord! Whatever good thing You may send me, I am in dire need of it!’ Then one of the two women shyly approached him and said, ‘My father is asking for you: he wants to reward you for giving us water for our flocks.’ Then, when Moses came to him and told him his story, the old man said ‘Do not be afraid, you are safe now from people who do you wrong.’ One of the women said, ‘Father, hire him- a strong, trustworthy man is a good hire.’” -Sura Al Qasa Bryan Stevenson reminds us that “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” If only this were actually applied to everyone.
Some among us have gotten many “free passes” for harm that we have caused. Without any process of repentance, repair, relationship, and sustained transformation - they get to go on with their lives as though there are not literal bodies in their wake. There is little to no acknowledgement of the ways in which their actions have hurt others, and sometimes they are even rewarded for them. They hold positions or identities that our society has been built to reward and protect at all costs. Including the lives of others. And then there are those who are permanently labeled and essentialized by “the worst thing they’ve ever done.” There is no exploration of why they made the choices that they did, what prevention could have happened, what restoration or healing is possible. They are cut off from community, cut off from care, cut off from any invitation and support to change, cut off by a society that was designed to diminish and eliminate them since its inception. It doesn’t have to be like this. It should not be like this. Both ends of this spectrum are reflections of a society that has never had collective care at its center. That has never believed that ALL of us are inherently worthy of compassionate community. That has always assumed that some of us are better than others, that some of us are more deserving of forgiveness and love. That some of us are human and some of us are not. Moses, after killing one man and almost killing another, was given the chance to share his story with a community that saw his humanity. That understood there was more to him than the worst thing he had ever done. He was welcomed and given a place to tend to his and others’ wellbeing as he sought guidance from God in the wake of his mistakes. What if we made that the norm, not the exception? What if we were willing to take care of each other, even in our most wretched moments? What if we actually built a society with the understanding that we are all so much more than the worst thing we have ever done?  “And Solomon succeeded David. He said ‘People, we have been taught the language of birds, and we have been blessed with a share of everything. This is clearly a great favor from God’s Grace.’ And gathered together for Solomon were armies of jinns, men, and birds, all marshalled in ranks before him. And when they came to the Valley of the Ants, one of the ants said: ‘Oh ants! Go back into your homes so that Solomon and his armies do not unwittingly trample you.’ Solomon smiled broadly at her words and said, ‘Oh Lord, inspire me so that I am thankful for the blessings you have granted me and my parents, and so that I may do good deeds that please You; and admit me by Your Mercy to be among Your righteous servants.’” -Sura Al-Naml Everything communicates. Alive, organic, manufactured, inanimate - everything is telling the world something.
A flower blooms - perhaps telling you the weather may be warming and/or the sun is out. A chair creaks - perhaps telling you something about its capacity, construction, or age. A spiced dish smells - perhaps telling you that there are some good things coming your tastebuds’ way. A cat’s belly vibrates with its purr - perhaps telling you it feels safe and trusts you enough to let you pet the danger zone. Everything, “living” or not, has its own way of telling its story. We will never understand every single language that exists on this plane of existence, and there is joyful humility in that reality. It invites us to remain open to communication we may not realize is precisely that - to signals sent to any one of our senses, instincts felt in our hearts or souls - that are something’s language inviting us to learn. To stay curious. To engage. When we experience those moments of understanding, especially the unexpected ones, how do we honor them? What does this new connection our senses forged shift our being? How does learning a new “language” bring us closer to God?  “Allah is the Light of the heavens and earth. God’s Light is like this: there is a niche, and in it there is a lamp, the lamp is inside a glass, the glass like a glittering star, fueled from a blessed olive tree - from neither the East or West - whose oil gives light even when no fire touches it.” -Sura Al-Noor (The Light) Our child, not-coincidentally named Noor, was recently gifted a moon flashlight. About every other day, they point frantically at the top of their dresser and exclaim “Nommy! Noom! Moom! Bo! Moom!” And so we turn off the lights in their room and/or pull down the shade, and turn on the Moon.
This child is like a cat with a laser pointer when the Moon shines on their wall (then their floor, on their belly, on their parents, etc). They chase it, trying to capture it in their hands. We were even semi-successful in getting them to chant “Come down, moon!” when it’s on the ceiling and they want to make it come down to within their reach. Eventually, they inevitably demand to hold the moon flashlight themself, unsuccessfully tracking it now that they’re shining it into their palm because they have no idea what a flashlight is. But they hold on tight to it. They know that the moon is there shining, even if it’s not quite visible to them in that moment. Even when it is turned off and tucked away behind a lotion bottle because Nommy is done with chasing the moon after 7 rounds, they know that Moom is there (::sigh::). Even when, after crawling all over the floor and standing on tippy toes to “touch” the moon, they never really hold it, they are thrilled to see the moon. To know that it’s there. What would it feel like to regularly get in touch with a gratitude for something so intangible yet so ever present? Something that, even when it’s “tucked away,” or someone tries to hide it from us, we know exactly where it is when the time comes? That even if we do not understand it, being able to interact with it brings us such exhilaration and joy? Perhaps that is one way to understand and return to God / the Divine / Love / the Sacred. A light that needs no tending to remain always present. A light that need only be called upon to shine. A light that we may share ourselves at times, sometimes clumsily, but still available for others to “see.”  “For every spiritual community, we have appointed acts of devotion for them to observe; so do not let them argue with you [Prophet] about this matter and invite them to your Lord - you are on a path established by the Divine.” -Sura Al Hajj When did humanity turn God into a commodity? Something that could be bought and sold? Something that had a finite supply? Something that needs to regulated, but only one of us has the right set of rules?
I once had a mentor tell me that “God is too big of a word to let one person define.” As someone who used to hate the word because of the variety of ways it was used against me, I’d slowly started to open back up to it while in seminary. It was, as God would have it, my studies of the Bible and largely Christian systematic theologies that brought me back to my faith of origin, Islam. In diving deep into the limitations and possibilities of one faith, I realized I could do the same with my own. I could honor and care for any traumatic interpretations of my past, while also leaning into exciting interpretations for my future. If God truly is unlimited, there couldn’t be just one way to define what is Holy and Good. But because of fear or a hunger for power, humanity needed to make God something scarce, something only a select few had genuine access too. We turned what could be an exhilaratingly vibrant tapestry of faith into rags. Some among us let the differences we encountered become sources of division and dehumanization - and those who had not quite abandoned the possibility of weaving our truths together had their trust violated, and their communities decimated. Certain ways of being and believing were deemed as having a more validity, and that meant their followers could conquer anyone or anything that varied from their views. I believe it is more often than not those differences that strengthen our understanding and appreciation of the breadth of what some call “God.” How magnificent that there can be multiple ways of understanding the lessons of love, community, and care! How intriguing that there are different prostrations and prayers across our communities, and yet, we all understand that humility is the primary orientation many have when relating to “God.” How exciting that the Sacred can show up in so many ways, lifetimes, and forms to teach and sustain the diverse range of humanity and life? How great is it that God is so big, we all get to share what we’ve been revealed as part of God’s abundance?  “When the pangs of childbirth drove her to cling to the base of a date tree, She [Mary] said: ‘Woe is me! I wish I had been dead and forgotten long before all this!’ Then a voice [Jesus] called out to her from beneath the tree: ‘Do not grieve! Truly your Lord has provided a merciful spring under your feet; and if you shake the trunk of the date tree, fresh dates will fall towards you. So eat and drink and be glad…’” -Sura Maryam (Mary There is something so earnestly human in this sacred story. During/after giving birth in isolation, Mary experiences profoundly unbearable pain, to the point that the story in the Qur’an names how she wished for death instead of continuing to experience the pain. She is so real for this - childbirth hurts. After childbirth hurts. Leading up to childbirth hurts. The whole dang reproductive cycle hurts.
It’s devastating that there are some in our world who want to force adults with the ability to get pregnant to have little or no autonomy about if/when they do so. Moreover, those same forces/individuals want to put people with the ability to get pregnant in a situation much like Mary’s at first glance - alone, with nobody and nothing to sustain her body AND spirit. But Mary’s story continues. Not only are there now water and dates near her, they were provided by God/the Divine. Her care, her survival, her physical and mental health, her spirit, were all a sacred mandate. She was divinely meant to receive what she needed to survive and thrive. Now, are water and dates literally enough for postpartum healing and care? Of course not. But in this story, maybe they represent something more - a reminder that she deserves to be cared for in this vulnerable and difficult time. Nothing about how bodily autonomy is being legislated today is truly about “care for” our bodies. It is all about “control over” others’ bodies. Whether that is in the gutting of essential medical and reproductive care for individuals with the potential to be pregnant, or the criminalization of medical and communal care for transgender individuals - there is an unholy denial of this right to be cared for. There is a willful denial of the Truth - of the Divine Revelation - that our sacred duty is to provide, not deny, the resources every body needs to feel whole. Thankfully, there are those among us who are persevering in that sacred duty. Whether it is through pursuing legislative resistance to efforts to control, creating structures of mutual aid in local communities, sustaining networks of resource allocation and travel to ensure the most impacted among us have some of that bodily autonomy returned to them, teaching/reminding each other of our sacred rights and responsibilities, and more - God’s will for Mary, and for all of us, remains available. It is up to all of us to sustain it.  “Yet humankind prays for the harmful just as it prays for the beneficial: indeed, humankind is hasty!” -Sura Al-‘Isra/Bani Israel Have you ever said or done something you regretted because you were particularly activated - angry, sad, confused, scared, disgusted, stressed, [name your feeling]? Have you ever compromised on your ethics because it was just easier to accomplish an essential task that way? Ever had a fleeting wish that a calamity might befall someone whom you find dangerous or even repulsive? Ever get a twinge of satisfaction when death claims someone who could have been a comic book villain?
We all said yes. Maybe not to every one of these questions. But probably to at least two. Our world is moving too fast, and we are demanding too much of it and of each other because of the speed required to be considered worthy. Most of us feel like we don’t have the option to slow down - and perhaps to some degree that is true. There is a real urgency to the social, economic, political, and environmental challenges we are encountering - to ignore the deaths and destruction that already exist because of those challenges is to say that those lives and that Life is not valuable. AND While that urgency is very real, what is not is the need to engage it uprooted from what we believe and who we are. That we can move quickly AND “at the speed of trust,” if we ground ourselves in what we believe, what we TRULY believe, is possible. It is when that urgency is engaged without the intentionality of living in and practicing what we believe in our every day lives, that we begin to “pray for the harmful” in ways that we would not necessarily be willing to describe outloud. When we are not repeatedly exercising a muscle of discernment and regularly ritualizing our remembrance of what we might call God, Love, Community, etc, we will hastily make choices or hope for outcomes that are harmful. We will forget or guiltily put aside our values in service to “getting the dang thing done.” We don’t have to move that fast anymore. We never did. It is a sacred choice, an act of resistance to slow down. To nuance. To recognize how everything is so connected that there is no reason for us to be fighting about whose “project” or “issues” is most important. That, yes, we will say and do things that are maybe not leaning into our better nature, but maybe, a different context might cut those down by 5%. That we will stop pursuing ways of being that are killing all of us, and instead imagine and re-create new ways of being that care for each and every one of us.  And your Lord inspired the bee, saying ‘Build yourselves hives in the mountains, and trees, and what people construct. Then, feed on all kinds of fruit and follow the ways made easy by your Lord.’ From their bellies comes a drink of many hues, within which is healing for humankind. Indeed, there truly is a sign in this for those who think.” -Sura Al-Nahl (The Bee) How we treat bees is a reflection of how we treat God.
We all belong to intricate, intersecting, fragile, and resilient ecosystems. There is nothing we can do to separate ourselves from them. Like it or not, we are each and all part of something so much larger and beyond our (full) control. But for so long now, we’ve been living in ways that have been designed to elevate us above those connections - that pull up on the threads holding all of Life together so hard that they are beginning to snap. With each break, the ecosystem shudders and weakens, and our own existence is that made that much less. Each thread we pull away from or break unravels the knot of our own survival - each time we try to separate ourselves from other expressions of Life, we chip away at our own. The bees know this. They cross pollinate as they feed, and in doing so, help all sorts of plant life grow. That plant life in turn sustains and nourishes animals of all kinds, including humans, and not just as food. As cleaners of our air, as stabilizers of our earth, as our shelter, clothing, and medicines. Honeybees especially know the cost of damaging other expressions of Life. When they sting, they are stuck in the being they have stung. At that point their lives are totally dependent on that connection in a new and devastating way - to rupture this connection forged in harm is to die. To choose to separate, particularly after moving from a state of mutual care to harmful injury, is to further separate oneself from Life. Humanity may not have barbed stingers, but we certainly have done our fair share of injuring and poisoning others in our web of Life. And we are witnessing how those injury-to-separation interactions are killing us as well as the rest of the world. It’s hard to tell if there is still a way to alter this trajectory of eradication - I’d like to hope there is, but it will require us recognizing that the relationships we have with Life now cannot be what we have in the future. That the ecosystem is different - and some of those threads are irreparably lost/broken - so we ourselves are different. How we treat bees is how we treat Life. How we treat the gifts we receive without ever asking for them. How we treat the forces sustaining our existence that we have barely even begun to understand. How we treat the wisdom they are guided by, the wisdom they offer us for how to support our shared survival. How we treat bees is a reflection of we treat God.  “Those who love the life of this world more than the life to come, And who turn others away from the path of Allah, trying to make it crooked, Such are the ones who are lost, Having gone far astray from Divine Presence.” -Sura Ibrahim 2780.
That’s the number of known children under the age of 18 who were killed in Gaza by Israel in less than the first 20 days of the genocide its leaders brought to its final stage on October 8, 2023. 2780 lives to come. I legitimately wonder what it is we lose in our souls when we are confronted with horrors like this one, and our response is to enable them further. What does it cost our souls to ignore the direct A-to-B connection between our actions and the indiscriminate execution of children? Or, even worse, to acknowledge it and say it is a worthy price to pay to keep “the life of this world” a certain way. I don’t want that way. None of us should. That way is so far astray from any Sacred intention, any Holy Love, any Divine Presence, no amount of repentance will ever fully repair the evil it endorses and causes. This one is a short one. Because it should be so blatantly obvious that if the path someone points you towards is 2780 children killed in 20 days, you know God had nothing to do with shaping it. |
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