Feb 28 | Waves of Mercy (Radical Love Journal #1)

This year I committed to several Lenten practices. Two were fasts, and two were acts of worship. The fasts are from tea and jewelry, the latter of which I’ve revisited several times.

The first of the two acts of worship is a nightly recitation of al-Fatiha, the first surah (chapter) of the Qur’an. This passage, labeled by some scholars as “the entirely of the Qur’an in one chapter,” is a prayer my Sufi friends say without effort. I hope to memorize it by the time Lent is over so I can say with them. I will expand upon it in a moment.

The second act of worship is this journal, containing my reflections on Omid Safi’s brilliant book, Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, a collection of translated poetry, hadith, prayers, and Qur’an passages. I was most privileged to meet Omid a year or two ago at his launch of this book, and was so taken by his playful, gentle demeanour and quick sense of humour.

Ash Wednesday evening, I cracked the book and got to work.

It says a lot about Omid-jan that I was already scribbling quotations just from his introduction!

“The very mystery of existence is explained through divine love in a first person saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad:

I was a Hidden treasure

and I loved to be intimately known

so I created the heavens and the earth

that you may know Me

Intimately.

Here love is spoken of not as an emotion, not as a feeling or sentiment… Rather, love is seen as nothing but short of the very unleashing of God onto this realm of being. It is through love that God brings the cosmos into being, it is through love that we are sustained, it is by merging with the cosmic current of love that we are led back home.”                        p. xxiii

Can we stop and contemplate how amazing it is that God, Source of Creation, should want to be known intimately by something so small, fragile, impermanent, and often disappointing? The Abrahamic religions say that God created angels that worship endlessly, but that was not enough. God then created the universe, the planet, plants and animals and oceans and mountains, but that was not enough as well, for in their very DNA, they follow the will of God. They live the lives they’ve been given without much questioning.

No, God wanted to make a creature that could choose, despite all things, to love. God wanted something which could choose love and fidelity and devotion, with varying degrees of success. And indeed God made us like Godself, for while we do not always act our best when we are in groups, it is in groups, alongside each other, that humankind truly succeeds.

We do better together, just as God does alongside creation. If you are a Christian, you would add, just as God does in the One Undivided Trinity, the Three which moves as and is fully One.

Omid-jan goes on, leaning into this beautiful desire:

“God doesn’t want to be known discursively, merely rationally in the cool and distant intellect. God wants to be tasted and known in our bones. God is whispering to humanity, “I yearn to be tasted.””          p. xxiv-xxv

God did not want to be known merely by stars, planets, and their dust. God wants to be known in the breathing of trees, in the feathers of birds, in the salt of the ocean filling a fish’s body – but God takes an absolute and utter delight in being known not merely through taste, but being shared.

Who among us would not want our presence, our love, to be so joyfully shared by our friends? Who among us is not buoyed up by praise and excitement at our arrival?

In the Eucharist, this concept comes alive in a totally new way. It is not merely that we accept the soft warm bread of the Body, or the fiery beauty of the wine. We not only physically share these material things with one another, but we share the experience with one another, with our words and our bodies. We do this through Eucharist and in daily life.

This contradicts so effortlessly the notion of God as a thunder-browed tyrant, or a domineering parent, or an avenging spirit of justified rage. We’ll underline it more by coming back to the al-Fatiha.

Omid-jan’s translation runs as follows:

“We begin in the Name of God

Everlasting Mercy, Infinite Compassion

Praise be to God

Loving Lord of all the worlds

Everlasting Mercy

Infinite Compassion” (p. 6)

Take a moment to note the holy symmetry! Following the beautiful, almost erotic murmurs of Bismillāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm, we have this verse, al-ḥamdu lillāhi rabbi l-‘ālamīn. And then what follows?

Again, the prophet insists: ar raḥmāni r-raḥīm.

“Lord of all the worlds,” the title which might give some of us pause, which would normally assert hierarchy and domination, is held within the loving arms of ar raḥmāni r-raḥīm, “the Compassionate, the Merciful.”

It is only within a literal womb of compassion that true lordship, true sovereignty, is known. It is within the gentle perichoretic dance of Three living fully as One that true leadership is modeled.

Here Allah can be said unequivocally to be the birth-giver of mercy.

It is mercy that I must therefore pursue this season. Omid-jan translates the following from the Hadith Qudsi, a collection of holy sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad:

“Adorn yourself with divine qualities.” (p. 33)

How appropriate that I’ve put off my jewelry for a time in honour of these far more precious adornments! But how should I proceed?

Again, from the Hadith Qudsi:

“Indeed My mercy comes before, goes after, and takes over My wrath.” (p. 20)

When I read this, I imagine a great wave. Wrath is drowned in mercy, even in these days of environmental degradation, widespread abuse, sexism, racism, homophobia, white supremacy, terror attacks, and capitalist greed. We who hold power must allow ourselves to be overtaken by the wave – not to accept or bless these behaviours, but to understand that they come from broken beings who need to be shown the right way to live by the ones they would be more likely to trust and listen to.

If I allow myself to be caught up God’s mercy, to ride that wave – hopefully howling with laughter at its capriciousness and inability to be controlled by a creature as tiny as me – I allow myself to become like God.

For yet again, we read in the Hadith Qudsi:

“My Heaven cannot contain Me,

neither can My Earth

But the heart of my faithful devotee

suffices Me (p.25)

Thanks for reading! Updates to the Radical Love Journal will be on Fridays.