IDEA 23
Breaking Up or Waking Up?
“God is Just!” you exclaim. What you took has been taken. What He gives He reclaims – in equal measure, and without profit, for nothing can be said to make God, the Owner of all, richer than He already is. (IIQ, page 235)
Is it possible to be attached, willy-nilly, to something without developing an attachment to it? Or, to be more specific, is it possible to acquire a body without losing one’s mind to it?
I wonder, sometimes, how I came to be this odd amalgam – a living, breathing organism, but with an expiry date, a mind that thinks its own thoughts and dreams its own dreams, and yet pretends is mine, and a sense of self that feels as if neither of those two, nor its time and place in the world, has the right to tell me who I am.
When my place in the world, my mind, and my body are all returned to the tool shop from which they were issued just a few years back, who or what will I be then? Or is this imagined being I call ‘I’ a persistent illusion — a bubble composed of water and air that believes, by its size, that it is something or someone else?
When Zakariyya (peace be upon him) confessed having a hard time understanding how his wife could bear a child, given her age as well as his, he is told in Q19:9 — Thus has your Lord said, “It is not hard for Me. And I created you before when you were nothing.”
Imagine being nothing, and then becoming not just something, but someone! Occasionally, when I think (too often) that I have sacrificed enough time or effort for my Creator, it comes to me (not often enough) that however much I ‘give,’ I am only giving back. I realize, with a stroke of obvious and yet uncommon insight, that no amount of voluntary return can ever count as even the tiniest morsel of gratitude for the sheer, overwhelming fact of existence, of having something to attach my sense of being to, and of being someone with enough sense, and faculties, and resources, to write these words and see them appear among the pages of the world as independent testimony to this being.
Who am I, that The Lord should value me so highly as to call me into being out of nothingness? Whatever He gives me after it is all icing on that colossal, cosmic cake of existence. I take so much for granted that I have no right to complain or even sigh with regret when it is taken back. Thank you, GOD. I did not deserve this. Whatever You gave me is Yours. And whatever You leave me after this is entirely Up to You.
Download the PDF version for free at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’ān – Mont Redmond complete version, or purchase a hard copy at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an: Redmond, Mont: 9781738842506: Books – Amazon.ca.Photo by Damon Hall on Pexels.com
