Divine Sight Through the Lens of Mercy

				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Season 3 Episode 9
with Abdul-Rehman Malik
Episode Title: Divine Sight Through the Lens of Mercy

Mark: Welcome, one and all.
Colleen: Hey Mark.
Mark: Welcome, Colleen. It's good to see you.
Colleen: I'm one and you all out there are all. We hope you're still with us, in this season. Are we still with each other, Mark? That's kind of how it's been. Are we still with it?
Mark: Yes. We're still with it, which has actually been very invigorating for me this season. Meeting so many wonderful guests and having some really, I think deep conversations about the spiritual life, from different perspectives.
Colleen: Yeah, I was just sharing in, one of my Centering Prayer groups, Lectio groups that, about our conversation with Dr. Yuriah Celidwen and, her Indigenous perspectives just been sitting with me, just like that. Ease of connectedness with a sense of oneness with the world, which I feel like I have to work for a little bit more. This sense of, like indigenous kind of connectedness. It's that Keating quote that we started the season talking about is looking at a tree but not you looking at a tree.
Mark: Yeah, just this morning I did my mindfulness group for the patients with chronic kidney disease. We were doing a little morning sit. And it just occurred to me, I think probably because of some of these conversations. We're talking about the breath and then I just added, the breathing of the trees and plant life and bring that all in and it's not a new idea but I don't always remember, to highlight that the interconnectivity of all things and, it doesn't have to be fancy to do that. Just to mention that we're breathing in oxygen from the trees and we're sending it back, in the form of carbon dioxide, all that stuff. It really opens up and to hear those patients suffering with chronic disease. To hear how that nurtures to be in touch with that.
Colleen: Yeah. So hopefully you all listening are on this journey with us too. And thanks always for listening. We have a guest today that I'm really excited about actually. He's a friend of Natanil who was one of our first guests on this season and just a general friend of Contemplative Outreach too but, I will go ahead and share a little bit about our guest today, Abdul-Rehman Malik, am I saying your name correctly?
Abdul-Rehman: You are. So if pronounced in a pro quote, unquote, proper Arabic, it would be Abdul-Rehman. Friends call me AR. And I think as I've gotten older, I've grown rather agnostic about the way I'm referred to and there are lots of funny stories. So you are welcome to call me AR because as you travel the world, especially in the lands where Islam is a significant religion for us, the name Abdul-Rehman gets shortened in all kinds of interesting ways. So when I was in Syria, I had Syrian friends who called me Abu.
I have Somali friends who will say, Abdi, which is the name that my son has taken on. He's also Abdul-Rehman. And Palestinians have a different way and so on. So, it's interesting how names get shortened. So, Colleen, it was valiant. It was a valiant [effort.]
Colleen: Okay, it’s valiant. I like that. Well, I might continue through the conversation with AR. I like that. I think that's cute.
Abdul-Rehman: Please do, Colleen.
Colleen: Okay. And I'll share a little bit for our audience to a more about you. AR is an award-winning journalist, an educator, and a cultural organizer. He works at the intersection of faith, culture, and social change and his work has spanned the globe. You've heard him just mention places where he is called by many various names. Like Pakistan, Sudan, Indonesia, Tunisia, Mali, the Netherlands, the UK, and beyond. He's also a lecturer at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Jackson School for Global Affairs.
He directs a student-facing leadership program at Yale's Dwight Hall for Social Justice and Public Service. AR is a founder of the Karavan Sarai Collective, whose Sarita Karavan program has provided narrative strategies and training to storytellers and civil society actors to support, vital interfaith and intercultural peace-building work in conflict and post-conflict contexts around the world. He is a veteran contributor to the BBC Radio and other international media. And he's also host of his own podcast for the Aga Khan Museum called This Being Human, which I encourage everyone to check out. We're so glad to have you here with us. Welcome AR.
Abdul-Rehman: Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here with you both, Colleen and Mark.
Mark: Welcome. We usually start from our perspective the work of Thomas Keating, and as you know, in 1984 he called a group of friends together to his monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. They were from all different traditions, religious and spiritual traditions, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, Native American, Russian, Orthodox, Protestant, Roman, Catholic, all kinds of people came simply to share silence together, to sit in silence together.
And then to have a conversation about their faith traditions. And one thing as they went on over the years, and it was something like 20 years they met every year for a week. For this time together. Along the way, they talked about their different traditions and they had some points of agreement and they were, I think as they described, they're very surprised too that there were that many.
One of them is about this divine, some names we use for that God. They came to a common term for that called ultimate reality, and it tries to capture, or at least make accessible, our way of speaking about our traditions and our spiritual practices. The other thing they found great value in was actually each person sharing their journey. So we like starting with that, with each of our guests. If you might share something about your own spiritual journey and where you're coming from and how you arrive at this place where you sit right now.
And if you want to comment about your sense of ultimate reality as well please feel free to do that from your perspective.
Abdul-Rehman: I really appreciate the question, Mark. In a way, when we do similar exercises with our students, we talk about spiritual autobiography. And it's always interesting for young people in particular, to be offered an opportunity to talk about their spiritual autobiography, because I think, to give an autobiography, there has to be a sense of sort of comfort and confidence with the journey so far, and it's interesting at what points in our life we're asked to offer a spiritual autobiography, because I think each one comes with its own sense of confidence, but also with its own sense of doubt and questioning and whether or not we feel like we're on solid ground or not.
But I'm turning 50 next year. And I think I've come to that point of maybe if not confidence, then a sense of kind of what path has led me here. I was born in 1975 and my parents are from Pakistan. My father was born in India before the partition. In 1947, his family left Amritsar, the great city which holds the most sacred relics and texts of the Sikh religion from Amritsar to a place called Multan.
My mother's family was from a city called Jalandhar, and although my mother was born in Pakistan, the entire family migrated in 1947 across that border that now separated India from Pakistan. I think the story of partition is very important to me and has become more important to me over time because both sides of my family, actually found new homes and had to recreate their lives and had to start again and had a rupture with their past that was never reconnected.
No member of my family ever went back to the Indian side of Punjab since 1947. My attempts to go back and to reconnect or at least touch the soil that my grandparents and great-grandparents would have known as the soil of their home have proved unsuccessful. There's something about migration and transition that I think has been part of my life from the very beginning, and so my father spent time in the United Kingdom at the end of the 1960s and then came to Canada in 1970. My mother joined him in 1973, and I was born in 1975.
And, 1975, if we look back at our own history here in the United States was a kind of important, and difficult year. It's the year of the fall of Saigon, the ending of one phase of the Vietnam War. It is right in the middle of the OPEC oil crisis. It's the beginning of the movement towards Palestinian liberation.
It's a very, acute time. It's a time of recession in the United States. It's also a time of Urban and an ease. It's a time when those who fought in the freedom movement or the civil rights movement as more commonly called are coming to terms with the fact that so many aspects of the movement have failed and that in fact institutions of government of power have failed. Black people and people of color.
My parents now are holding a child, in this mess of a world and they gave me the name Abdul-Rehman. Now, usually, names are given after great counsel and advice is sought from elders, but my parents didn't do that. They gave me the name Abdul-Rehman, which means servant or slave of the merciful one.
Rehman being one of the attributes of God. One of the names of God. One of the Asma'ul Husna, as we say in the Islamic tradition. One of the most beautiful names, and so my name means servant, slave of the merciful one. Years later when my late mother, God rest her soul, explained to me why they gave me this name, they said they looked at the world, around them.
And she said she reflected on her own circumstances as being, an immigrant to Canada with no other family around, creating a home and family and community from scratch. And she said that these were going to be difficult days. She had a feeling in her heart that these were going to be difficult days, that I would live through. And she said, I wanted to make sure and we wanted to make sure that you were connected to the attribute of God that would most assist you in this time and that was the name of God, the merciful one.
Fast forward 30 plus years, when our son was born and we found out in fact, that we were having a son, my wife, partner, and we also chose the name Abdul-Rehman for our son because we thought if my mother's rationale had been to connect to the merciful God in a time of trial and tribulation, that same merciful God knows that trial and tribulation that they felt back in the mid-1970s feels even more acute now and that if I was given this gift of connection to God's attribute of mercy then we should pass that on to our son.
Why is that important in my spiritual journey? It's important because it is Mercy, Rehman, the name of God, Ar Rehman, has actually been an animating force in my spiritual life. There's a chapter in the Qur'an called Ar Rehman, the merciful. It was a chapter that I would listen to often because I saw my own name in it. It was a chapter of the merciful one and my name was connected to the merciful one, so it was a chapter of the Qur'an that I tried to memorize in Arabic so I would have it committed to heart because I wanted to have that connection anytime I'd hear references to mercy in the prophetic literature, I would be drawn to it if I'd hear it in the literature of Above my tradition, I'd be drawn to it.
And over the course of time, as I met my spiritual teachers, I realized that my relationship with them too, was an exploration of mercy. Mercy became and is not only for me, but in many parts of my own Islamic tradition, mercy is the most emblematic characteristic or name of God. It is the name of God that is most repeated in the Qur'an, other than the divine name Allah.
Why does God return to mercy so often, even in moments where God is holding us radically accountable and God is offering us a vision of what that radical accountability will mean, and holding us to our agency in the world and to be aware and deeply connected to our actions because they are meaningful, not only between us as humans and not only on the planet that we walk on, but our actions offer us a connection to the divine that mercy comes again and again. That the womb, in Arabic, the word for womb (Rahem) comes from mercy itself.
This is the location of mercy. For me, that has been a consistent theme in my life, and I think in many ways, I have sought, whether it was in the mosque study circles or in the youth groups, and I was really deeply connected to my mosque community. My parents were praying Muslims and so, prayer and fasting and ritual were a very important part of our home, but my parents were also deeply political, so politics, especially in the late 1970s and '80s, were a very important part of my identity.
I connected to change in the world. I connected justice to my faith from a very young age. I had a strong sense that we lived in a world that was in a justice deficit. Some of my early memories of growing up are being out in front of the Russian consulate on Boxing Day.
After Boxing Day, protesting the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, in minus 40 degrees Celsius weather, and being present for these kinds of, political commemorations and protests because it wasn't just that we were condemning an injustice, but that it was incumbent upon us, to represent ourselves as a family and as individuals in the fight for justice, and I think it's so many ways that's shaped who I am.
And I think ultimately, in the university when I, was part of a sort of Islamic political movements and movements for justice, and I was engaged very early, in my university days, in Palestine solidarity work and then later on, my generation was animated by the genocide in Bosnia and in fact I remember in 19, it must be 1995, I was part of a student group who hosted the mayor of Sarajevo, Bosnia, at our university, who was smuggled out of the city through its tunnels. And we hosted the mayor of Sarajevo at our school. And, the lecture hall, the convocation hall was packed –1700-plus people – and for my generation, the Bosnian genocide was animating right in the heart of Europe.
After having declared never again, Europe was watching a genocide happen. And so I think these things animated me and they weren't just political things, right? There were things that were animating my spiritual life, and I was constantly speaking to myself about how do I connect my spiritual life, my life of prayer with the life of action in the world, and I think I was very privileged in the mid-1990s to, I think reconnect with what we might call a classical Islamic tradition, through contemporary teachers.
And that, of course, involved reacquainting myself and studying in a systematic way, jurisprudence and law and theology. But also, for the first time in my life, being formally immersed in the study of Sufism particularly in 1995 was, I would say if I were to write my autobiography which I'm sure no one would wanna read, I would get to a chapter and the chapter would be 1995 because so many things happened that year.
I met my mentor, the late Fuad Nahdi in London, England, who became a major animating force in my life. I began to read literature that I was introduced to in my time in the UK and I took a class called readings of Islamic mystical thought, which really profoundly changed me. I was introduced to people like Al Ghazali and Attar and others, Ibn Arabi who changed, the way I saw the world and I met some of my spiritual teachers at a retreat in New Haven, Connecticut of all places. And here I am back in New Haven, Connecticut. We were literally at a log cabin in the woods just outside the city.
Engaged in this kind of study with other young people, my age. And so, I think so much of, my journey has not only been around connecting to tradition. But finding mercy as the animating force in that tradition, but also finding mercy connected to justice as being the animating force in my life. And, I think the work that I've been involved in, whether it's been journalism or education or community organizing, or educational organizing, or finding and helping facilitate spaces for other people learning and connecting to their tradition.
And I think more contemporarily questioning that tradition in a deeper way and finding space to question it and supporting students, another generation. Folks in a time when the world is even more precarious than it was when I was born and aspiring, I think. In my own work, with the prayer and the prayer, you know my students sometimes ask, Hey why do you do the work that you do? And why do you do the work with us that you do? And my prayer is that I want for myself and for you to be a means through which the divine attributes of mercy, Rahman, justice Adl, and compassion flow.
I want to be a means by which God's mercy, justice, and compassion flow through us. We want to be a means to that. So how do we train ourselves? How do we engage in the hard work, the contemplative work, the spiritual action, the service work to become vessels to clarify our hearts and to become a means? The word is really interesting in Arabic, the word is sabaab. Sabaab is a means, asbaab is plural. How do we become the sabaab or the asbaab, the means through which God acts in the world? Because in the Islamic understanding of radical monotheism, right? And this is if there is an operating principle in Islamic theology, it is that, right?
The Ultimate Reality, Mark, that you spoke about for the Muslim becomes expressed in the word Tawheed, or the absolute oneness of God, right? And that even all multiplicity points to oneness. Therefore, this notion of Tawheed or radical monotheism, is that all reference goes back to the Creator, and yet the Creator chooses to have means, and gifts us agency God, the Creator, could will and have the ability and the fiat to make anything happen in fact, our fundamental theological belief is that not only us, but everything the universe and creation is sustained by the Creator, and the Creator is never absent from creation. So why this idea of having means? This is what we would call in Arabic sunnatullah, the way of God.
And this is the generosity of the ultimate reality. Is to allow us these moments of agency and conversation and exploration so that we've been given the gift of life and that gift is employed in the service of mercy, justice, and compassion. It's employed to serve the creator who has called us to his most emblematic attribute, mercy.
And so in my work now I often see myself as being, if I have an aspiration, it is how do I cultivate in myself and those around me, not only the aspiration but the heart to be a means by which God acts in the world through God's mercy, justice and compassion. And God knows that in the time that we're living in now, that is a difficult call. That is a difficult moment we are in.
Colleen: Yeah and it strikes me too, that in this multiplicity. In this awareness of God as the attributes of God that you recall, mercy, justice, compassion. There's some likeness in those but also sometimes when I hear mercy and justice, I think how do we hold this tension? And I'm curious, I want to kind of frame this a little bit too, because one of these other points of agreement that they came to in their time together at Snowmass was that ultimate reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.
That was actually the second point of agreement. And I want to say this very frankly too, AR there does seem to be a very limited understanding and even a limited perception in media for sure about Islam. And Christianity, I don't know if Christianity fares a lot better these days because the perception of Christianity now is under great threat.
But it also historically has been the Crusades. There's always been a perception that doesn't fare so well or jive so right with our own understanding of the attributes of God. I'm talking around this because I also want to hear a little bit about how your understanding of God's nature, this absolute oneness, may have also shifted in 95 when you were exposed to the mysticism of Islam and Sufism.
I know in my life story, Christianity, pre- a time and post- a time, my exposure to mysticism were radically different. Did you have an experience of how your view of God shifted in that moment?
Abdul-Rehman: That's such a prescient question, Colleen and I really appreciate you digging into that. And I think in all kinds of interesting ways. I think one of the challenges that we have always had as people of faith, is the seduction of making our own faith traditions into the idols that we worship. Do I worship the Ultimate Reality?
Do I worship Allah? Or do I worship Islam? Do I worship my tradition? Do I worship the edicts of my tradition? Do I worship the habits and the habituated practices? I think in so many ways, tradition in its probably flimsiest definition, in many ways becomes an idol that we worship at the altar of.
When in fact, our traditions are a means. Are, as we would say, a’sabab or al-asabab, are a means by which we approach God. Allah is not a Muslim. Allah is not a Christian or anything else. If God is the ultimate reality then what is religion? What are these faiths?
And these systems of understanding the ultimate reality. I teach a class called Foundations of Islam, essentially the Christian seminarians at Yale Divinity School. And I have an incredible group of students year after year who are just sensitive, erudite, soulful, inquisitive and curious and honest.
One of the things that we often talk about is that religion is, and the traditions that we follow ultimately are human-made. And that's the beauty of them, isn't it? This thing that I call Islam, has of course definition and contour and topography and is fundamentally human.
It is human beings over 1400 years who have sought to commit the entirety of their intellectual and spiritual and physical energies to understand what God and the Prophet want from us. What a noble task. And what a noble task that has been taken up by women and men and people for thousands of years and yet that tradition is alive because more human beings enter into the phrase seeking greater understanding of the divine.
The Qur'an itself is particularly forceful about this because the Qur'an to paraphrase gives us an analogy, that if all the oceans were ink and all the trees on the earth were pens, you would extinguish all of the oceans and still you would not extinguish the meanings of God. What is the Qur'an telling us?
The Qur'an is saying that this is inexhaustible. That the sacred texts are entrees into the inexhaustible reality of the divine. And so the human being will never be bored, will never be comfortable as long as we have spiritual life and that life calls us to exploration of the spiritual. And of course, the conditions of our time continue to evolve and change and grow more difficult and more pressing and more fierce.
And God knows that we need that engagement with the divine constantly as we renew our covenant, with the creator of the heavens and the earth. And, I think a lot about my own sort of spiritual upbringing, I think actually a lot about El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz Malcolm X.
There's a lovely paragraph in the closing pages of the autobiography and this is obviously being dictated to Alex Haley before Malcolm's martyrdom assassination in February 1965. And Malcolm says that since returning from Hajj, where he has this momentous spiritual experience, right? And he's gone to the holy city of Mecca, he's witnessed this kind of, if not erasure of race, the erasure of the privilege of race.
And so that he's sitting, he says with the whitest of white and the blackest of black, and the Arabs and the non-Arabs, and he's accepted into a fraternity, which he has never felt before in this way. And so he writes and he dictates in the closing pages of the autobiography, Brother Malcolm says, that since returning from Mecca to paraphrase, my friends include black and white. My friends include Republicans and Democrats.
My friends include capitalists and communists. And he even says some of my friends also happen to be Uncle Tom's. And he says that since returning from Mecca, he found that his circle of friendship and contact grew. That to me is profound. That Malcolm at the height of reimagining the struggle for freedom in America and linking it back to the struggle for freedom all around the world, a fundamentally political and economic and social struggle. Malcolm was able to find the spiritual thread. Because the spiritual thread for Malcolm was, that as I grow more confident in my faith, as I grow closer to the creator of the heavens and the earth, the boundaries of my theological political tolerance grow.
And for me, my litmus test of bad religion is that if you become more religious, and the boundaries of your theological tolerance, and your spiritual tolerance, grow more narrow, there's a problem with your religion. There's a problem with your religiosity. Because the closer you get to the divine opens us up to the possibilities of how to worship and be with God. And with each other of course. Because if that's the route, if God is the creator, if God is the Ultimate Reality, then each and every one of us are here by not only the permission of, but we are sustained by the same creator.
We are all here with purpose. And sometimes it's true that purpose is hard to find. We're going through a moment right now when we are witnessing mass death, live stream. We are getting to a time where we are seeing the most horrific things. And not that these things haven't happened before, but they are now on our phones. We are seeing them as they're happening in the moment on a scale that horrifies us.
I have students, right? I engage with young people all the time, and they are coming, and they are broken, and they are overwhelmed, and they are fractured. And they're saying AR, I'm finding it hard to find God in this. And these are not mere questions of theodicy, right? These are connections that folks that are struggling to be prayerful and struggling to be godly, and are struggling to connect to the Ultimate Reality of things and also dealing with what is happening in the world right now, the pain ,the suffering, the fracture. Let alone the pain and the fracture of the very earth that we walk upon as the title of the bestselling New York Times bestseller, rather, says The Heat Will Kill Us First. If none of this was going on, we'd be in trouble.

(Gentle music begins…)

In the Christian tradition, Contemplative prayer is the opening of your mind and heart to God, who is beyond thoughts, words, and emotions. Centering prayer is a method designed to facilitate contemplation. The method suggests 4 guidelines. 1, choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God's presence and action within you. 2, sit comfortably and relatively still. Close your eyes or leave them slightly open and silently introduce your sacred word. 3, when you notice you have become engaged with a thought, simply return ever so gently to your sacred Word. And 4, at the end of the 20-minute prayer period, let go of the sacred word and remain in silence for a couple of minutes. The additional time invites you to bring the atmosphere of silence into everyday life.
(Gentle music fades out…)

Mark: Yeah. I wanted to ask you more about that. I am so intrigued by what you're saying in terms of holding these two ideas that God is mercy, and there's an absolute oneness, and there's a lot of connection there. And yet, we see so much in our own experience and in the world all this fracture that you're mentioning and the suffering. And you said that about your own coming into being, the partitioning you said even that your parent’s experience and your ancestors' experience and you come into that.
And Keating talks about this too, in one of his books where he talks about “Goodness is the affirmation of creation as good. Together with a sense of oneness with the universe and with everything created.” But he goes on: it is the disposition that perceives everything, even the tragic things of life, as manifestations of love and of God.
And I was curious because I know your podcast which is wonderful; This Being Human. I'm guessing a reference to the now popular at least in the states poem, by Rumi entitled The Guest House. And that poem, which I've said a thousand times, says that, “This being human is a guest house and even if a crowd of sorrows show up, who violently sweep your house empty of all its furniture, you treat each guest honorably.” But how do we do that? In terms of, you know that's a different kind of love in a way. It seems to me that it's not a romantic love. It's something else.

Abdul-Rehman: No Mark, it's not, and it's hard work. That is the hard work. You know, Karen Armstrong once was asked about her charter of compassion, and said, Oh, Karen You could talk about compassion. It's so easy. All of you spiritual people talk about compassion and mercy and it's so easy. And she's like, compassion and mercy are the hardest things to do.
To forgive it does mean suffering and to live not only with your own suffering, but to be witness to one another's suffering and to be present as that suffering is happening, and be someone committed to the amelioration of suffering, this is hard work. It's interesting because, in approaching this question, of theodicy as theologians would like to call it. How do we engage with the idea that evil exists and God is good?
I think in Islam, we have a very simple kind of perspective on that, and that is, this is the gift of agency. The gift of agency is that we, as human beings, have the capacity and power, as the Qur'an tells us, We are created in the best of forms. And this to me is interesting right? I mean, if you allow me this departure for a moment. The Qur'an, as other scriptures and texts, speaks about the creation of the first form. Sometimes referred to as the Adamic form.
But this form, this first soul, its structure as being created from dirt. And yet the Qur'an says that this was the best of God's creation. And in that great drama that the Qur'an describes in its second chapter, the great drama in the court of heaven, when this human form is created out of mud and dirt and is fashioned and God asks the heavenly kingdoms to bow in reverence to God's creative power and God's creating this beautiful creation.
The angels, of course, bow because they have no choice. They're compelled. They are witnessing God's power. And then in the Islamic understanding of the celestial supernatural room, there are other beings. Including these beings created from smokeless fire called jinn and Iblis. Later on referred to in the Qur'an as shaitan or satan, is one of these characters in the court of heaven, worshiping God constantly in the company of the creator of the heavens and the earth.
And Iblis says, No, I am created from fire and that thing is created from mud. Why should I bow down? Look at us, we worship you, Oh, God. In the Islamic conception, the satanic figure is not a God denier. In fact, it's someone who is asserting God's greatness through their own greatness, and that's the error. I've always asked myself. I've been reading those verses since I was a young boy.
Why is the human being created from mud? Why do we have the capacity to be the greatest of creation? And another part of the Qur'an, that we created you in the best of forms and you became the lowest of the low? ‘Asfal asafileen’ in Arabic, you became the lowest of the, what's going on here? That's the power of agency.
That is the power of the gift. That's the divine secret. The secret that you and I and each creation, each human being has been given is that we have the agency, and God gave us this agency. And we have the agency to be good and do good in the world and to struggle for that good, or to debase ourselves and become wretched, murderous, genocidal - planet and people destroyers.
That is the capacity of the human being. So for me, it's a question of our agency. Not only of our personal agency, but of the systems that we have created, the systems of oppression and exploitation, and extraction. The immoral systems that justify our hatred.
And that is what is required of us when I speak about, or my faith speaks about radical accountability. That's what I'm talking and thinking about; we are radically accountable for what our hands have wrought.
Colleen: I don't even know where to begin. So one, you're talking and I'm thinking about how it's this spiritual struggle, but what I'm hearing you say Keating said as well that, we're confronted with the struggle also to be fully human. One of his later books, Consenting to God As God Is, he says that the human family, we're a species that's still evolving. He says, “the chief of whose problem is rooted in the fact that it has not yet become fully human, let alone divine.” And that, this human condition, marked by powerlessness, confusion, ignorance, and darkness, and its dependency on, our kind of animal nature, our lower instincts, et cetera.
This is our human condition, as he calls it. And as you were using that image of the dirt and the mud, all of this makes me think then, we do want to be intentional about talking about practice, right? Contemplative practice. Because then, you're using the word agency but how do we develop this agency?
How do we develop this muscle to be able to act opposite this nature to become divine, to enter into these attributes of God that is our birthright?
Abdul-Rehman: Again it's such a powerful inquiry because it's really where the rub is, right? That's the work. There's a section in the Qur'an where God addresses the human being and says, “Oh, my servant, why do you despair of the mercy of God? Oh, my servant, who has wronged themselves, why do you despair of the mercy of God? The mercy of God is never absent, always close. It is a very powerful statement from the Creator.”
And yet, it is something that I have wondered about for a long time. Because the Islamic tradition and the Qur'anic message Is that God's mercy is close and to access it one takes responsibility, right? And one turns sober. One turns to God and literally asks God for forgiveness. And that is not merely an asking, but it is an asking and a commitment to transformation. That one asks for forgiveness, and then seeks the means by which the ill action, the hurt that one has caused, will not be committed again.
That one begins a process of once again holding oneself to radical account and going into the world and being different, constantly invoking the creator. Surrounding oneself with individuals who are not only like-minded but heart-minded like them, to do that work, to find community, to find connection, and to constantly return to God.
One of the Sufis said this is where the rub is, Colleen. One of the Sufis masters said that I pray for forgiveness for the evil that I do in the world and my wrongdoing, knowing that I am weak and that at some point I will return to it. But I constantly ask forgiveness of God, hoping that God will take me back to God's self in a state of forgiveness, not in a state of heedlessness.
This Qur'anic idea of constant awareness of zikr of the remembrance of God is fundamental in this process, is the constant reminding us. And that's part of the contemplative practice, the remembrance of God, are rituals, of course. Are often really difficult. We have to pray five times a day. It's a pain in the ass. I won't lie.
It'd be stupid to lie about it. Prayer often feels like a burden. We have to wake up before the sun rises. There are times right in the middle of a busy day. Then it's sundown. And then when you're tired in the evening. But why? Our teachers always remind us why we're actually called to God at the most inopportune moments, not as what is good for us, but the time that we're most heedless, most engaged in the world.
Why that coming back? Why that reminder? Because that's the practice, isn't it? To remind ourselves that we are in relationship with God, that we are being sustained by God, and that God is closer to us, as the Qur'an says that our jugular vein. God was never absent.
People say that, oh, God is absent. God was never absent. What are we seeking when the creator is close? That's when the Qur'an says, oh, my servant, why do you despair of the mercy of God after you've wronged yourself? Know that the mercy of God is close. It didn't go anywhere. We went away.
Our hearts wandered, but the reality never wandered, right? We became heedless. And I think what we're witnessing now in the world, and the very earth is crying, and the skies are crying, and the seas are crying. And we are seeing before our eyes our very planet transform because of the systems of exploitation and extraction and oppression that we have created.
Why? Because we went away from God. The Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, said walk upon the earth with humility because the earth is your mother. This is language that makes sense to us because we've studied with Indigenous elders. We understand this maternal, parental what we would call in Arabic, zati, soulful body relationship with the earth because we do.
We're made out of dirt. From dust to dust to earth to earth. We know that when we go into the ground, we disintegrate. The earth takes us back. It's the nature of our creation. And yet we can be the greatest of creation. It's a struggle. I think we are constantly engaged in a struggle with our own ego, of course. The thing that makes us important.
And this comes back to the point that you were making Mark. Why? I've often thought to myself, if the mercy of God is so close, then why is it so difficult? And I think to myself, why is it so difficult for me to ask for forgiveness? Why is it so difficult to hold myself to account?
And that's the ego. That's that satanic impulse. I am better than. I'll get by without. Why do I need to seemingly debase myself? In the Muslim prayer of course as you know, and in other traditions, Buddhist traditions and Ethiopian Orthodox traditions we prostrate, right?
We bring our forehead to the ground, to the earth. What the spiritual masters tell us, it is a sign not only of debasing the intellect but raising the heart above the mind. And how do we develop that heart? Constantly the heart conversation happens.
And, not but, and, I sincerely believe that one can do that work, the contemplative work, on the front lines of a protest. In serving those who are oppressed and standing for justice with those who have faced injustice, not in some kind of way of charity, because it's not charity. Our own survival depends on it.
Those who are living with oppression, our tradition teaches us they have a direct line. That God is so close to them that they're speaking to God.
I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think, recently, especially witnessing the mass death in Gaza and seeing, and witnessing the terror and the atrocities, people are broken by it, not only Palestinians who are facing this. But I think all people of conscience, Jewish sisters and brothers and siblings, Christian sisters and brothers and siblings, Muslim, so people with no faith at all. And yet we've all been united and brokenhearted.
In the Islamic tradition, those who die and those who pass away under the yoke of oppression are considered shuha’da, commonly translated as martyrs. But what does shuha’da actually mean? The shaheed is the one who has witnessed, the testification of faith in Islam is called the shahada, the witnessing of God's oneness and the messengership of the prophet and his lineage. The notion that those who die in the way of God, the Qur'an tells us, don't say that they are dead. Verily, they are alive with their Lord.
I remember reading someone who had a spiritual opening during these days of mass death in Gaza and writing that they woke up for morning prayers, and for a moment they no longer saw the bombs, and the collapsed buildings, and the burning rubble, but they saw angels and they saw beautiful souls rising up into the gardens of heaven.
In that way Mark, what you were describing, that in all of this difficulty, we find love, we find beauty. That is the unveiling. That is what the Sufis, the mystics, those who are witnessing God tell us that beyond all of this ugliness, there is essential beauty. And isn't it for us through our work in the world, through finding mercy, through promoting justice?
And yes, there is a tension between mercy and justice. And this is the interesting thing about the Islamic conception of the oneness of the Creator. Is that God is, grace and mercy and compassion and generosity. God is also the creator. God is also the loving. God is also the abaser, and the destroyer and the re-fashioner of things. That all of these things are the ultimate reality, right? And each reflects an attribute of God.
God is the Avenger. In one of the names in the Islamic, tradition. How do we hold this all together? For me, I see all of that, and in one of the statements the Prophet Muhammad, there are these amazing statements called the Hadith Qudsi, or these sanctified sayings, which are not part of the Qur'an, but are almost like spiritual openings that the Prophet had and spoke in the words of God.
And in one of these sanctified sayings, the Prophet Muhammad says, speaking the words of God, I am as my servant sees me. And in another statement, Husn al Dhan - a very powerful concept in the Islamic ethical tradition. Have a good opinion of God. What does that say to me? If I see God through the lens of God's attribute of mercy, I will begin to understand Ultimate Reality through that reality. Through the reality of mercy. If I see God as the avenger, as the debaser, as the destroyer, as the one who holds to account, then I will live my life accordingly.
And I think there were moments in my life, In my own spiritual development where the attributes of God, through which I was understanding the ultimate reality were those of judgment, of abasing, of holding to account. And I think a beautiful thing happened when I met some of my spiritual teachers and I saw the way they were in the world and I saw the way people were with them, and they were with people in the most difficult sometimes environments.
I realized that they always saw and experienced God through Rehman and Rahim, the merciful and the compassionate. And that not only changed the way in which God interacted with them and they interacted with God, but it changed the way that they interacted with God's creation.
To speak to what you were saying earlier, Colleen, the ritual, the practice, is the foundational work is the practice is the thing that keeps us connected. It is not the end of our religion. It is the beginning of our faithfulness because that is the thing that holds us and scaffolds us as we go into the world.
[58:06 ] Al Ghazali, the great theologian of the classical period said, don't ever condemn anyone because you don't know what their end state will be and what your end state will be. Live in humility and do the work that you need to do in the world. Now, these are all difficult. These are all difficult things. That's why communities of practice are so important. I think if Father Keating leaves anything to me is the fact that these are communities of practice. It's not something that Father Keating was doing alone.
He and others like him, women, men - our siblings in faith, are creating communities of practice, of bringing people together, of finding not only hope but actually building that discipline and the muscle together. Will we fail? Absolutely. We're human. What is true failure to not return again and again. We have to return again and again and again. I will fall down. I must get up and I must return again because God's mercy is so close. I just need to reach out and grab it. I need to reach out and grab it.
I encourage myself rather, I encourage my students that the friendship with God is really close. It's about awareness. Let's not think that this is something that's unachievable. Let's go out into the world and befriend God.
And with that, befriend God's creation. And with that, act as mercifully as we can and speak out against injustice as clearly as we can. Whether that's anti-Black racism, whether that's the systemic harming of women and girls, whether that's the systemic harming of our queer siblings, whether that is Islamophobia, whether that is anti-Semitism. Whatever that may be, whatever injustices, whether that's economic injustice and marginalization and oppression, whether that's against white supremacy. We speak about it not only because there are systems of exploitation and expression, but they are profoundly ungodly.
They are profound systems that prevent us and seek to prevent us from connecting to the divine. And that's why we owe it to ourselves. To go out into the world and work for that justice because that's the justice that I think of.
We have work to do in the world and I know it. I struggle these days. I won't lie to either of you. These have been bleak months. I really struggle. I struggle at times with hopefulness. And then I go back to my own tradition, which gives me the language just as your traditions give you the language and we share that language together in spaces like this.
I go back to the words of the Prophet, and the words of the Prophet are that even if you see, the signs of Judgment Day rising, or even if you see the sound of Judgment Day coming upon you, or even if you see the radical accountability of God descending upon you and you have a sapling in your hand, plant the sapling. Plant it anyway. And why? What an unusual thing to say. What's the value of that sapling if it doesn't grow? No, the value is not in the growth of the sapling, or its lack of growth. The value is in the planting of it, and it's an unusual thing. Most of us aren't carrying saplings with us. So the real lesson of this statement from the prophet is to be a sapling holder.
My hope for my generation, my son, for the students that I engage with when we work, is to become holders of saplings. Be like my wife who's an amazing journalist and a gardener. She's always got seeds in her bag. She's collecting seeds. She's always got them there. Be someone who always has a sapling, and whenever you see a moment, plant it. Of course have every hope that it will survive, but you plant it because that's what we do; we plant seeds.
We plant seeds. We plant saplings. It's on God, and we trust God. But because our spiritual belief in the Islamic tradition is that if that seed does not grow here, it is already growing in the gardens of heaven. It is already growing in the celestial gardens. Every seed I plant here has a spiritual reality that is with God. I have to believe that if I'm going to have any hope in the world. If I'm going to have any hope in blessed action, I believe that.
Colleen: Yeah. And that's what we believe too. And that's what grounds us in our practice; this sense of deepening awareness of reality. That is what we hope in. Goodness, I wish I was one of your students.
Abdul-Rehman: Colleen I always learn more from them than I'm sure they learn from me. They're an incredible bunch.
Colleen: Such a wonderful exchange and community to be in, you know. You left us with this sense of remembering Father Thomas as having created these communities of practice, but I can see that happening in classrooms too and communities of dialogue, which is so important. And dialogue as a spiritual practice that we really solely need these days more sharing of beliefs and perspectives like what was modeled at Snowmass and in these conferences so.
Mark: I love being left with that image today of the seed. Seeds that you were planting are for us today and seeds that we can all go out into the world with and continue to plant. And in that kind of service that you started with, that servant of this merciful one that we can trust in that. And I really want to thank you. Thank you for being with us today.
Abdul-Rehman: No, thank you both for this opportunity to share and to reconnect with the work of Father Thomas Keating. And thank you for reminding us, both of you, of this very important language of Ultimate Reality. I think for us spiritually, it's such an important concept of connecting to the source of all things.
And that by connecting to the source of all things, we experience the wholeness of ourselves. Because it's through our distance – not God's distance –it's through our distance from the source of all things that I think we find great pain and suffering. And I think it's such a powerful and important reminder. So thank you for this invitation back into this beautiful space.
Colleen: Yes, and thank you for your podcast, which we want to encourage everyone to listen to. I mean, we didn't even get to talk about it.
Abdul-Rehman: No, please tune in. It's been a real privilege to do it for the last 4 years. This season has been really great and our last episode, which is with the Qawwali singer Dhruv Sanghari Bilal Chishti, is just magnificent because he sings and teaches through the poetry of the subcontinent and the Sufi poets, and it's a tour de force. So it's a good place to start in your This Being Human journey, but thank you, Colleen, and thank you, Mark.
Mark: Thank you AR. And you can find information on AR and the podcast in our show notes, we'll have links to all that. Thank you all for being with us today. And once again, thank you AR for being here and for really sharing your deep wisdom and deep commitment to this work.
Abdul-Rehman: Thank you both.