Day 19
Surrender
Excerpt from Father Reason (Rumi)
The universe is a form of divine law,
your reasonable father.
When you feel ungrateful to him,
the shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.
Make peace with that father, the elegant patterning,
and every experience will fill with immediacy.
Because I love this, I am never bored.
Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of springwater
in my ear and in my inner being.
The last few days have been a struggle for me. I am struggling with not fasting. I know what I said a few days ago about continuing the fast in ways other than food and drink, but it’s more challenging than I realized to let go of that and accept the current situation. I’ve found myself eating what I need to for my medication and then not eating for the rest of the day until fast break, hoping that somehow it will count. To be honest, I’ve been a bit miserable about it. A lovely friend has offered to fast the days I’m missing with me whenever I make them up. That helps but it isn’t enough.
So, I’ve been in that cycle of feeling sad about not fasting. Reading the excerpt above reminded me, once again, of how our own perspective and our own feelings can loom so large in our mind, large enough to convince us that our point of view is it. In noticing some of the beauty around me today—the leaves growing along my window, the gorgeous 6-foot long prayer on my wall, my beloved—I am reminded of how self-indulgent we can be in our feelings. Of course, by all means we must experience and be honest about our emotional being, but that does not have to limit our view of the horizon.
When we get to the place where our particular feelings are all we see, it is essential to use the touchstone of beauty, the touchstone of noticing and appreciating other beings, the touchstone of prayer and consciously being with Allah, the touchstone of surrender, to restore our view of the horizon of life. I spend a lot of time thinking about surrender. To me this means, the return to understanding how small I am in the scheme of creation, and the simple appreciation that I get to be here, gratitude for all the blessings I can perceive and the infinite many I do not. It means the return to that essence of our souls which is adoration of Allah and wonderment. It means tosubmit to who I am on this level beyond time, space and personality, rather than who “I”, ego, am. As Muslims we know that the very word “Muslim” means one who submits, and Islam itself means submission. Submit is a verb, encompassed in surrender, and requires constant action. There isn’t a place of submission you reach, beyond which you can coast as if that’s the end of it. No, every instant requires our intention to submit and striving to master our nafs so that they take us deeper into surrender rather than away from it. They almost got me today but Allah is ever-generous and merciful. I didn’t want to write this post today and was thinking about what reason I could use to feel justified, and what would I tell Wazina? Cracking open my Rumi book was Allah’s door to remembrance. Ya Allah, make us of those who remember you in all things. Amin.
