IF the purpose of life is to develop a relationship with God, to come closer to Him, we need to have something common. To get closer to another human being, one has to develop a commonality of interests. If intellectually, one has to have convergence of minds, if emotionally, one has to appeal to his sentiments, share feelings and similar type of experiences, because we both possess reason. Then how does one get closer to God, what do we share with Him? We share with Him what Quran tells us that God gave us, when we came into this world; He breathed into us something of His spirit. We came into this world with a sea of qualities within us and we could either kill them, stunt them, or cause them to grow. When we grow in these, we grow not only in our ability to experience the beauty of life through these, but we grow in our ability to receive and experience the infinite beauty, the infinite peace, the infinite truth, the infinite compassion, the infinite mercy and all that which only comes from the infinite perfect source of all these.
The more we grow in mercy, the more we grow in our ability to receive and experience in this life and in the next, the infinite mercy of God. The more we grow in compassion, the more we grow in our ability to experience God’s compassion in this life through prayer, and through ritual and contemplation. The more we grow in truthfulness, the more we grow in our ability to experience the God’s truth, because all truth comes from God. The more we grow in these things, the more we experience the attributes of perfection and experience His being, trying to merge our nature unto His, getting closer to Him. This is more than physical nearness, more than just convergence of ideas, feelings; it is the convergence of Essential Beings, a closet type of nearness, two beings can feel or experience.
The analogy of goldfish, dog and my three children illustrate this. No matter how much my love and caring I pour it on Goldfish, she will feel it to a tiny degree, my dog feels it more and my children can feel the love, the compassion, the generosity, the protection to a much greater degree and we can have a relationship of beauty, which I can never have with anyone else.
Still the question, why did God give us the intellect, the choice and the sufferings? Why couldn’t. He programme us to have all these qualities? The answer is, you cannot have any of those attributes listed without these three things and all these are definitely essential. You can programme a computer never to make an incorrect statement, but you can never make it become a truthful computer. You can programme a cat scan to help the sick, but it can never become compassionate. All those things compassion, forgiveness, truth, caring, love are borne out of intellectual choice, suffering and reason. If we want to reach out to someone to do a compassionate deed, it is inconceivable without the environment of suffering. If we decide to help someone, we have to reason of what is of required from me and unless I suffer in the process, it does not become a compassionate deed. It is the choice, which makes it a compassionate act. Same is true about truth. Truth is a choice of telling the truth and not telling the truth. Often we tell the truth at risk to our own personal loss.
More the sufferings that might come out of this choice, the greater is the truth behind it and we have to weigh the consequences of that choice by telling the truth. The famous wedding vow, you undertake at the time of marriage to take a woman to be lawful wedded wife in sickness, or in health for rich or for poor, till death do you apart illustrate this. We knowingly make this choice, understanding, what is at stake here and it might involve richness or poverty, health or sickness and it may entail sufferings until death. Love is giving and suffering together and hanging on with each other and persevering, making a choice and knowing what you are doing. In all this, intellect (reason) choice and suffering play a central role so; it is very easy to see why Quran stresses these and in order to develop all wonderful attributes, we have to have these. Quran calls sin a self-destructive process.
Quran says, when we sin we destroy ourselves and by destroying ourselves, we forfeit the chance to experience that beauty, which is there for us in this life and the next. Like if we have some shortcomings in the womb, we suffer from the physical ailments. Similarly, if we do not develop these qualities, we will forfeit our relationship with God and the very purpose of our Being and it will be the worse hell, we can possibly imagine. Quran when it talks of heaven and hell uses very powerful symbolic language. The greatest peace and serenity can be offered to you in heaven on one end and on the other, the most terrible sufferings. It would be worse than anything that you could ever imagine. Quran tells us God will say on the Day of Judgment, “I did not harm you in the least, you destroyed yourself and it can be said in total objective truth.” ‘May the Peace and Mercy of Allah be upon you all.’ —Concluded.
Extracts from Professor Jeffery Lang, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Kansas USA, who converted to Islam after reading Quran and author of book, ‘Struggling to Surrender.’
—The writer is author of various books based in Rawalpindi.
