Recently, a friend asked, “What quality could we cultivate that would be most pleasing to God?” It is a worthwhile question; any believer should want to gladden the heart of the Creator. What is more, among the many choices we face, the first and most fundamental choice is whether to float along passively in life, or to seek a way to improve ourselves. We may be tempted to take the easy way out, and just let things happen, but not to choose a path is also a choice.

In a search for what is most pleasing to the Only Being, we might first think of virtues such as kindness, compassion or generosity that make life easier for those around us, qualities so inspiring that they are considered divine attributes in the religion of Islam. God, in His perfection, cannot be limited to any form, but He is, so to speak, surrounded by an aura of Godly qualities that find their reflection, sometimes only dimly, in our behaviour: tenderness and mercy are examples, as is the perfection of justice, the compassionate willingness to forgive, and the unlimited embrace of the Friend.

Since all qualities, especially the attributes we call Divine, have their origins in the One, we could think that developing any virtue to its perfection would open a way into the heart of God. For example, Allah is Halim, the tender, and so if we succeed in making our heart as tender as possible, we might suppose that He will be pleased. But what if, like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, the Divine has designed for us the destiny of a warrior? Would it not be better in that case to turn toward firmness and power?

In other words, some qualities seem better suited to some lives than to others. Then how to decide? If we must make a selection, should we go with our strengths, choosing a quality that we already feel resonates in us? Or should we look for qualities that seem quite foreign to our nature, hoping thereby to balance ourselves?

Fortunately, there is one quality that is always appropriate, and that is a perfect mirror for the Divine: sincerity. One dictionary defines sincerity as the absence of deceit or hypocrisy; if we want to put it in a positive way, we might say sincerity is the truthful expression of what we have in our heart. We cannot conceive that the Divine would ever be deceitful or hypocritical, and therefore we could try to adopt the same behaviour, beginning at the center, with our relationship with God. If we say our prayers mechanically, without sincerity, then God is not truly real for us. When we manage to pray sincerely, from the heart, God becomes a reality in our heart, and that must surely be pleasing to the Creator. That is the light that shines in this saying from Gayan Chalas : One single moment of a sincere life is worth more than a thousand years of a life of falsehood.