In the recently posted article by Hazrat Inayat Khan about bringing heaven on earth, we are told that heaven, that ‘perfect’ place celebrated by poets and proclaimed by preachers, is not some imaginary, faraway fairytale kingdom but is in fact right inside us. All that is necessary for us to experience it—indeed, for us to take up permanent residence there—is to harmonise our personal will with the will of God. As we might assume that God, the Divine Father/Mother/Creator of all of humanity, wants the best for us, then what would hold us back? Why don’t we do that? Why do we remain in exile? If heaven is within us, it must be our natural home, and we belong there.

But, as Hazrat Inayat points out in this short text about belief in God, there is a need for both art and nature. Nature is the divine creation, and we are part of that, but the Creator has hidden a seed of Himself in us; we have the possibility of embellishing nature with our art. It is art that finishes our own individual nature with the beauty of personality, and it is art — when we employ it — that turns our divine ideal from concept to living reality.

To bring an ideal to life requires, first of all, meticulous care. Like a humble and devoted gardener, we must tend what we wish to raise, protecting it from competing plants and from harsh weather, illness and parasites; we must keep watch by both day and night. But we must also be willing to give our life to the process. In the play Una, by Hazrat Inayat Khan, the sculptor longs for her work to become truly living, and learns at last that this can only come to pass if she accepts the bowl of poison and sacrifices her own life to her work of art.

To bring a divine ideal to life means to repeat with every thought and word and deed, in all its possible variations, “I believe in Perfection,” — or we might say, Truth, or Love, or Life or Light — but also to recognise that my little ‘I’ puts a limitation upon Perfection; it is too small a picture frame to hold the Infinite. Like the sculptor Una, when the need for sacrifice becomes apparent to us, the process can at last be completed: we do all we can to erase our ‘I’ from the picture, and let the majesty of Perfection shine on its own.

Then, exiles no longer, we are blessed to discover that we have never left our own true home.