When Hazrat Inayat Khan came to the west, the people to whom he gave the Sufi Message were deeply affected by war: the tensions preceding World War One, the enormous suffering of the war itself, and the lingering grief and confusion when it ended. A hundred years later, our world is not free from similar shadows, and from certain spiritual doubts and questions that may arise as a consequence. The brief passage below offers one possible Sufi response to such concerns.
It is a great fault of this age that it tries to judge God. The Roman Catholic Church has done one good thing in always giving man the idea that he is incapable of judging God.
Parents, who in every way wish the best for their child, may often have to do a thing the child cannot understand. Man as man cannot understand the justice of God, until he rises to the state of perfection, and then his mouth is closed.
What can be said is that in creation God Himself manifests. In suffering, He Himself suffers; He Himself is puzzled in His creation, and one day He Himself realises His perfection. God only exists, no-one else.
In these difficult times also in Holland I ponder about what we can learn from this. Rumi tells us: Pain is a form of grace. Helminsky teaches: God is not only the suffering of the world but also the refuge against that suffering.
The world outside the window is not good, is a song.
Could the lesson be to let fear go and seek redemption and the Love of God?
God wants the best for us and invites us in many ways. Isn’t it??
‘…In suffering, He Himself suffers…’: yes, it is very consoling to feel very deep inside that He/She suffers with us, and rejoice with us, and so on. But when the Murshid says, ‘…He Himself is puzzled in His creation, and one day He Himself realises His perfection…’. Dear Nawab, I’m sorry, I try to feel the truth of these words but it is a little bit confronting for me to read that God is puzzled and that He is in a process to realize His perfection. Could we say that the infinite process of creation by the Creator is a perfect one, which He himself realizes in an eternal Hu, or Om, or…Maybe I missunderstood the profound misticicism of this.
Dear Amin, thank you for the good question. What Hazrat Inayat is saying is not easy to follow, as it requires us to put aside our usual way of thinking. And even if we succeed in following the thought, the realisation of it is a step much further – the ultimate step, perhaps. So it takes patience.
If we say, ‘God is perfect, but humans are puzzled,’ then we are separating God from His creation, and making duality of what should be unity. Those who have realised the Truth say that there is One, not many, and we feel that to be so even if we do not see it directly. But this means that God is also in His creation, and His creation is in Him (although He is not defined by His creation); therefore all that passes in creation – the joys, the sorrows, the confusion and the lightning bolt of clarity – all is experienced by none other than God.
Perhaps we can use the image of lovers to make it a little clearer. In the beginning, they feel an attraction but they are separate, but in time the love may deepen to such an extent that they see that they are not separate, that they are one spirit living through two bodies. That is the picture of the mystical realisation, what Hazrat Inayat calls ‘the joy of my homecoming.’
Thank you dear Nawab for the clear explanation that invites again to reflect a lot on the concept we have of God.