In India, where Hazrat Inayat Khan grew up, the monsoons come with remarkable predictability. From early Spring the temperatures increase relentlessly, mercilessly, until one day — in Delhi it is usually near the end of June — clouds roll in and the rains begin. The dry, hot, unendurable tension is broken, and all of nature rejoices.
No doubt Hazrat Inayat was thinking of this in his short text about the rain of this season; the tanks he refers to are also an India-wide feature, brick or stone-built reservoirs with stepped sides to make it possible to reach the water as the level subsides.
The question to which this text responds has not been recorded, but we can imagine that on a number of occasions people said something like: ‘But why do we need the Sufi Message? We have our own religion!’ Or perhaps the question was sometimes put like this: ‘You say that the Message is the same that has always been given. Then, why do we need to hear it again? We have our own prophet, since centuries and millennia.’
The metaphor of the rain is a tactful explanation. The purpose of the Message is not to challenge anyone’s allegiances, but to enliven us. Yes, there may indeed be water in the tank, but it is no longer filled with the same life and magnetism as when it fell from the sky as a blessing. Water from a tank may be able to sustain us, but it might be wise to filter it and perhaps even to boil it first, before we put it to use.
Above all, this teaching points to the natural cycle. We see rhythms from day to day, from month to month, and from year to year; there are cycles of growth and decline in our endeavours and in our personal lives, and of course there is the ages-long cycle of the Message that comes from Above, ‘when Dharma decayeth’. The Message has always come as a response to the suffering of humanity; when our cry reaches a certain pitch, the reply comes. That is why Hazrat Inayat says, “As it is necessary that every year there should be a rain, so it is also necessary that every cycle must have at its end God’s Message.“