Tawakkul

And unto everyone who is conscious of God, He always grants a way out of unhappiness, and provides for him in a manner beyond all expectation; and for everyone who places his trust in God He alone is enough. Verily, God always attains to His purpose: and indeed, unto everything has God appointed its term and measure.
Q:65:2-3

It is highly inappropriate to cite verses like this, out of context, and without any formal education or training. But the words strike me as expressing such a truly remarkable quality, a dazzling human quality -that of trust-that I felt compelled to do so.

Last night I had a terrible dream. I was praying in an open field but I couldn't understand the language of the leader of the prayers. And the old man had a strangely elongated face (something like an old Russian icon I'm familiar with). Everyone wore tall, rounded black hats and some prayed with gnarled hands outstretched to the heavens. And the frightening thought occurred to me: what a terrible thing it must be to lose one's faith and what a gift it is that one has any....

(the dream ended on a positive note as I followed a white horse until I came to a small green gate in a wall....)


From 'Radical Hope':

After the destruction of the Crow's way of life it was difficult to comprehend anything. Did anything make sense any more? The very frame of reference had shifted. One is reminded of the ethics of the horizon, the limit, when Agamben talks about the camps. What sense can there be when one is beyond the bounds of reason-bounds that have been set by the way of life?

She laments, ' I'm living a life I don't understand'.

Plenty Coups sees in a dream the ending of the traditional way of life. But he sees something else as well: The tribe relied on what it took to be the young men's capacity to receive the world's imaginative message; it relied on the old men to say what these messages meant.

What did Plenty coups see? He saw the dissolution of the old world; he saw that he and his people were living on the edge, that a radical discontinuity in their narrative, their lives, was about to take place. In short: he had imagined the unimaginable. But to imagine is not to know. [It goes without saying that the dream is not merely a subjective experience, as the moderns would have it].

Plenty Coups is told that his people will survive, but they will only do so if they learn to listen, learn to be open; this, in effect, means a radical openness to the new, to the possibility of possibilities. By doing so they would know which month of winter they are in. This entails a suspension of the traditional ethical life, what they have always considered as the good. It is, as Kierkegaard says, the teleological suspension of the ethical in order to lead into a higher life or, as in their case, to preserve the holy.

And here is the key passage, the words that Lear infers Plenty to have spoken or thought about when understanding his dream-vision.

God-Ah-badt-dadt-deah -is good. My commitment to the genuine transcendence of God is manifest in my commitment to the goodness of the world transcending our necessarily limited attempt to understand it. My commitment to God's transcendence and goodness is manifested in my commitment to the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my limited understanding of what that good is.

A commitment to good that transcends our own understanding, our own subjectivity. Such a thing is difficult in normal circumstances; in the face of tragedy and despair it requires superhuman resources and I can only imagine that such trust is , in itself, given to us (as Citizen might say, a matter of grace).

~~~~~~

"..because when these birds feel that the time has come for them to die, they sing more loudly and sweetly than they have sung in all their lives before, for joy that they are going away into the presence of the god whose servants they are. It is quite wrong for human beings to make out that the swans sing their last song as an expression of grief at their approaching end; people who say this are misled by their own fear of death, and fail to reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or distressed in any other way; not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, whose songs are supposed to be a lament. In my opinion neither they nor the swans sing because they are sad. I believe that the swans, belonging as they do to Apollo, have prophetic powers and sing because they know the good things that await them in the unseen world; and they are happier on that day than they have been ever before."

I heard Lesley Chamberlain read these words on the Radio the other day and there was something wonderfully reassuring about the incantation-like quality of her voice. Of course, the notion that there can be any serenity-even if for but a brief moment- strikes our modern sensibilities as outrageous, if not impossible. And yet, and yet, might it not be that in the swan's song there is a hint of sadness, since it touches on the passing away of the life she has known? No, it is not "fear", but a lament for the erasing of her identity, her isolated self-will. Wasn't that the very quintessence of her being: to long much, to desire much? Didn't deepness reside in the yearning, in the hope?

The swan does not sing because she now knows that there is 'the good'. This she has always known, even darkly. It has always been there, it's reflection had always been here.

We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual relaity which is beyond them. For the spirtual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.

--Iris Murdoch.

But she sings at the approach of the good, as a lover does at the drawing near of the beloved. She wants to die in that circle. But why lament then? I want to live I want to die. How, in a state of bewilderment, can memory still exist? How is it possible to exist like this, fading, soaring ?

But then she thinks: it has always been so! Have I not always been this dying white star, alone in this infinite dark ocean, this black sun? There were reflections. They were nothing, they were everything. I am still me, you are still you. But I look at me, think of you.