This time I was "studying" for finals with my friend, whose name, in order to preserve anonymity, I will translate into English: Perspicacity.
Why were we not really studying? Because Perspicacity and I have the awful habit of relating our readings to real life, trying to find an appropriate application for them, quoting relevant experiences from our pasts, and inevitably getting wildly off-topic.
X was the subject this time. He is Perspicacity's roommate, and I am not calling him X to preserve his anonymity. We call him that in real life because he is a former believer, who left of his own free will, and who now runs something of an online crusade against religion.
"X thinks that religion is responsible for a disproportionate amount of this world's atrocities, and its ignorance," Perspicacity said as he packed up his laptop.
Certainly, X had a point: who could deny that religion is a historical divider, and that even when it is not itself at the root of a conflict, it frequently serves as a pretense?
But, "my dear Perspicacity, religion is also the source of the greatest goods in the world: lending believers hope and reasons to live well. Wouldn't a world without religion be a world without altruism?"
Perspicacity was standing above me now, slinging his backpack behind him for the trek home (where he no doubt intended to concoct something extraordinary for dinner). He tilted his head to the right and, looking down at me, asked, "Is it really altruism when a person does something with the belief that he'll be blessed in the next life for doing it? Or cursed for not doing it? It sounds almost selfish."
I stared up at him wide-eyed. With one fell swoop of a sentence he had unearthed in me the large question I had buried so carefully, along with its answer, years before---not to hide them, but to secure them and make them a part of me, for the day I would need them: "How can I truly serve God with a single eye when I know he is going to reward me for it?"
I had never been able to put into words the conclusion I had come to, and so I knew I wasn't going to be able to give Perspicacity a very satisfactory answer. All I was able to get out was this: "If your life were on the line, and I had a split-second decision to make in order to save it, the farthest thing from my mind would be my eternal reward. I know from personal experience that people sometimes can be motivated purely by love of others, and love for God."
He left then. I stared blankly at my computer screen wondering how I could have expressed the intensity of my feeling on the subject. A couple hours later, an e-mail appeared from Perspicacity himself. It was a reference to a tradition about a female Sufi saint of whom he had said I reminded him---before our library conversation:
One day, she was seen running through the streets of Basra
carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other.
When asked what she was doing, she said:
"I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise.
They block the way to God.
I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward,
but simply for the love of God."
I actually began to cry for my swelling heart. That's what a heart does when it realizes its hidden secrets are known, and truly known, by someone else. Some secrets aren't meant to be told to others, but are rather for us to discover in others, and joyfully too. Who could have known that Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya al-Qaysiyya would uncover her secret in me, so many centuries after she had buried it in herself?
And how many around me, I wonder, are waiting to be discovered?
