The human person is made in the image of God, and is tremendously privileged compared to other creatures since the human person manifests the very divine attributes of God in his very being. Since God is One, we ought to manifest wholeness, serenity and integrity in our lives as human existents. But, alas, we live our scattered and broken lives, battered by so-called “priorities” that do not really matter in the light of eternity! We go through our day deliriously and frantically doing activities that really do not have eternal significance. We unnecessarily diffuse our energies and scatter our souls to materialistic, selfish, egotistic and vain pursuits! By envying others who are better than us and who have more than us, we become slaves to bitterness, depression and despondency. Sadly, we have forgotten the value of our intrinsic uniqueness—our irreplaceable, unrepeatable and irreducible value as an individual soul created in the very image of God and mirroring His divine nature and character! Trying to find significance in external things outside of ourselves, we are like that foolish lady in Mevlana Rumi’s Mathnawi poem who for one whole day practically tires herself looking for her precious diamond pendant in all nooks and cranny of her house, when all along, she was wearing it on her neck. It is high time now to reflect inwardly and see for ourselves that we are valuable just the way we are. We can never be made more valuable—God created us as a value-in-itself. In the words of Mevlana Rumi, “Whom you seek is seeking you! In creating you, He has kissed you on your breast: and by that one kiss, He has planted eternity in your heart and instilled the remembrance of ‘forever’ in your mind” (See Rumi’s “Fihi Ma Fihi” [It Is what It Is] page 14). With God’s divine life in our very souls, what more could we ask? No amount of external and material things can satisfy a heart whose heartache comes from the longing to be kissed once again by the Beloved. The Sufi mystics of Islam remind us that through constant invocation of the Names of God (zikr), we will be able to become detached from this temporary and ephemeral world; and we will become one-pointed in our remembrance of that time when God first kissed us and gave our first heartbeat to us. The heart longs for God because He is the very source of our heart’s beating. Our longing for God is the reason why our breath sighs inwardly and outwardly. Through constant invocation of God’s Beautiful Names, our soul, like Sleeping Beauty of the fairy-tale, will awaken from its dormant slumber and forgetfulness of God, allowing it to take a glimpse of our primordial oneness with God. It is the remembrance of God as our Source that will enable us to turn away from the fancy glitters of this materialistic and consumeristic world of greed and hate—ultimately back to Him, the Source of All-Goodness, All-Light and All-Love. Turning away from our being scattered (pagiging sabog) and from our lost bewilderment (pagka-pariwara), we will be back once again in the embrace of our One Beloved: and we will become whole once again (pagiging-buo ang loob), we regain the grace and enablement to manifest God’s divine attribute and character in the midst of our busy, muddled and chaotic lives. Why not spend some time of our day remembering our connection with the Source of our being—our One Beloved? Invoking his Name again and again, works within our mind, our heart and our whole being, making our entire existence reverberate with His Reality, thereby gradually yet surely, bringing us to Him whose Name we lovingly call, until His Name pierces through the veils of our separatedness, uniting us the lover to God our Beloved. What a beautiful reunion of soul to Soul! Amen, a thousand times Amen! (Written by Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu on September 2, 2014 at 8:23 PM.)
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 13:49:32 +0000
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