I can’t know why I found God, but I do remember when. I had been broken-hearted in a way that was beyond my capacity to understand, and the cyclone of pain turned everything that I knew as my life to dust. This death of my life was the beginning of my relationship with God, and myself.
Though I had left Islam a long time ago, I was graced with the memory and practice of salat (Islamic prayer) on one of the darkest nights of my soul. I recited Al Fatiha, the start of the Holy Quran, from memory, and then bowed down, touching my head to the ground in submission to what I could have never anticipated, and could never face by myself.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, “One who knows himself, knows his Lord.” This journey of knowing myself and knowing God has, since that bitter cold day in 2008, been my solace, my anchor, my muse, and my connection to a living an intentional life.
Another world-renowned teacher, a Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, writes, “Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.” (“When Things Fall Apart”)
All of us experience situations that have felt as if the earth has crumbled under our feet, and we do not have anything to stand on any longer. Often, like me, the first response to such a difficult situation is denial, anger, and blame. Or resistance shows up as numbness, addictions, pity, revenge. Many of these states come together to create the perfect storm. Our minds become so entrenched in the negative life situation that it colors everything in our lives.
I could not have had the long view when my first marriage ended. If I did, then it would have been so easy to trust, so easy to surrender, when in truth it wasn’t. For every step I took forward, I stumbled two backwards. In this process I have learnt that just like with our body, we must practice to strengthen the qualities to which we aspire.
Submission is not admitting “defeat” and resigning ourselves to what we are experiencing. Submission is a heartfelt “giving up” of control, and in that moment of grace, being given the resources of trust and acceptance. Life has a way of teaching us the lessons we most need, even if they are not the lessons we would have engineered for ourselves.
Gratitude does not lessen or cover up the emotional pain of loss, but it brings loss into the light of being alive. It gives us the opportunity to break bread, watch birds, and step barefoot on grass, knowing that somehow in all this simplicity, we will find the courage to move forward to another day. Similarly, faith does not bandage over our wounds. For many of us faith is the journey of knowing our wounds, and trusting their presence, belonging to them not as victims but as witnesses of what we have endured, and how we have grown.
Arriving a decade from that fateful season of my life, I could never imagine it to be, nor want it to be, any different. Because now, despite all the shortcomings of my various conditions, I walk in faith. I walk in trust, knowing my heart, knowing myself, and through that knowing God, as a forever friend, walking with me where no one else could ever go.