48. Sky-Scrapings

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If you cannot imagine yourself at this moment face to face with GOD, you have your face on backwards. Or you have not yet grown a face.
You may not be recognizing what you are actually seeing. Each ‘I’ in you has its own eye.
Gaze out at the world, and see how vast your soul could be in the sight of GOD. Gaze in at your soul, and see how dark and empty the world will become when GOD fills your sight.
Harsh reality is healthier than a comfortable lie. Why else are simple people, with their struggles and sorrows, more cheerful than the wealthy with their symphonies, sycophants, and sins?
The truth is too important for GOD to deny the understanding of it to the simplest child. Hence those who pride themselves on intellect are the worst liars, the most corrupt, and the most deluded.
A long-term orbit convinces its passengers that they are on a straight line. Only on arriving at their starting point do they see their error. The upright path to GOD is perpendicular to biological life.
The human race is named so for a reason; in Paradise, its streams are many, and running for us. A sense of quality is fittingly named taste; for this, the subtlest of our senses, Paradise produces fruits.
To judge fairly among persons, we need GOD. To judge fairly within a person, we need Him even more. Who but He could separate a soul’s best faculties from its worst, and give to each its due?
All human kingdoms, mental or material, are make-believe. The only kingdoms allowed to stand on the Last Day are those that were made to believe in the King, the Maker, the First Believer.
The life and death of the earth are seen in growth and disintegration. Their counterparts in heaven are faith and despair. GOD helps us to grow, but only by His Friendship can we believe in Him.
Our bargain with our Creator was that for life we must accept death, for pleasure, pain, and for good, evil. Nothing living refused that primal deal; complaints after the fact are in bad faith.
It all depends on where you stand. From the valley floor of noisy bustle, prayer appears a waste of time. But on the peaks, beneath Eternity, what could be more urgent than a dialogue with GOD?
Since death is literally nothing, the rational atheist has nothing to fear from it. He can only fear his denial of GOD is also worth nothing, and that around him and his two nothings there is Someone.
The immediate reward for doing good is being good. But since being good belongs to GOD, it is intangible, and so goes unnoticed. Feeling good is a foretaste, but is available here even to the bad.
As a concept, infinity is clear. As an experience, finitude is easy to grasp. Yet between them we are constantly confused: our hearts long to taste infinity, but small minds want to capture it.
We are doubly disappointed – by our demand for certainty in the things of this world, where it cannot be had, and by our lack of certainty in the Everafter, where for most of us it comes too late.
Think of the poor, the sick, the disgraced . . . and you are one of them. Whichever way you turn in this world, you find no solace. It is then you know why you need GOD, and where to find Him.
No human plan, idea, rule of life, or ruler can unite mankind. The autonomy GOD has placed in every human heart is too absolute for that. Rather it is the Resurrector Himself Who will unite us.
GOD enjoins patience on us for what befalls us. However bad our past may be, it is also, thankfully, over. So patience with (and penitence for) that fallen past may be the best thing befalling us now.
Seeking the truth while denying revelation is like drilling wells and building pipes without ever seeing a cloud or feeling a breeze. Earthly wisdom may wet the soul, but the spirit thirsts for Spirit.
The higher the life form, the greater its readiness for non-biological modes of growth. Every spirit has a Paradise – a breakthrough in bliss and beauty – that represents its capacity for transcendence.
The anthropic principle tries to explain the precise fit between us, the observers, and our cosmos in terms of blind statistics. GOD does explain it as intentional craft. Whose telling merits our trust?
Spiritual growth is a fiery process, requiring both heat and light. Some wayfarers want the heat, and fail to see their errors. Others squint for light, but are unmoved by the truth when they see it.
Fear and hope are poured into our lives, and wisely so. It is by tasting many fears and hopes that we can learn to rank them. Only then can we learn what is worse than death, and better than life.
Wisdom, in the beginning, might only come from long toil in the mines of learning. But there are times, later in life, when dusty gems of knowledge start to sparkle in the long rays of wisdom.
Moral beings, like biological beings, have both hard and soft elements. Creatures need skeletons, interior walls, and surfaces to survive; so also do religions live by contrasts, rules, and barriers.
When the night of disappointment falls, listen to the truths that were enshrined in it for you. When the day brings high hopes, mark how the world will look when you are gone from it.
Things are by nature dependent. Each thing depends either on another thing, or on One Who is not a thing. If the former is always true, reality is forever disunited. If the latter, then reality is One.
Faith in GOD as the Immediate Giver of all things is no more a denial of the scientific version of causality than blaming ‘you’ for slapping my face denies the fact that it was only your hand I felt.
Reciting scriptures is not guidance, nor is studying nature. GOD’s Guidance comes to those whose hearts and minds are open to both revelation and creation, using each one to illuminate the other.
Though GOD cannot be seen in this world, hearts that want Him find Him. So who can blame Him for hiding, when He lets us see every thing we want and then we only want the things we see?
Our demand to see GOD is like a baby crying for his mother to care for him according to his terms – fretting, burping, and so on. By ignoring such calls, GOD is telling us to stop acting like babies.
We have needed great feats of intellect to extract our current meagre level of scientific knowledge from physical reality. How much more, then, was required to arrange it all there in the first place?
‘Amid the gruesome brutality and gratuitous suffering of war, where is GOD?’ – Exactly where you left Him when you descended into the street, running for survival or panting for victory.
For those who aim to keep their mental frames, a sign of GOD is a traffic warning or a highway marker. But for those who are intent on breaking them, His signs are ladders or launching pads.
Nearing a culture’s zenith, the shadows in it are small and easy to detect. But as we decline towards nightfall, the outlines of darkness grow soft and long, till nearly all are thralls in nihil’s realm.
Truth without obedience produces pride and sophistry. Obedience without truth leads to blindness and oppression. Only truth can justify obedience, and only obedience can activate the truth.
GOD’s Forgiveness outweighs in its meaning a lifetime of global atrocities that the offender then admits and repents of to Him. Those who scoff at this overvalue the world and undervalue Him.
We err grievously in judging ideas by the people who espouse them. The noblest truths, which are GOD’s to grant, can easily come to rest on the unqualified, or be unjustly claimed by the corrupt.
Does the rain just fall, or is it sent? If the world is dead, a product of lifeless forces, then rain falls unfeelingly. But if the world is alive, then rain is sent by the Living, and shares in His Liveliness.
Do events simply occur, or are they intended? If things were never meant to be, then why do we thrust meaning on them? But if everything has its Intender, then how can anything be meaningless?
Requiring rigorous unity of this world, be it intellectual, cultural, political, or religious, is a kind of idolatry, as it demands the Unicity of GOD come down into a realm of ambivalence and duality.
The signs of GOD are necessarily many; no one symbol, text, or person may establish an absolute monopoly on the way to Him. When such a claim is made and accepted, idolatry inevitably follows.
What can one say of a faith that is vocal in matters where GOD is silent, and dumb where GOD is eloquent? Sound belief proportions its emphases by the relative weight each topic has in its texts.
One cannot assess the worth of seeds by their failing to sprout in cities filled with concrete and manicured lawns. Nor can one judge a faith by adherents who have warped it to fit their vices.
If you are proud of your success, remember GOD could destroy it in a heartbeat. Your success is on His Terms and by His Will. And His Will does not imply that He is pleased with your success.
Satan is a malevolent life form in humans who accepts GOD’s existence but not His commands. What can be said, then, of souls in humans who neither accept His commands nor His existence?
While GOD makes spiritual opportunities unequal, His Justice counts both handicaps and efforts in awarding outcomes. But worldly inequalities remain just so – without GOD, they remain unjust.
Earth is our physical home; we can safely explore the heavens from its reliable solidity. GOD is our spiritual Home; we can safely explore the diversity of values when we start with His Unicity.
Expand your horizons. Do not crouch in the cozy shadiness of presentism, as a toad under a coconut shell, but view today’s regimes like ancient kingdoms, and past empires as if you live in them now.

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