I got a call yesterday from a mother of somebody in their early thirties, who wanted me to talk to them, or actually they wanted to talk to me, about they’d been frightened, and they’re frightened about their understanding of what does it mean to die before death?
You know, life is frightening. I was sitting next to somebody my own age yesterday at the Jumu’ah and he said to me, “It’s difficult getting old.”
Not a surprise. We live in a world that we barely understand. For instance; think about your circulatory system, think about your lymphatic system, and think about your nervous system. Think about all these systems that we have going on inside of us that function, and here we are in the midst of our consciousness barely knowing anything about them, yet they determine to a large part, whether we stay alive or not and the quality of that life.
As you get older you begin to see more and more doctors, and you realize that these experts, who spend a lifetime studying these things, don’t know a whole lot about them either. Yet they have been put into a position to make assumptions and then to take some action.
We have to become secure in faith. And faith is the answer to our lack of knowledge. We have to become comfortable in not knowing answers that have finality. We have to understand that information that we’re going to get during this lifetime is limited in its nature and is not going to answer all your questions, and we need to learn to be satisfied and grateful even though we don’t have all the answers. And then, when we do get answers, we’re going to end up with answers that don’t coincide with what we thought they should be, and we’re going to have to be able to adjust to those answers and incorporate that into our understanding and our being on a regular basis even though these answers don’t seem to flow the way we thought they should.
For instance, the world has many different ways to pray. As you go from continent to continent you’ll notice that God is prayed to through different kinds of rituals. And you’ll notice that houses of worship take on different styles. That which you will see in Japan is different from that which you will see in India, is different from that which you will see in Arabia, is different from that which you will see in Rome; very different.
So here we are in a pretty confusing landscape. And each one of these places, each one of these religions, tries to take up its space and tries to fill its space. But more than that, it tries to dominate its space and tries to exclude everyone else from its space.
Imagine a clear lake in the midst of one of the migration paths of animals, and imagine a thousand buffalos coming into this lake. Each one of them is going to want to take over its own spot and create its own comfortable muddy encampment. And when you have a thousand, or two thousand, or more, buffalos in one lake all of a sudden this clear lake becomes very muddy. And if I were to tell you there’s clear water there you’d have trouble believing me…
