Conversations On God

Part One

My sister went to a catholic school and I loved going to pick her up after school. I loved the halls, ladened with Jesus dying on a cross, I loved the nuns that would parade across the lawns. I loved the feeling of being in a shrine, on holy ground, how goodness was expected in these soft moments where God resided. There’s something different about the way light feels in temples, mosques, churches, the way that things that are truly sacrosanct can radiate such undulating feelings of calm.

I’m grateful to have this relation to God, where I have always felt them close, no matter what’s been happening in my life, and this became a sanctuary for me, a cure for loneliness. When I was growing up it was not cool to like God. The Australian suburbs were a bit agnostic I must admit, and as my parents never lived around other Bangladeshis (whether on purpose or?) we were always secluded, in white spaces—so not a lot of connection existed to a larger Muslim community. Yet, in my private spaces, no matter how much I contended with Islamophobia, however much I lied about not being Muslim, at home, alone, I revered God. I called to them.

I took solace in learning about the history of Islam, of its deep mysticism and socialist aspects. I was consumed by the renaissance period of Islam, of the astronomers and scientists and poets and physicians—of the grandmasters that brought us the first cursive of the alphabet, the first spit of coffee, the first halls of a university. According to CNN, “In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi founded the first degree-granting university in Fez, Morocco. Her sister Miriam founded an adjacent mosque and together the complex became the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University.” This, Islam’s impact on the world, riveted me, and yet my every day, my life outside, existed in taunts. I didn’t like the way being Muslim made me feel outside in the world. I hated the leers, the confusion of my friends, then the over-explanation, always, of why I was Muslim became a continuous procedure I launched myself into to claim my humanity. As if to pronounce and prove my sanity, I always needed to explain myself. But my relationship to God? How could I ever explain that.

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Yesterday I re-watched Tree of Life by Terrence Malick. The film starts with the voice of God, maybe… or is it you? Is it your small voice, meek, grasping for God? “Mother. Brother.” It’s perhaps Malick’s most generous film, pulsing with the profoundness of life, rapturous shots of our Earth, this lush planet, and seeking answers of who we are, and how we came to be, what burdens us in the darkness? The film is an epic that grounds itself in God, and the first shot pulls you in immediately like you’re witnessing a burning bush, as if you’re Moses himself, hearing God’s command through the speakers.

I love films that make me confront my mortality. I love art that reminds me of our limited time here. Sometimes I just ask myself, What’s your mission on this planet, and is it for God? It’s a question I keep coming back to on dark days, on days I feel like I have nothing, when a lingering sensation of defeat overcomes me. My father, on our weekly call to each other, recently told me he’s been considering similar things, of our collective return to God.

There’s a scene in Tree of Life where Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) holds her young son, points to the sky and says, proudly, “That’s where God lives.” I found myself crying at that scene, at the eagerness, the hope, the wilfulness we muster to be close to God, to not lose that sacred guidance.

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When I was a child, I didn’t understand the presence of a higher spirit, but sincerely felt that force everywhere. In the trees as I played, in the dark muddy soil as I searched for worms. In the bush, I would see brown snakes summoning the sun, leeches caressing the pebbles in the shallow creek, and see God through the diffractions of light pooling out, as I hovered in angst. It was here, in these quiet moments, that I started to talk out loud, first with a whisper, then, slowly, boldly, as if I was talking to a friend.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a lot of real friends that I could turn to for existential reasoning, I gathered myself and sought God’s counsel. It’s in these moments that I gained reprieve for my life and perhaps where I began to determine the foundation of my relationship to the divine, where I just was, all me. Flawed, yes, but my intimate broken self, calling out for redemption. “The soul was never meant to be seen completely. It is more at home in a light that is hospitable to shadow,” John O’Donohue writes in Anam Cara. If more people were told to turn on God, even when you are ashamed to, and especially when you are scared to, maybe more of us would find some-kind of tenable, earthly salvation.

I have a poem called How To Cure A Ghost (yes very meta) where I speak of the time I went on Umrah (a lesser-known pilgrimage than Hajj) and as I circumambulated the Ka’abah, I found God’s mercy, like a sigh. I found myself looking at the heavens as I moved around and around, the circle of life, the cycle of life, akin to the whirling dervishes that seek Allah’s grace, and wondered why I had faded into an abyss, an abstraction, instead of looking up and praying gratitude for all that I did have. Buddhists will tell you that all human suffering is a construction of the mind. This, as a survivor, makes little sense until I remember… that when I look at with the trees, when I am with the earth, my feet gathered in the soil, I am with God. And no hurt exists.

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My friend James told me last year he thinks that God could just simply be light. The presence of light, like the peak of the sunrise across the planes of the dark night sky, the first pink smear, then the bright pull of a new day. What a beautiful way to envision God, to remember them.

In my darkest days (I ebb and flow out of darkness) I’ve always prayed to God and felt immediately better. When I’ve felt lonely about my life, about the things that have happened, I have found solace in God. It’s always this time of the year, as well, when I come in contact with this very specific contemplation. Maybe it’s ushering in Sagittarius season, with all its grand philosophical questions, but I’ve been trying to remember that we fear God’s abandonment when we are constantly abandoning ourselves. Today, I’m sitting with that reality, and I’m being slow with myself. I’m trying to return to myself, to remind myself… even when I’ve had nothing, I’ve had God, and I can do anything I wish to achieve.

In a few weeks, I’ll be doing a seven-day ayahuasca ceremony again. It’s in the spaces, outside the confinement of dogma or monotheism, I’ve created a better understanding and relationship to the divine—to creator—who delivers us only what we can bear. As I find my self lost in the stagnancy of trauma, I’ve lifted myself out with the belief that I am here. I am here, and that is everything. I am here and being guided by God. Time is so finite, but we are here, together. There’s a purpose to this pain, there’s a purpose to you, to me, to us. To the lives we’ve been given. What are we missing? What aren’t we seeing? I wish to know.

This will be apart of a three-part series on God, two of which will only be available to paid subscribers. If you’d like to become, please do! Link below.