still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles ; and though we are
rarely the centre
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.
---Rilke, (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
~
A melancholic article in the Guardian about how some young Muslims in Britain drift from their faith and, eventually, feeling they can't go through with the double-life any more, renounce their religion. The social isolation that follows-not to mention the death threats-is truly saddening.
Living in a country with a Muslim majority affords one the space for hypocrisy and an easy-going relation with one's faith (unless one is a minority, in which case only expect bigotry and fear). Here, there is no question of faith and old-world masks and duplicity are what keep the world going-if taken in the right proportion, that is. Knowing not what to ask, when to keep silent, is an art. All this relentless desire for "exposure", "frankness", the Truth as it is, unmediated, is, of course, the kind of mindset that animates the extremists and fundamentalists.
If one can survive today without questioning too much, without being questioned, that is saying a lot.
But what would it mean to lose one's faith, slowly, out of the limelight..with a whimper, not a bang? And what of a society that goes through those changes (Arnold's Dover Beach). You often think: one's faith can always falter (Augustine in his last days). It would only take a catastrophic event for it to shrivel and disappear. And political upheavals, too, can result in it being smothered (only to reassert itself in a conservative, backward-looking version, but then it's not really faith but something else).
Two prayers: please prevent this from happening; please don't make me religious.
If there is doubt, then it exists within the circle of faith. Even a broken circle is still a circle.
~
There is no depth to the world in the summer light. The shadows timid, small, like frightened animals. Everything is flattened out under the clear sky, a dimension taken away from our lives, and there is no place for second thoughts.
We do not see ourselves clearly in summer and our minds are reduced to waiting, to passing all these hours in our lives, hours that tell no story. In some sense, this is the unbeliever's version of Heaven.
~
W.S. Merwin writes of the elemental, the return of nature-the space and time of nature- where there are no more human beings any more; at best there is a thin trace of memory, a dim recollection of a quietened human life: memory, longing, crossed paths, the silence in our words, but the two are only parallel: we are neither before nor after nature. Instead, there are distances- that cannot or should not be closed-and distances and angles open up a way of love; the way an image's reflection and its object maintain a clear space between themselves reminds you of the word &.
But if you think about it, you don't have a religious bone in your body (except your funny bone, perhaps). After a long, long time you went to a mosque: the open structure, the interplay of light and the water, always suggest that in Islam God (or, you'd like to say, the holy) is everywhere and nowhere. To miss it, to reach out after it..not this, not that, the Hindus would say.
I'm not even a 'cultural Muslim' since I don't follow any practices and have no connection to this land, but neither do I hold to an "idea" of religion. What, then?
In early morning, before anything is said or done, there is a clear wind, light and blue, that enters our lives for good. It passes, but always returns, whether we know it or not. Grey clouds fragment, scatter, lose their density. Without them, you think, there would be no yearning.
~~
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