I find myself sleeping more. And eating less, even when it is time to eat.
Rain is trickling down the gutter outside, the air is a beautiful grey.
Why have I always–always–loved grey cloudy days, rainy days even better, and not summer rain either, big warm drops splashing down, no, I love the cold needling rain of spring and autumn, a drizzle, so thick you can’t feel it but arrive home thoroughly soaked.
The soaking I think: to be covered, suffused, bathed, owned, by something you didn’t even know was around you.
I love the mysteries and the unexplainables. The Kaaba, the black house of God, called The Near Mosque, circumambulated by millions, the direction of Muslim prayers, the cube at the heart of the Masjid-e-Haram, is empty inside.
What does it mean?
When the prophet was taken on his mehraj–flight to heaven–he was taken first to The Far Mosque–Al-Aqsa, in Jerusalem–and then into Heaven. Myriad things occurred there, but the final thing was this: God changed the direction of prayers–from The Far Mosque in Jerusalem, to the Near Mosque in Mecca.
What does it mean? That you must worship what is closest to you? But the steed bore him to the Far Mosque first and thence into heaven, yes? So maybe heaven, the physical (or metaphorical) site where God is supposed to be, is not really the most important point?
Revelation is handy: God whispering in your ears, smoothing out uncertainties, explaining what was supposed to happen next. But what do you do when you are an ordinary mortal, in doubt, hearing nothing but silence?
At any rate, there has always been a lively debate over the real location of the “Far Mosque,” defined in scripture not geographically but solely by that adjective. Rumi put his two cents in when he wrote, “That mosque Sulayman built was not made of bricks and stone. The farthest mosque is the one inside you.”
Besides the fact that Rumi, preeminent Sufi teacher, sounds alarmingly like a yogic sage here, it is also interesting that he makes no distinction between the destroyed Temple of Solomon, mourned by countless people, and the mosque which was built in its place.
What if every mosque and synagogue were the same place. Worshiped in by different communities with their own litanies and liturgies and scriptures and their own appoint times? If only.
And why is the Kaaba so important? Because there a black stone fell from the sky? Because Ibrahim and Ismail built it as a house worship–but why there? What happened there?
There in the desert, as Ismail was dying, Hajira, first wife of Ibrahim, put her son down and ran in the desert to look for water.
Looking for water in the desert? What was she thinking?
It didn’t matter to her. For a moment, her son dying in her arms, she panicked.
I think it’s the true definition of faith.
In his almost-death, Ismail found life. Where his heels hammered the ground a spring issued forth. He drank.
Meanwhile Hajira in her panic ran by him several more times before seeing he had been saved.
Is “heaven,” or at least our idea of what that place is, relevant to spiritual practice? Here’s one answer: during the Hajj, when pilgrims commemorate Hajira’s search for water, they do not stop when the water burst forth, they run between the two hills Safa and Marwa seven times–the times Hajira ran before she noticed the water.
Which had been there all along.
The Kaaba is a sacred place because it is the place a person refused to believe the most horrifying thing: that she had been abandoned. That she was alone in the desert without succour. That there was nothing she could do to save her baby.
And there, next to the Near Mosque, the closest object to it, the sole object–since the Mosque is empty inside–at the heart of Islam, is the body of this person, a woman, an African woman who heard nothing in her ears but the beating of her blood and the most illogical of thoughts:
The boy is dying. Run.