The Intimate Discourses of Ibn Ata’illah 15 – Abdur Rahman’s Corner
Peace, one and all…
Intimate Discourse 15
‘My God, how often has Your justice destroyed the dependence I built upon obedience or the state I erected!
Yet it was Your grace that freed me from them’
Commentary
The servant offers many deeds of obedience outwardly. He also purifies his spiritual states from contaminations through sincerity. The servant, therefore, gains the impression of having gained entry to a powerful fortress. He feels that he is protected against the subtleties of ostentation and vanity. But when the servant reflects on the justice of Allah, his reliance on his assumed fortress dissipates.
The demand of divine justice is that Allah does as He pleases. It is, therefore, within the purview of His justice to ignore the obedience and worship of His servants and even punish them for their worship
The Shaykh progresses further and says that, in fact, it is Allah’s kindness which has constrained the servant to abandon dependence on his obedience and worship. Thus the servant’s reliance is on Allah’s grace, not on his deeds of virtue
Reflections
How often do we fall into pride, arrogance and self-conceit! How often do we think our paltry deeds mean something! If we dig beneath these half-conscious motivations, how often we feel that we somehow subtly constraon the divine into giving us what we want! And yet … Allah’s subtle grace leads us to our own deep healing. Allah!
In reality, however, God’s justice is actually His love at work within the depths of our hearts. It is the merciful action of God bringing our hearts back into balance and equilibrium. As Ibn Ata’illah makes so beautifully clear here, it is an act of liberational grace when Allah removes the scaffolding we have built around our hearts. This scaffolding is so often built from false pride, beneath which lies a deeper sense of weakness, inferiority, and wounding. Pride, greed and fear all emerge from our wounded hearts as reactions to the imperfect world we find ourselves in. We learn to cover our sense of weakness in false confidence, anxiety and worry. We build great edifices out of our apparent knowledge and understanding, all the while anxiously defending ‘our’ corner of the world. Whilst these ego defences are understandable, they form a barrier between us and a deeper relationship with Allah.
God is intimately aware of our pretensions, and His overflowing grace allows us to slowly see our own limitations, and as Hu wills, to overcome them. As these inward structures collapse, an empty stillness can emerge, a place of renewed connection, a space of beautiful bewilderment. We must work but our work by itself is insufficient, it is only God who can grant success, and in that space of active surrender, new possibilities can open within our hearts.
And our last prayer is in praise of God, Sustainer of all the worlds
