Ineluctable Turning: Returning Home in the Quran

The code of this ‘turning’ and ‘returning’ is the intrinsic value of everything: that there is no escape.  Everything we do, we do to ourselves, everything we do affects the other and the world in its own minuscule way.   Everything ‘turns’ and ‘returns’ back to us and to the universe, to our genes and our cells.  We can’t escape from our deeds, it comes back “home”.  “Home” is the great metaphor of this ‘turning’ and ‘returning’.  After work we go back home, whatever it is, a shack or a house, after death we go back home, to the earth, and in returning to the earth we return to God.  And in the Day of Judgement we will be recreated for the new abode based on our thoughts, words, deeds from which there is no escape, and hence we go back to our Source.  “Ineluctable returning home, the intrinsic value of life and deeds” is the code of turning and returning back to God.  And this is the Truth and the Truth is God.

It is obvious that not only the Quran but all scriptures are a reminder about the Day of Judgement, beside everything else.  I couldn’t attune myself to this fact and this non-attunement took me to disbelief and disconnection.  Unfortunately, I completely understand what it means that not only one can’t “hear” the message, but also one might feel “offended” by the matter of fact divine tone in reminding us again and again that the Day and Hour is coming and gives us some details about Hell and Heaven.  I used to think that this “punishment” language is excessive. But now that I realize the depth of my oblivion, how forgetful and lost I was, it makes sense to me why the Quran is a reminder of the Hour of Judgement, and hence I am attuned to hear the message and connect—God willing. 

I am as well well-aware that I need to constantly remember that it is all up to God and I ought to “remember” this fact.  Why?  What is this need for double and triple and thousand-fold remembering?  If “God’s will” and the “Day and Hour of Judgement” ought to be always remembered, it doesn’t mean we have no will of our own, but we have the will to remember or to forget.  In our constitution we have both, we are forgetful and drawn to closest effect or impressions.  We are prone to lose ourselves in our immediate senses.  Thousand years religions and philosophies are an attempt to take us farther than our senses.  To see the universe, to realize that our senses deceive us when we think the earth is the center of the universe, we take mirage and delusions as true, we are inclined to lose ourselves in pleasures of senses and give a second place to the joy of connection and compassion, meditation and contemplation.  

It is eye opening to me that philosophy from Plato, Aristotle to Heidegger is this endeavor to strike or craft a balance between our being-in-the-world and “ontological difference” between this everyday senses, entities and objects, this person and that person, and the horizon of all beings, Being as such, and to reconnect the sensible to insensible.  We have gone through a host of historical oscillations to arrive at this simple point that to understand my feelings about this very moment: to see the window, trees, to hear birds, to feel my body, to smell my environment, to become aware of myself and others, in order not to be deceived and go astray, I ought to remember that I am here and do all these things, because of “that”—that universe, the whirlwind of galaxies, the beginning of universe, the solar system, the biosphere.  And in order not to fall into my delusion of autonomy, absolute faith in “material evidence” and hence into disconnecting the sensible from insensible, we ought to see universal imperceptible Being in each particular being.  So, scriptures and sages remind us of the unseen, the origin, the Tao, God, what cannot be attested by immediate senses in an empirical way, but can be experienced, felt, and perceived through reason, intuition, meditation, prayers, spiritual practices, and the “heart”. 

Our whole history of religions, philosophies, and sciences is a reminder that the universe within me is continuous and coextensive with the universe without me.  And if we want to talk about a hierarchy, unlike what our senses say, the universe and the horizon of events, the Tao and God come first.  The concrete invisible whole and the Source come first both in terms of the condition of possibility of understanding myself and my world (epistemology) and in terms of my existence (ontology).  

  

Now, I am better attuned to understand why we need the reminder of scriptures.  I wish to briefly reflect on the following passages from Surah Pilgrimage (22) in the Quran:

“In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy

People, be mindful of your Lord, for the earthquake of the Last Hour will be a mighty thing: on the Day you see it, every nursing mother will think no more of her baby, every pregnant female will miscarry, you will think people are drunk when they are not, so severe will be God’s torment. Yet still there are some who, with no knowledge, argue about God, who follow every devilish rebel fated to lead astray those who take his side, and guide them to the suffering of the blazing flame.” (22:1-4)

We might not be inclined to hear this and attach to our everyday business and pleasures.  But in the light of what I mentioned above about our historical movement in religions, philosophies, and sciences, it might become more sensible why the Quran constantly reminds us about the Day of Judgement: transfiguration and recreation of the whole universe will surely come though it is not in our immediate sight.  This is not “unloving” to be reminded that we should not take side with devilish powers and heed the light, goodness, and the divine to be rescued from the blazing flame.  The blazing flame is an echo of our falling into the nearest and the consequence of our own deeds.

“People, [remember,] if you doubt the Resurrection, that We created you from dust, then a drop of fluid, then a clinging form, then a lump of flesh, both shaped and unshaped: We mean to make Our power clear to you. Whatever We choose We cause to remain in the womb for an appointed time, then We bring you forth as infants and then you grow and reach maturity. Some die young and some are left to live on to such an age that they forget all they once knew. You sometimes see the earth lifeless, yet when We send down water it stirs and swells and produces every kind of joyous growth: this is because God is the Truth; He brings the dead back to life; He has power over everything.” (22:5-6)

The second passage takes us from the nearest: the dust to the unseen creator.  God created us from the dust and stresses the fact that we are made from both “shaped and unshaped”, formed and formless, sensible and insensible elements.  This is a reminder that we are not arbitrary conglomeration and a subclass of dead particles.  Don’ look at the nearest, but the farthest, the creator: “We mean to make our power clear to you.”  No child is formed in the womb without God’s choice and no one die, young or old, without God’s destiny.  We forget that the possibility of existence as such is given by God.  This forgetfulness can ruin us and hence we fall into worshipping the nearest and our senses or thinking life is accidental and arbitrary. 

Then we have a message for those who can hear, I couldn’t in the past.  God opened my heart and eyes to see the poiesis (the making, poetry) of God in everything.  If we can see the poetic codes in the universe, we can “see” God.  Everything is an allusion to the great Poet, merging atoms and particles, sensible and insensible, perceptible and imperceptible, the coming into being and fading out of being is an allusion to the hidden Truth: the cycle of seasons, “[y]ou sometimes see the earth lifeless, yet when We send down water it stirs and swells and produces every kind of joyous growth: this is because God is the Truth; He brings the dead back to life; He has power over everything.”  Now, in our scientific discourse we think we “know” how the alterations of seasons work; we know how the seeds grow and die; we know how the spring comes after winter; we assume we know, however this knowledge itself will reveal God as Truth if one pays attention to its poiesis: it is not only in the material dimension but in all the domain of existence, seen and unseen, we have the ‘turning’ and ‘returning’, a cycle of coming and going back into the source. All spirals of galaxies and life allude to this poiesis, the cycle of seasons is a stanza of this poetry, ecopoetic of our responsibility to the world ("eco" derives from the root "oikos" meaning "house, home, or hearth.”  Ecopoetics explores how language can help cultivate (or make) a sense of dwelling on the earth).

The code of this ‘turning’ and ‘returning’ is the intrinsic value of everything: that there is no escape.  Everything we do, we do to ourselves, everything we do affects the other and the world in its own minuscule way.   Everything ‘turns’ and ‘returns’ back to us and to the universe, to our genes and our cells.  We can’t escape from our deeds, it comes back “home”.  “Home” is the great metaphor of this ‘turning’ and ‘returning’.  After work we go back home, whatever it is, a shack or a house, after death we go back home, to the earth, and in returning to the earth we return to God.  And in the Day of Judgement we will be recreated for the new abode based on our thoughts, words, deeds from which there is no escape, and hence we go back to our Source.  “Ineluctable returning home, the intrinsic value of life and deeds” is the code of turning and returning back to God.  And this is the Truth and the Truth is God.