Tireless Worship

Why is the first commandment: “you shall have no other gods before Me”?  Why is “no god but the God” central to Islam and religions of the Book?  What does ‘having a god’ or ‘God’ connote?  It connotes love.  If I say this is my god, I mean I love him or her or this artistic work or that thought, or this object or that perspective.  God means the most important thing, the most loving one.  So, is it strange that the most joyous action for a believer is praying to God?  When I was an atheist, and even for a while after believing in God, the verses below was difficult for me to accept and digest:

“The night, the day, the sun, the moon, are only a few of His signs. DO NOT BOW DOWN IN WORSHIP TO THE SUN OR THE MOON, but bow down to God who created them, if it is truly Him that you worship.  IF THE DISBELIEVERS ARE TOO ARROGANT, [REMEMBER, PROPHET, THAT] THOSE WHO ARE WITH YOUR LORD GLORIFY HIM TIRELESSLY NIGHT AND DAY.  Another of His signs is this: you see the earth lying desolate, but when We send water down on to it, it stirs and grows. He who gives it life will certainly give life to the dead. He has power over everything.” (41:37-39)

In my own personal experience, and with the grace of God, I came to understand what it means to glorify God tirelessly night and day.  My selfish and seemingly independent existence didn’t accept tirelessly worshipping God, day and night.  For what?  Why non-stop?  Does God need my and others’ worship?  It seemed to me intolerable and unacceptable to worship day and night.  I went through so much in life to fathom the verses above—that can misguide some, as the following verses mention: “Those who distort the meaning of Our message are not hidden

from Us.” (41:40)

What are the other options?  For children and youths, color and pleasure, play and fun are the most important things—however, curiosity, family and social interactions, sexual intimacy, seeing the world and discovering one’s capabilities are the context of this having fun and playing.  We learn from childhood the enthusiasm of learning, an endless abyssal process.

For adults career, family, sexual pleasure, travel, business, scientific, artistic, philosophical, or religious explorations also come into play.  After I exhausted all my options, I felt utter despair as nothing could satisfy me.  Of course, we need all of these, but there is an unfathomable hole and indefatigable yearning in our soul, in the core of our ‘not-knowing-of-the-meaning-of-our-being-here-and-our-death-destiny’. After philosophy, religion was my latest adventure.  Philosophy opened a path for me to truth—to the fact that philosophy and science cannot reveal to us the ultimate truth.  They help us to think clearly and stimulate our imagination.

When, with the grace of God, I turned to God in a revived and reflected faith, I found prayer the only meaning and source of satisfaction, that no pleasure and fun can substitute.  I came to it out of truth, not imitation or soothsaying, denial of death, or self-deception.  I examined it closely, because my motto all my life was and is that I don’t want to live a lie, and I don’t want to seek God just to calm my qualms. I wanted my faith to be ‘proven’ to me.  This proof is not a mathematical proof, but a proof that comes from transformation of consciousness, an informed, digested experience of God, to which different people arrive from different routes.

When one arrives at this destination, then indefatigable praying and worshipping God is not something imposed on us but is the essence of life as such.  What is love after all?  When you love a person or a career, or devote yourself to political, artistic, scientific, philosophical endeavor, do you get tired of it?  Do you get tired of seeing the eyes of the spouse or the child whom you love?  Do you get tired of breathing air? 

I concluded that it is the other way around: Not only glorifying God is not an imposition, but it is the essence of life.  This is the way existence works, God holds the worlds through their attending God-Love.  Then I realized everything else is secondary in comparison to glorifying God (which means loving God), if you come to the conclusion that everything that is important to us is a gift by God to us, including sexual pleasure, food, work, travelling, explorations, and scientific and philosophical thoughts, and the most essential and real is God and the only direction is to God, then the verses above will make complete sense to you.