Khutbah #2  Transformations, Personal and Cosmic

We all know our lives are transformed by the birth of our first (or only) child.  Suddenly, our own self is no longer the sole focus of our most intimate attention.  My own transformation began when I was about two months pregnant with Sara.  I remember the time and place when I felt her soul communicating with me – “I am ready to come into the world, I have chosen you to host me.”  Projection?  Maybe, but that’s not what it felt like.

I felt the transformation of my self again when she was ready to be born…when the whole focus of my whole being was on pushing her out into the world. 

For almost 25 years, she has continued to transform the way I see the world.  I follow what she does, and wonder. 

From the age of about 8 until college, Sara wanted to be a marine biologist.  She was obsessed with the ocean, and fish, and dolphins.  That made sense to me – not just because her granddad took her on a boat ride in the Keys when she was 8 and the boat was surrounded by a pod of dolphins, but also because the ocean is culturally neutral.  We would travel to Egypt every year to visit her father’s family – across the ocean and back – across the cultures and back.  She knew from the beginning that she was not fully one thing or the other - however you define that “thing.”  The ocean was safe.  She had dreams about being underwater with the fish, in their world, where she could just “be” and not have to “be – ware” of how she acted or what she said or didn’t say to who.  Maybe she was intuitively responding to a primordial connection - the earliest manifestation of life on earth, before culture, before human beings. 

God says in Surah Al-Ambiyya (The Prophets), Ayah 30:

Are, then, they who are bent on denying the truth not aware that the heavens and the earth were [once] a single entity, which We then parted asunder?  - and [that] We made out of water every living thing?  Will they not, then, [begin to] believe?

And in Surah 24, An-Nur (The Light), Ayah 45:

And it is God who has created all animals out of water; and [He has willed that] among them are such as crawl on their bellies, and such as walk on two legs, and such as walk on four…

And in Surah 25, Al-Furqan (The Standard of True and False), Ayah 54:

And He it is who out of this very water has created man, and has endowed him with the consciousness of spirituality and strength in social relationships…

In college her interest in the natural world was extended to encompass the creatures of the earth which came before – several evolutionary iterations before, the record of the fossils… the evidence of the ongoing transformation of God’s creation….the evidence to match His message, from Surah 11, Hud, Ayat 6-7:

And there is no living creature on earth but depends for its sustenance on God; and He knows its time-limit [on earth] and its resting place [after death];  all this is laid down in His clear decree.

And it is He who has created the heavens and the earth in six aeons; and [ever since He has willed to create life,] the throne of his almightiness has rested upon the water.

Now, in graduate school, Sara’s focus encompasses geology - the historical trajectory of the earth itself.  And thus, she has again changed my perspective of history and time, and the transformation of the earth.  And when I look in the Quran, I find that God shared this, in Surah Yunus (Jonah), Ayah 6:

Verily, in the alternating of night and day, and in all that God has created in the heavens and on earth there are messages indeed for people who are conscious of Him.

Sara is making a career of studying those messages.  Subhan Allah.  One of her former professors at the University of Chicago, Neil Shubin, published a book recently called “The Universe Within,” about the connections, not only between all life, but between life on earth and the elements of the universe.  I quote:

Through eons on earth, seas have opened and closed, mountains have risen and eroded, and asteroids have come crashing down as the planet has coursed its way through the solar system.  The layers of rock record era after era of changes to the climate, atmosphere, and crust of the planet itself.  Transformation is the order of the day for the world:  bodies grow and die, species emerge and go extinct, while every feature of our planetary and celestial home undergoes gradual change or episodes of catastrophic revolution.

Rocks and bodies are kinds of time capsules that carry the signature of great events that shaped them.  The molecules that compose our bodies arose in stellar events in the distant origin of the solar system.  Changes to Earth’s atmosphere sculpted our cells and entire metabolic machinery.  Pulses of mountain building, changes in orbits of the planet, and revolutions within Earth itself have had an impact on our bodies, minds, and the way we perceive the world around us. 

God shared this, in Surah 51, Adh-Dhariyat (The Dust-Scattering Winds), Ayat 47-48

And it is We who have build the universe with [Our creative] power, and, verily, it is We who are steadily expanding it.

            And the earth we have spread out wide – and how well have We ordered it!

I heard on the news this week that the first craft humans sent into space in the 1950s, the Voyager, is now outside the bounds of our solar system.  Voyager is in interstellar space, outside of that system which is composed of material from our sun.  To quote one astronomer, “Voyager is not from the material in which it now finds itself.”  What more will we learn from the data it sends back about the nature of transformations?  About the birth and death, not just of planets, but of stars?  The fact that our earth, even our sun, are created entities, with a beginning and an end, is now part of human consciousness – not just in faith, but through verifiable scientific investigation.  But rather than being terrified by that awareness, we can take comfort in anticipating our greatest transformation to come.  For God has shared with us the nature of that which endures – the truth that can save us from destruction, from ourselves.  God also shared this with us, as in Sara’s favorite Surah, Az-Zalzalah (The Earthquake):

            When the earth quakes with her [last] mighty quaking,

            And when the earth yields up her burdens,

            And man cries out, “What has happened to her?”

On that Day will she recount all her tidings, as thy Sustainer will have inspired her to do.

On that Day will all men come forward, cut off from one another, to be shown their past deeds.

            And so, he who shall have done an atom’s weight of good, shall behold it;

            And he who shall have done an atom’s weight of evil, shall behold it.