Khutbah #4:  The Chicken in the Egg

Surah 3:  Al-Imran

Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the succession on night and day, there are indeed messages for all who are endowed with insight, [190] and who remember God when they stand, and when they sit, and when they lie down to sleep, and thus reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth;

“O our Sustainer! You have not created any of this without meaning and purpose.  You are limitless in Your glory!  Keep us safe then, from suffering through fire! [191]

A very dear friend shared a wonderful metaphor with me a few days ago, about one of God’s miraculous creations, the egg.

Let’s focus for a moment on the wonder of the egg.  Eggs are marvelous creations.  They are exquisitely calibrated with purpose and meaning, to sustain the growing chick within.  The shell offers just the right level of protection – strong enough to protect the growing embryo, but not so strong that the chick will not be able to peck it’s way out at the appropriate time.  The embryo grows for an appointed number of days – 21.  If the shell is broken to soon before it’s time, the embryo dies.  If the new chick is not able to peck it’s way out of the shell at the appointed time, it will die.  The egg and the chick co-exist in their respective roles of protector and nurturer, and growing life within.  They follow their God given roles without question or challenge.

Surah 22: Al-Hajj  (The Pilgrimage)

Art thou not aware that before God prostrate themselves all that are in the heavens and all that are on earth – the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the mountains, and the trees and the beasts? [18]

Revelation tells us that all of nature, including all the beasts, follow the will of God without question.  Now imagine, for a moment, what would happen if the little chicks in their eggs had been given the gift of consciousness and free will.  Imagine what could result.  Perhaps they, now endowed with creative intelligence, would sense that there are others like them outside their shells, and that there is a wider world beyond their own.  They might develop technologies inside their eggs, so that they could communicate with each other.  Imagine that some of the chicks who had incubated for 15 days developed the equivalent of iPhones, that could send them pictures of the world outside.  They would see the most marvelous green grass, and blue sky, and multicolored flowers, and a beautiful mother hen feeding them delicious grains.  They might get so excited and agitated that they would roll around and knock up against their shells and possibly break them open before they were fully developed, and they would die.

Imagine that some of the other unhatched chicks who had incubated for 15 days had developed only simple cellphone – like contraptions, that they could only use to talk to each other.  They had all sensed another world outside of their shells.  But the only reality they knew was inside, where they had everything they needed – food, warmth, and safety.  How could they trust that there was really someone out there who would feed them, and how could they possibly survive without their protective shell around them?  “Why give up this perfect world we have?,” they might decide.  And so they would be overcome by fear and refuse to use the egg beaks that have formed on their little heads to help them peck open their shells at 21 days.  And they would use up all their food, and grow too big for their shells, and suffocate and die. 

Surah 3:  Al-Imran  (The House of Imran)

And no human being can die save by God’s leave, at a term pre-ordained. [145]

We are similar to the baby chick in it’s egg, in that we have a number of days in our physical bodies, on earth.  Our number of days is ordained.  But unlike the little chicks, our consciousness includes the gift of free will.   Our challenge is to use that free will to glorify our Creator, even though we cannot not possibly understand the nature of our Creator from within the confines of our physical “shells.”  This is our ultimate challenge.  And we have become very, very skillful at finding ways to “go astray.”

Surah 22: Al-Hajj  (The Pilgrimage)

And many human beings submit to God consciously, whereas many others, having defied Him, will inevitably have to suffer [in the life to come], and he whom God shall scorn [on Resurrection Day] will have none who could bestow honor on him; for verily, God does what He wills.  [18]

What does that mean – that God will scorn those who defy Him?  The image we project is of a judgmental deity, ready to punish any who do not follow His will.  But remember that the Quran was revealed in 7^th century Arabia, in language that would be understandable, not just linguistically, but culturally to the people of that time and place.  They did not have words or the understanding for concepts like “consciousness” or laws of “cause and effect.”  And so I must study these admonitions in Quran for their deeper meaning, for the meaning they convey to me.  And I understand them like this:  there are several places in Quran where God points out that people who have sinned have not harmed God at all, they have only harmed themselves, as in

Suran 2:  Al-Baqarah

And [by all their sinning] they did no harm unto Us – but [only] against their own selves did they sin.  [57]

 We “sin” by separating ourselves from God, in a myriad of different ways.  We have developed a plethora of technologies that we use to help us accomplish just that.  And the worst sin of all lies in taking our accomplishments and our ability to achieve  more and more too seriously – to think that we can solve all our problems ourselves, in this physical realm.  We can come to think of faith as an historic relic of human civilization, better left so that we can move on and conquer the next seemingly unachievable task on earth.  This is like the chicks with the “iPhones,” – they could “see” the better world out there and were convinced that they could take it on of their own volition.  And they were lost.  When we lose our faith that our Creator - God determines our destiny and will guide us to the next stage when we are ready, we are truly lost. 

We also “sin” by being like the chicks with the cellphones, who convince each other that there cannot be any better world than the one they are in.  We cling to what we know and trust as if that were all there is.  We worship the practice of our ancestors, the beauty of our earth, our bodies, our senses, and our creations.  We lose our innate intuitive understanding that all this is but a pale reflection of the greater Reality that is God.  We cling to this world and become corrupted and deceived by it, and we only harm ourselves.  We can cut ourselves off from God to the extent that when our time comes to leave the physical world, our spirit is so immersed in this one that we cannot move on.  To me, all the metaphors in Quran that describe hell would encompass that sad fate. 

God tells us that nature is full of signs for those who believe.  The metaphor of the chicken in the egg can be seen as one of God’s signs to us, to trust the process and purpose of incubation in this life… to appreciate the gift of our eggs – to use our intelligence and creative abilities to take care of our eggs, and to help each other do so, and take care of the physical world that supports us.  And never to forget that there is a broader Reality, Creation, and Purpose that we are part of, and will move on to when it is our time.

Surah 32:  As-Sajdah  (Prostration)

He governs all that exists, from the celestial space to the earth; and in the end all shall ascend unto Him on a Day the length whereof will be like a thousand years of your reckoning [5]

Such is He who knows all that is beyond the reach of a created being’s perception, as well as all that can be witnessed by a creature’s senses or mind:  the Almighty, the Dispenser of Grace [6] who makes most excellent everything that He creates. [7]

Surah 54:  Al-Qamar (The Moon)

Behold, everything have We created in due measure and proportion [49] and Our ordaining is but one act, like the twinkling of an eye. [50]

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.

Khutbah # 1

Having failed to change the policy of our local mosque regarding the separation of the women's and the men's prayer areas, (the former of course being vastly smaller, in the back, and blocked from a view of the minbar by a grey wall), a friend and I decided to start our own Friday prayer.  The first was at my house and included myself, my friend and her three children.  I thus gave my fist khutbah, and led prayer for the first time with non-family members.  She asked me to post the khutbah, and so I comply, to the best of my ability.

The topic that has been most on my mind recently is war.  It started this summer while I was in Maryland, helping my mother recover from heart surgery.  My parents live near the Antietam Battlefield, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the U.S. Civil War.  I noticed a sign as I drove through Funkstown, the little town about a quarter of a mile from their house, announcing that there would be a re-enactment of the much smaller "Battle of Funkstown" while I was there.  I had seen a re-enactment or two as a child, but never as an adult, so I decided to take a short break between hospital visits, and go to see the re-enacters.  They had set up camps in the local park...one campsite for the Confederate soldiers, and one for the Union soldiers.  They had tents just like you see in the pictures of the Civil War, except they were cleaner.  They had uniforms just like the soldiers had worn.  I've been told some of them even wear wool underwear, because they want to be as close to authentic as possible.  I spoke to one of the Confederate soldiers, and he told me he's been doing this for years.  It's a great hobby.  Pack up all your gear in a trailer, take off on the weekends, go to another re-enactment, and play pretend war.  Funkstown was awash in Confederate and Union flags.  I missed the actual "battle," but I was told the armies skirmished back and forth the main street of the town for about three hours on Saturday morning.  I pondered over this.  Why do grown men get so much meaning out of re-creating war?

After I returned to Chicago, the situation in Egypt descended into chaos.  Police opened fire on the encamped demonstrators who were protesting the deposition of Egypt's first democratically elected president.  Hundreds were killed, a curfew imposed, and yet demonstrations continued, and more were killed.  How could this be happening in Egypt, my adopted country, two and a half years after the revolution deposed a thirty-year dictatorship?

And then, more escalation in the civil war in Syria, with evidence that the government used chemical weapons on civilians, killing over a thousand.

When I was young I believed that humankind was supposed to be progressing toward a more peaceful world.  World War II had ended, Vietnam finally ended, even the Cold War ended.  We were supposed to be evolving as a species, I believed, and that evolution should inevitably be toward peace.  More democracy, more prosperity, more peace.  And now, here we are and wars keep coming, new ones.

Why?  Sure, every war has it's economic and socio-political reasons that are analyzed and debated.  But what about the broader metaphysical question?  Why war?  Why have we not been successful at eliminating the human propensity to kill for what we want or think we need?  I looked to the Quran, to see what revelation has to say about war.  I found this in Surah Al-Imran, Ayat 169-174:
But do not think of those that have been slain in God's cause as dead.  Nay, they are alive!  With their Sustainer have they their sustenance, exulting in that which God has bestowed upon them out of His bounty.  And they rejoice in the glad tiding given to those who have been left behind and have not yet joined them, that no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve:  they rejoice in the glad tiding of God's blessings and bounty, and that God will not fail to requite the believers who responded to the call of God and the Apostle after misfortune had befallen them.
A magnificent requital awaits those of them who have persevered in doing good and remained conscious of God:  Those who have been warned by other people, 'Behold, a host has gathered against you; so beware of them!' - whereupon this only increased their faith, so that they answered, 'God is enough for us; and how excellent a guardian is He!' - and returned [from the battle] with God's blessings and bounty, without having been touched by evil: for they had been striving after God's goodly acceptance - and God is limitless in His great bounty.  [Translation by Muhammad Asad]

And this is what those words said to me:

1/ Revelation reminds us  our physical world, beautiful and compelling as it is, is but a pale reflection of the greater Reality Who created it.  Quran reminds us of that in several ayat, notably in Surah 29, The Spider, Ayat 63-64:
But most of them will not use their reason:  for [if they did, they would know that] the life of this world is nothing but a passing delight and a play - whereas, behold, the life in the hereafter is indeed the only [true] life: if they but knew this!  [Asad]

2/ Revelation reminds us that we shall we return to that greater Reality - our Creator - Allah - as long as we remember and cherish our connection.

3/  Revelation does not tell us which side is right and which is wrong in any of our current earthly battles.  We all believe we know, but we cannot see the whole Truth because our experience of Reality is limited to our three-dimensional frame of reference.  Each side in a battle believes that they are in the right.  Only Allah can know all the dimensions, all the reasons for the course of human history.  But revelation does tells us that each one of us, individually, is responsible for our intention, for what is in our heart.  And it tells us that if we are forced to fight and die, or be sacrificed for a cause greater than our earthly selves, for the greater Reality of  God, we need not grieve and we need not be afraid - neither for ourselves or those who have already died in that intent.  They, and we, will be returned to the greater Truth.

After the khutbah I asked the children "So why do you think people like to do re-enactments of battles?"  And the oldest one reminded me of the many battles that have been fought throughout time, that war has always been part of human history.  And the thought occurred to me that maybe when we are not in the middle of a battle, when we are not fighting or fleeing for our lives and calling on God to protect us, maybe we feel a need to remember that sense of danger, of immediacy... that sense of nearness to death... that sense of nearness to God.