A Descent into the Maelström

“The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.”

– Ascribed to Joseph Glanvill by Edgar Allan Poe in his “A Descent into the Maelström.”

Elaborating on this theme, one of the characters of Poe’s story, while describing his experience of hurling into the sea’s vortex upon his fishing ship, tells of a moment of lucid reflection despite gazing into the face of death:

“It may look like boasting—but what I tell you is truth—I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power.”

Dream and Work

But, I beg you to dream. I beg you to rise above our own defeatism, and our own brokenness. If you’re tired of the way things are in the Muslim community, then at least meet your God saying, “I made a good-faith concerted effort to change things.” Leave the results to Allah, no one ever knows the results…People can never imagine the way history unfolds.  A small, marginal idea could become a very large idea in history. So, don’t think of the results…If you think in terms of empirical, you’re not dreamers…If you measure things in our world today, you feel an overwhelming sense of defeatism. Because empirically, mathematically, there’s no point, there’s no point to trying anything. We are overwhelmed at every single front.

| Abou El Fadl

War-Making

“It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, ‘Stop killing,’” he explained at the Plowshares trial. “There are other beautiful things that I would love to be saying to people.” | the late Father Daniel Berrigan

—”It is sane to acknowledge madness, and lunatic to imagine that such madness could ever simply be bullied into reason.”

| Eagleton

White Supremacy’s Real Triumph – Modern Shirk?

White supremacy cannot gain authority by itself. In other words, there has to be some buy-in on the part of others. Others have to accept and internalize the belief that the norms that the dominant group of whites on the eve of modernity identified as normal were in fact normal.In fact, others have to be brought to the point, not simply that they believe this in their minds as some sort of mental abstraction; but the real triumph of white supremacy comes when non-whites—and whites by the way—internalize the fundamental deep seated feeling that whiteness represents normal and that everything else is abnormal, retrograde, or inferior.

| Dr. Sherman Jackson

A Note on Culture and Religion | Nasr

God not only decides the truth of the religion but also where it’s going to grow. We believe that God ordered Gabriel to go to Makkah and not to Jakarta. He didn’t want Islam to  rise in Eastern Asia, He wanted it to rise in Western Asia; and why was Christ born in Bethlehem…these are not trivial questions. The awareness of the origin of a religion…is providentially determined from a religious point of view—it’s not historical accident. The awareness of the locality, the locus in which the religion grows then determines how the religion creates its own culture; it absorbs some things, it transforms some things, and it rejects some things. That’s very, very important. All those things are done according to the inner structure and constitution of a particular religion.

From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3scdilFvF0

| Seyyed Hossein Nasr

A Tragedy: Or a Blessing from an Unexpected Source

“I learned about the Ummah from a college class.”

Q. 72:16

وَأَن لَوِ استَقاموا عَلَى الطَّريقَةِ لَأَسقَيناهُم ماءً غَدَقًا

If they are steadfast on the path [of Allah], We shall provide them with abundant water,

لِنَفتِنَهُم فيهِ ۚ وَمَن يُعرِض عَن ذِكرِ رَبِّهِ يَسلُكهُ عَذابًا صَعَدًا

so that We may test them therein, and whoever turns away from the remembrance of his Lord, He will let him into an escalating punishment.

On Time | R.S. Thomas

From The Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000

SAMSUNG

Some reflections on American Spiritual Art from a Norwegian Eye | Karle Ove Knausgaard

At dusk, when the light falling on the snow still had only the merest tinge of blue, we pulled over to look at an enormous concrete statue of Jesus that stood right next to the road, between the groves of trees. It must have been at least 15 feet tall. In one outstretched hand, he held a globe. All his limbs were out of proportion, and his face was so crudely made that the statue seemed the embodiment of a child’s drawing.

To the left of it, there was a house, and to the right, a fenced-in yard. Beyond the fence stood a giant dinosaur. I went over to have a look. A sign on the locked gate proclaimed this exhibit to be the finest in the world. Several other hulking prehistoric creatures stood there motionless in the snow.

When I turned around and looked back at the house, I saw a little girl and a woman in her 30s, probably the girl’s mother, standing in the window staring at us.

What kind of a place was this?