Hee Munjo Deen Ai post 4 - Sherbet and Cake

79 years ago today, Prince Karim al-Hussaini, now the Aga Khan and the 49th Imam of the Shi'a Imami Ismaili Muslims, was born in Geneva. Every year, the Salgirah, or birthday, of the Imam is an occasion for huge rejoicing, for jamatkhanas everywhere to be packed to the rafters with people dressed up to the nines.

It's a celebration not just of one man and the tremendous difference he has made to the quality of life, spiritual and material, of millions of people across the world, but of the presence of a living spiritual guide. It is an outpouring of joy that there remains on this earth someone descended from the Prophet and from Ali, with both the authority to interpret the faith for the present day, and, somehow, the "light" that can't quite be explained, that enables him to do so with a level of wisdom and compassion that are extra-ordinary. It is an occasion to remember that, as he tells us so frequently, his guiding, supporting hand is on the shoulder of each one of us, upholding us in his love and care.

(There will be more posts on the Imam, and on the concept of the Imam, but to get some measure of the man, have a listen to his recent lecture at Harvard University: http://www.theismaili.org/news-events/increasingly-fragmented-planet-need-cosmopolitan-ethic-hazar-imam-tells-harvard-audience).

In the South Asian tradition of Ismailism, any big happy occasion, including weddings and religious festivals like Salgirah, is celebrated with "sherbet and cake." Sherbet is a drink of sweetened milk flavoured with rosewater, coloured pink and topped with chopped pistachios. Its rose pink colour, studded with green, and delicate flavour, are indelibly associated with rejoicing in my mind. (It helps that I love the taste of it, too). After the jamatkhana ceremonies tonight, everyone will gather in the social hall, have a glass of sherbet (or several) and a piece of cake, bemoan the long queues to get said sherbet and cake, and catch up with friends and family, including those whom we might not see very often.

Prevented by illness from attending jamatkhana tonight and enjoying sherbet and cake in the company of friends and family, I created my own tribute to this little celebration by making a cake flavoured with rosewater and studded with pistachios (pictured above). I will recite the ginan, the devotional poem traditional for this occasion, which calls on us to rejoice in the presence of the True Guide, and I will savour my sherbet-flavoured cake, and I will be thankful beyond words for the wisdom, love and guidance of the man who is my spiritual father and mother, my Imam, whose words are truth and whose actions are love.

Salgirah Mubarak.

Hee Munjo Deen Ai post 3 - one soul

O mankind! Be conscious of your Lord Who created you from a single soul and  from it created its mate and from them twain hath spread abroad a multitude of men and women. (Qur'an 4:1)

I have loved this verse of the Qur'an since it was chosen as the motto for the Aga Khan's Golden Jubilee in 2007. In choosing this verse, the Aga Khan (the spiritual leader of the Ismaili tradition to which I belong) was, I think, making a powerful statement about the unity of human beings across those frontiers which traditionally divide us: race, gender, class, religion, language, our own sense of superiority and inferiority. That year, as in previous years, he emphasised again and again that the so-called "clash of civilisations" was really a clash of ignorance. He underlined over and over that the diversity within the Ismaili community - global and local - was a source of strength, and urged us, his followers, to come together as the brothers and sisters we claimed ourselves to be.

I always associate this verse with a ritual that takes place at the end of the Du'a, our set prayer. We turn to the person beside us, whether we know them or not, take their hand, look into their eyes and wish them "shah-jo-didar." It's hard to translate that wish - it's essentially wishing for the other person to be blessed with Divine Light, to which no worldly joys can compare. It's the highest thing you could possibly wish for someone. In that moment, no matter how different we are, we share that same deepest longing - for love, for light, for freedom, for something beyond all of this - and we wish it for each other as we wish it for ourselves. It's over in a flash, but sometimes I am shaken by the stark openness of that connection.

Some days I feel the weight of this verse lay heavy on me. Can I look Donald Trump, or Muhammad Emwazi, face to face, eye to eye, and feel in my blood, in my heart, that we come from a single soul? My ego screams "no," it wants to assert its difference, its distinctiveness. They are not like me. I would not be like them. And yet, and yet, the Qur'an is so clear, so strident. Who am I to argue with the Divine Word?

And if I'm honest, I sense it, too, our common humanity. These actions that are so different from my own probably stem from the same fears and needs that I have, that are part of the human condition, that we all know (but would rather not admit to). The need to be seen, to be valued, to be loved, the need to make a difference, the need to be right, to be known to be right, the need to feel safe and secure, the need for control and power. And the fear, the deep irrational all-consuming fear - fear of loss, fear of the unknown, fear of seeming less than I am, fear of isolation. I have no choice but to come face to face with my own darknesses in the darknesses of others. To quote the science-fiction author Orson Scott Card: "sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand."

This also crops up closer to home. I notice my tendency, when I am in conflict with someone, to be dismissive of them "he's just a jerk, a dickhead, an idiot, a narcissist. She's just a bitch, she doesn't know what she's talking about." But the vision of the world that I have, centred on this verse, doesn't let me do that for long. If I'm going to take this world-view seriously, if I really believe that we're created from one soul, I can't just toss people aside like this. I have to stop, and breathe, and recognise their humanity, and that they may be as right in their own eyes as I am in mine, and try and find some understanding, some compassion. It slows me down. I'm less invested in being right, when I take this view, and more interested in finding common ground.

Funnily enough, I've found the Buddhist loving-kindness (metta) meditation practice the most powerful way of connecting with the sense that we are created from one soul. It takes it beyond an intellectual proposition into something experienced and deeply felt. I resist doing it (that ego again) but I notice that when I do, I can relate more openly to people. My experience of relational meditation practices, sitting face to face with a partner or in a circle, and sharing what matters, bringing openness and kindness to listening and speaking, has also put me in powerful and immediate contact with the otherness, and the single-souled-ness, of another person. Sometimes it's as if all the barriers melt away and we are just there, in all our complexity and rawness and vulnerability, face-to-face and heart-to-heart, and I know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that we are of one essence. Any my eloquence is simply not up to putting the beauty of that into words.

Hee munjo deen ai Post 2 - praying for peace

Allahumma ya mawlana anta as-salaam wa minka as-salaam wa ilayka yarju' as-salaam. Hayyina rabbana bi's-salaam wa adhkilna dar-as-salaam. Tabarakta wa ta'alaita ya dhu'l jalaali w'al ikram.

Oh Allah, oh our Lord, you are peace, and from you is peace, and to you returns peace. Oh our sustainer, enliven us in peace and enter us into the home of peace. Blessed are you, and the Most High are you, O possessor of majesty and reverence.

This supplication is part of our set prayer, the Du'a, which we recite daily. I think I was told once that it was a prayer that the Prophet used to recite. Although I don't know that for sure something in me likes that idea - that we are praying to Allah using words that have been passed down to us through generations from the Prophet himself.

Growing up, I learned the Du'a by rote, and its translation by rote, and it was something that we just had to do. I don't remember much emotional engagement with it. I had huge emotional engagement with the ginans, our devotional poems, but almost none with the Du'a. That changed a little when I started to learn Arabic and gained a much deeper sense of the connotations of the words and the structure of each section. But it really changed during a time of desperation when it felt like surrendering to God was the only thing I could do. Nothing else made sense anymore. I'd been an educator within the Ismaili community for a few years by then and was fairly knowledgeable, in an intellectual sense, but my engagement with faith had been almost entirely intellectual. I hadn't really prayed except on rare occasions. Looking back, I believed in God, as a "ground of being" type God, the force that integrated, that made all things one, that I dimly sensed sometimes. But did I believe in a God that I had a personal relationship with, that I could pray to? I don't know that I did.

It wasn't a dramatic shift, not really. It's been more like a slow dawning, a gradual deepening of relationship. But there has been a change from a distant God out there to a much deeper sense of being in relationship. And it was this passage from the Du'a that I really connected with during the early period of that relationship. Somehow, and to this day I still can't explain how, I had a felt sense of a peace that was somehow beyond all my turbulence and despair and rage and could hold all of those things, and that I desperately needed. I prayed this passage in desperate need, crying out for peace for myself, for respite. I had no thought for others, then. Later, I prayed it in gratitude, for the gift of that peace that I could sometimes touch. Still later, I prayed it for myself and others, for a world that seemed to be in the same desperate need that I felt. Sometimes, when I remember during a period of turbulence, I still pray this passage, on its own. Often it's still the passage that opens my heart when I recite the Du'a.

The text hasn't changed. It's the same text, and a relatively simple one at that. And in a way my belief in God hasn't changed - I still think of God primarily as a "ground of being" beyond anything I can really explain or put words to. But my relationship to God, and to this text, has changed. It now speaks something of my trust in a divine Presence that embodies peace, with which I can somehow be in relationship, that takes me beyond my small-mind stuff.

If there's a moral to this story, it's that we should be wary of fixing interpretations of religious texts. The reading of a text depends on what we bring to it - our history, personal and political, our prior beliefs and world-view, our being in that moment. Our relationships with sacred texts change as we do, and that's part of the beauty of it.

Interlude - what to say to someone with an "invisible illness"

The vestibular disorder I thought I had 99% recovered from way back in 2010 has reared its head again, for no reason I can work out, leaving me wobbly (literally) and unable to move around as much as I would like. I am seeing it as an opportunity to work with some of my persistent habits of mind, in particular self-judgement, a lack of self-compassion, and believing that I have to be perfect to be loved.

I know from having gone through this the first time round that people with invisible illnesses of all kinds, from something relatively innocuous like dizziness and balance problems, as I have, to chronic fatigue, to mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, tend to face a certain amount of ignorance and "but you don't look sick." Many of these conditions, including mine, can be unpredictable, with good days and bad days, and no clear idea of how long recovery might take, or if it's even possible. Which might explain the vast number of "what not to say" lists. On the other side, as a friend or family member of someone struggling with an invisible illness, it's probably pretty hard to know the right thing to do or say, and you might well be scared of saying the wrong thing, not helped by the "what not to say" lists.

So here's an alternative list, inspired by and adapted from the wonderful friends and family that have taken such good care of me over the last couple of weeks.

"Don't worry about pleasing anyone else, do what's best for you. Trust yourself and your body." I only have limited energy, as my body is putting so much into trying to stay balanced. I can push beyond my limits every so often for things that are really important to me but I know I'll get the payback the next day. And it feels selfish to use that limited energy for things that matter to me but aren't really my responsibility, like going to choir rehearsals or doing "fun stuff" instead of work or cleaning the house. But at the same time, those things are what keep me sane when I spend so much of the rest of the time stuck at home feeling slightly rubbish. So it was lovely to hear my sister affirm my choices and remind me that it was okay to choose to put myself first, and not to feel guilty about it.

"When would you like me to come and see you? I'm free on X day. I'll bring groceries/food/anything you need" So many of my friends have offered to come and spend time with me, knowing that I can't get out very much. It's bloody lonely and I'm missing out on so many lovely things I could do if I were more mobile, so the fact that someone cares enough to come over and hang out with me and do little practical things to make my life easier makes me feel very deeply loved.

"What do you need me to do?" Two of my friends, who came over for dinner earlier this week, asked me very openly what practical help I needed. I don't think I'd have got up the courage to ask if they hadn't offered. But I felt cared for enough to ask them to go out for short walks with me if they had the time - I can't go very far by myself and am scared of getting stranded somewhere that's too far for me to get back if I have a dizzy spell. With someone else, I can go a bit further, and that will help my recovery in the long term. It's a tiny thing but it makes such a huge difference and makes it all feel a bit less isolating.

"It's okay that you feel .... (whatever it is)." It's amazing what has shown up emotionally - there's been a lot of fear, and a lot of guilt, and a lot of "is it my fault? Did I cause this to happen?" and a lot of loneliness and fear of isolation. I've cried more this week than I think I have for months. I'm sure that some of my friends who've been on the receiving end of that on the phone have heard some pretty crazy and irrational stuff come out of my mouth. But they've been so kind and accepting and open-hearted. Just allowing those feelings to be there, not judging or trying to explain them away, has been a wonderful gift.

"Sending you hugs." Lots of my friends are a long long way away and I know they want to help but the distance makes that impossible. So it's lovely to get little messages on social media that let me know that they're thinking of me. Being ill and living on my own means I spend a lot of time by myself, which is fine as I'm an introvert but can still get a little wearing eventually, so it's lovely to be reminded that I'm not as alone as I sometimes fear myself to be.

There's a pattern to this, I notice, as I write it - which is that the things I've appreciated have been the practical things, yes, but also those things that have made me feel loved and cared for. It doesn't matter how clumsy the expression of it might be, if there's genuine love there. Being ill sucks, but it has been a wonderful opportunity to recognise how loving, caring and generous others can be, and to feel a very deep gratitude for that.