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.