of Origins and Power

This is the seventh passage of the Long Obligatory Prayer. It is said standing, coming out of kneeling. The hands are upraised two separate times, once for each of the the first two sentences.

There is no God but Thee, the Almighty, the All-Bountiful. There is no God but Thee, the Ordainer, both in the beginning and in the end. O God, my God! Thy forgiveness hath emboldened me, and Thy mercy hath strengthened me, and Thy call hath awakened me, and Thy grace hath raised me up and led me unto Thee. Who, otherwise, am I that I should dare to stand at the gate of the city of Thy nearness, or set my face toward the lights that are shining from the heaven of Thy will? Thou seest, O my Lord, this wretched creature knocking at the door of Thy grace, and this evanescent soul seeking the river of everlasting life from the hands of Thy bounty. Thine is the command at all times, O Thou Who art the Lord of all names; and mine is resignation and willing submission to Thy will, O Creator of the heavens!

To testify that There is no God but Thee is a variation on the classical affirmation of Islamic monotheism: There is no God but Allah. It is a statement of the fundamental unity of divinity: that dominion over the world is not divided among a variety of figures but is instead unified under one absolute creator of all. This affirmation of divine unity helps bring together the various themes encountered throughout the prayer. But in particular it helps illustrate the spirituality behind this passage and the one previous. To think about the One Creator as absolute origin helps negotiate the difficulties I ran into with last night's entry on wealth and poverty.

In the course of commenting on the sixth passage of the prayer I ran into an apparent contradiction. God was described as wealthy in the divine attributes and humanity as poor. My concern was that this assumed too much commonality between Creator and creation to simultaneously maintain that the former utterly transcends the latter. The metaphor seemed to suggest that the differences between God and humanity can be reduced to one of degree: That God and humanity are both possessors of the same thing, but the former has more than the latter. The way that I resolved this was by arguing that the divine attributes are part of creation in the same way as humanity. Thus, any variation in the two can be reduced to one of degree while still maintaining the transcendence of God. (Though, I must say it opens up an interesting dilemna inasmuch as it sets up a radical difference between the Essence and attributes of God.)

I still think that this explanation works. But I don't think it fully does justice to the usage of wealth and poverty in this prayer. Instead of linking wealth and poverty to the actual possession of the divine attributes, I think it is also appropriate to link them to the capacity to originate divine attributes. In this way I want to make a distinction between wealth-in-possession and wealth-in-origination. This makes a difference when we think about how we explain ourselves and the world around us. To assign the origin of some thing is to interrupt the linear nature of time, cause, and effect. It is to say that something is a cause without prior causes. In other words it is to disregard the contributions of any others to the emergence of the thing that is originated.

This gains spiritual import when we look at how we think about origins in our immediate lives. For example, a businessman could say "I am the reason this company is successful. Before I came this place was going down the tubes. Now it is a booming enterprise because of my expertise." This is to locate something within him, in this case his expertise, as the origin of the company's success. The introduction of that expertise interrupted the downward spiral and set the company on an upward course. There is probably a grain of truth in that businessman's assertion. Because he probably participated in some important way in turning that company around. But to speak as if he is the sole reason for that turnaround is a different matter. It ignores the contributions that other people almost certainly made. On an aside, this has big implications on the way people think about class, race, gender, religion, etc. I'm sure his secretary would agree. A more reasonable way of looking at this situation is to say that an infinitely complex web of interactions resulted in the company's success. And that many of those forces were localized in the figure we call the businessman. Thus, the businessman can say that he participated in the success of the company but it would be a lie to refer to him as the origin. If he were the origin of company success it would imply that his contributions came out of nowhere, owe nothing to the world around it, and initiated a sequence of cause and effect that was otherwise not in progression. In other words, to pose as the origin, is to pose as God. And not just any god, but the One God who is the Absolute origin and transcendent beyond creation.

To be the Absolute origin is not to be at the beginning of a sequence of time. But rather to be the generating impulse of the entire sequence that all the while remains outside of that sequence. Rather, than a point at the end of a line. It is the point outside the line that makes every point in the entire line possible.

In this way God is outside of time. So long as something is "in time" it cannot be an origin, for there is always a prior moment that anticipates its being. The only way to be an origin is to be outside of this sequence. But to be outside of this sequence is to be outside the logic of befores, afters, causes, effects, and being as we know it. For being-as-we-know-it is always characterized by time and causality. In this way the Creator and creation do not share a common being. Rather the being of the Creator is fundamentally different than the being of the creation.

How did we get here? Oh yes, I was discussing the divine attributes.

In the context of the Long Obligatory Prayer, to be poor in the divine attributes means that one is unable to produce them out of nothing. Rather they are necessarily acquired from elsewhere inasmuch as one is a part of creation. A human cannot be an origin, a god. That distinction is reserved for the God, the Self-Sufficient, the Majestic, the wellspring of being-as-we-know-it and thus the divine attributes.

Following the testimony in this passage that There is no God but Thee the performer testifies to a certain wealth-in-possession, but not in wealth-in-origination. In other words, the performer testifies to the possession of the divine attributes while maintaining a dependence on God for the origination of those attributes.

O God, my God! Thy forgiveness hath emboldened me, and Thy mercy hath strengthened me, and Thy call hath awakened me, and Thy grace hath raised me up and led me unto Thee. Who, otherwise, am I that I should dare to stand at the gate of the city of Thy nearness, or set my face toward the lights that are shining from the heaven of Thy will?

Though poor-in-origination the performer is emboldened, strengthened, awakened, raised up and led unto Thee, by the influence of Thee. The performer is a dense concentration of power and enlightenment ready to face the world and whatever it throws at him or her. The next few lines appear at first to be a crude self-laceration of the soul, referring to oneself as a wretched creature, and an evanescent soul. But the otherwise in the last line quoted above indicates that this poverty is only one of origination and not of possession. Pay close attention to that last line. Who, otherwise am I that I should dare to stand at the gate of the city of Thy nearness.... This line doesn't say that the performer is unworthy to stand at said gate. It only says that this worthiness is conditional upon the above influence of God: of being shown Thy forgiveness, Thy mercy, Thy call, and Thy grace. Indeed, the performer has been empowered by that which is with Thee to stand proudly as one of God's creation, not by one's own merit, but by the merit of God, the Originator.