Getting Through Those Times
It's interesting how much spiritual writing is about getting through "those" times—you know, the difficult times, transition times, painful times, or as today's show calls them, the "in-between” times.
Just read the Psalms in the Bible; half of them seem to have been written during one of those times. Or consider all the self-help books that tell us the only way to get through difficulties is to take one step at a time in the present moment.
I certainly appreciate the quote from The Soul's Religion author Thomas Moore about how we need courage to live "at the edge of understanding, between knowing and not knowing."
But what can we do in such times? I'm a practical person. I can philosophically accept "not knowing," "mystery," and all those other spiritual terms, but I still want a strategy.
That's why I really appreciated the segment about Fazeel Chauhan. He went through one of those times with his brother, a drug addict. Fazeel prayed to God for help, but when his brother didn't get better, he began to doubt and question.
Around the same time, he took up yoga. Doing the yoga postures, he discovered that they were similar in both position and purpose to the postures of the traditional prayer of his Muslim faith. He practiced both yoga and the prayer, and discovered peace.
He may not have set out to come up with a strategy for in-between times, but he did. By just doing a simple practice, yoga and the prayer, he got grounded, and he rediscovered his connection to God.
It's unfortunate that so many of us know so little about the Muslim prayer practiced five times a day by Muslims all over the world. We see it as background visuals in many news stories, but we don't know what is being prayed during those postures and how the postures themselves underline every phrase: "God is most Great. Glory be to God. God listens to those who praise. There is no God but God."
I can't fully explain what I have learned from Muslims about the prayer here, but I do recommend The Illuminated Prayer: The Five-Times Prayer of the Sufis, by Coleman Barks and Michael Green, for its insight into the depths of meaning in the prayer.
Barks notes, "Anything you do every day can open into the deepest spiritual place, which is freedom"—even in those times.