Gratitude

The spiritual purpose of Ramzan is to teach us Gratitude, what if everything we take for granted: food and water is taken away from us; whom would we be?

A beast or a human? 

Who would we become while hungry and thirsty or lonely and lost? 

What is our essence beyond the trappings of the hunger and ego?

Gratitude has always been a bitter fruit for me, I lost my mother to cancer and my father to alcoholism and promiscuity, human beings with their greedy exploitive ways never did much to encourage me to be grateful. The more I saw of the world even in my 31 years here ----the more I hate it.  Its filled with vultures and predators who want to eat your heart, suck your brain or steal your soul. I started my journey toward Sufism from a place of total renunciation of the world and its people. 

But Fasting makes you discover your essence. It frees you from the beast inside you so perhaps you may recognize the real you hidden behind the layers of desires and materialism. 

So we may discover that even amidst ruins, we have something to be grateful for. 

If you say one prayer daily ..say THANKYOU

 I have always loved to remember a Sufi master Junnaid Baghdadi, he was a strict sufi murshid from the tradition of Hasan Basri and was also  the master of al-Hillaj Mansoor.  After each prayer he would say to the sky, “Your compassion is great. How beautifully you take care of us, and we don’t deserve it. I don’t even have words to show my gratefulness, but I hope you will understand the unexpressed gratitude of my heart.”

They were on a pilgrimage, and it happened that for three days they passed through villages where orthodox Muslims would not allow them even to stay in the villages; there was no question of giving them food or water.

For three days without food, without water, without sleep — tired, utterly frustrated… The disciples could not believe that this man Junnaid, their master, still goes on saying the same things. Before, it was okay — but still he goes on saying, “You are great, you are compassionate, and I don’t have words to express my gratitude.”

On the third evening when he had finished his prayer, his disciples said, “Now it is time for an explanation. For three days we have been hungry, we have not had water, we are thirsty; we have not slept, we have been insulted continually, no place has been given to us, no shelter. At least today you should not say, `You are great, you are compassionate.’ For what you are showing your gratitude?”

Junnaid laughed. He said, “My trust in existence is unconditional. It is not that I am grateful because existence provides this and that and that. I am — that’s enough. Existence accepts me — that’s enough. And I don’t deserve to be, I have not earned it. Moreover, these three days have been of tremendous beauty because I had an opportunity to watch whether anger would arise in me, and it didn’t arise; whether I would start to feel that God had forsaken me, and the idea did not arise.

There has been no difference in my attitude towards existence. My gratitude has not changed, and it has filled me with more gratitude than ever. It was a fire test, and I have come out of it unburned. What more do you want?  

I will trust existence in my life and I will trust existence in my death. "

Can we live like this?

This Ramzan, let gratitude wash in your soul and wipe away the bitterness of desire, 

Totally trusting Allah and being grateful to Him for whatever He sends our way. 

To be a Sufi is to be happy in God's will!