One travels with purpose when one travels towards an end that one has not yet attained but that one seeks and finds beloved. What I love is perfection, to be in a state that my heart feels everything is perfect as it is, even the imperfections make perfect sense. I want perfection of meaning. If the meaning of a state of affairs is perfect, it is perfect for my heart. Without the meaning being perfect, the form being perfect is still an imperfect perfection. I need a perfect imperfection. My heart’s peace is tied to the realization that nothing, and I mean nothing, is lacking in anything good in terms of meaning.
My need for this perfect meaning I find addressed in the claim that all things, perfect and imperfect, are telling me about the perfection of the source. My illness and my dislike of it is perfect as a sign of His love for, and power over, my life and my health. When and if I am ready to look at myself and all things as indicating His perfection, only then I confirm His perfection. If I find something imperfectly imperfect in the world, something – anything at all – that I think could be better (in meaning) than what it is at that moment, I cannot honestly see God as perfect in that moment and any invocation of the same is meaningless and dishonest. If the meaning of “what is”, is perfect (which is only perfect if I refer the meaning to the Source who is indicated and praised by “what is”) only then I can honestly feel and declare the the source, my creator, to be lacking nothing and absolutely perfect.
To recap, I first had to agree to look at the meaning of every single thing (excluding nothing at all) as revealing to me the perfection of its creator and possessor. This revelation of the meaning of what exists I could only realize as perfect by unifying the meaning to a single source and attributing nothing good to ought but Him. This unifying I learn from the Quran’s claim “bi-ismillah”. When things become perfectly meaningful in this way to me i.e. they are perfect bi-ismillah, I can feel and realize that all perfections are the maker’s. Then maybe I can say Subhan Allah and mean it. If anything remains imperfect in the world for me and it is not, in that moment, the best of all possible worlds for me, then Subhan is not God’s for me and should I want to find my heart’s true beloved (perfect meaning), I have work to do. The work I need to do is to reflect if I have indeed given “everything” over to the source or have I kept some things out of that “everything”. And I need to reflect on whether I can somehow satisfy my heart with something that is imperfectly imperfect.
The Quran as Revelation 