sacred place of prostration

إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ وَيَصُدُّونَ عَن سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ وَٱلْمَسْجِدِ ٱلْحَرَامِ ٱلَّذِى جَعَلْنَـٰهُ لِلنَّاسِ سَوَآءً ٱلْعَـٰكِفُ فِيهِ وَٱلْبَادِ وَمَن يُرِدْ فِيهِ بِإِلْحَادٍۭ بِظُلْمٍ نُّذِقْهُ مِنْ عَذَابٍ أَلِيمٍ

This verse helped me understand existence and things happening around me and inside me, in a new way…in a way that took away the burden of everday living so long as i looked the world with the lens of this verse.

its not always some catastrophy that upsets and pains me. it is everyday life and countless things in it and my own weaknesses and tiredness and confusion and disappointments and anger about so many things and many small daily struggles – these are what make my life difficult and hell-like: i neither live nor die…i move around dazed and wounded by things that hurt in big and small ways. the things that i must do, that need to do but that i feel no great joy doing and in fact carry on my shoulders as burdens that crush me a little daily…i am thinking of my daily life, the people who disappoint and hurt me, the things i keep doing that i see no ultimate and secure meaning in or see as negative (a swarm of people with their grocery baskets crowding the grocery stores..as if zombies grabbing what they can….doing their daily or weekend shopping…a chore they (and me) are tied to as if slaves being lorded over by our need to eat and desire to eat more and better etc)….this is how i see the world when left to my own mind…

the verse above reveals to me a different meaning….potentially…a meaningful world i can inhabit for a while (yes! its possible and real for me to “live”, no matter how briefly, at the sacred place of prostration) and that i visit (a wonderful assurance that my maker has willed it that one may leave the sacred precincts so that one may return to visit again….this solves the puzzle of what i could do to “maintain” awareness of my Lord/God)….

the verse tells me that to deny truth or to cover it up is to hinder (myself first and foremost) from the path/way of God..and this hindrance to the path of God means that i do not see everything around me prostrating to, praising and exalting and revealing God to me….the verse describes everthing prostrating to the divine..to the sustainer that sustains that thing as it is….and thus describes everything being at the place of prostration…to not see this is the cause of the grievious suffering i experience here..i can witness it and i do witness it. the verse reveals to me the cause of my suffering and pain. the maker of this universe has made it such that if i dont see, to go back to my example above, people driven by the mercy and wisdom of their sustainer to seek for and receive his sustenance (at the grocery store, for instance), if i dont see the scene before me as taking me to God (a path to God, the sustainer, the merciful provider), i must suffer the pain of seeing them as miserable greed or hunger driven mortals who are desperate for sustenance and food and are in a futile frenzy to sustain their life when death and annihilation is their certain end…(and also mine)….from witnessing a futilre feeding frenzy, i witness a place where human beings are prostrating to the sustainer, to the wise, merciful provider…the whole scene can be witnessed as the command of the merciful sustainer at work…and i find myseklf in the presence of the Lord…i see the face of the sustainer in what i see…I find myself at the sacred place of prostration as i witness the praiseworthy one in what i see…

i realize how my denial and covering up of the sustainer in what i see leads me to suffer…to burdens and emptiness that i try to fill by one or another means..people look to religion for filling their voids…for me, i find the verse’s claim that only my sustainer that i witness praised by what i see, fills the void and saves me from suffering…..(people find a perverse pride and joy in saying that they cant see…and they insist that on one can see…God in the tree, in the bird, in driving to work, in shopping for grovery, in cooking, in pickin up your child from school etc etc)….they think they are loyal to God when they insist, without reason, that the sacred house of worship is some physical building in some country…they only deprive themselves and hurt themselves by their unfounded assumptions…this verse calls me to not hinder anyone, including myself, from seeing everything prostrating to the sacred sustainer…it is Him that all things praise and it is Him whose command they are carrying out…if i can’t live much at the sacred place of prostration, i should like to visit it as many times in a day as possible…it is this that my soul needs and asks its Lord to help it with..