2:260

“And, lo, Abraham said: ‘O my Sustainer! Show me how Thou givest life unto the dead!’ Said He: ‘Hast thou, then, no faith?’ (Abraham) answered: ‘Yea, but so that my heart may be set fully at rest.’ Said He: ‘Take, then, four birds and teach them to obey thee; then place them separately on every hill; then summon them: they will come flying to thee. And know that God is almighty, wise.”

When I first read this verse, the first half had me excited – I too, like Abraham, want my heart to be sure that God, whoever created me, can bring the dead to life. I grant that I was once dead (at least not alive in the way I am now) and I am alive now and so yes, someone is there who brought to life what was dead (me). But I have not seen my dead self in the way I see death around me now. Facing death after being alive and conscious feels different than thinking about myself before being alove and conscious. my heart yearns to be more at ease about the truth about the dead, as I now see and experience them, made alive. And I must say, what God tells Abraham in this verse seemed to me for quite some time to be a sort of non-answer. It was a downer and on many interpretations I have heard, it remains obscure. It seems hardly the kind of reply that would bring a definitive ease to a heart already sort of sure about it. Abraham, and me, were looking for the heart’s satisfaction.

And as I kept thinking about the verse, I had to ask myself if I, and Abraham, know what life or death actually mean. I started to realize that I (like Abraham) have our own, experience and assumptions about what life and death are and perhaps our mutual lack of ease comes from something we don’t understand on our own but instead must learn from our maker. And so I read the verse as God teaching Abraham, and me, the meaning of the terms he (and I) used to ask God to show us how He gives life to the dead. I realized that I think that what is dead has no relation to life whatsoever and what is alive has no connection to death and that one of those things entirely negates the other. And so I found it necessary to ask my maker to teach me what He means by life and death. Perhaps Abraham is the example of a person who asks a question without realizing that he is using ideas in the question, whose meanings he has not learned from revelation/God but instead given meaning to, on his own. When I pay attention to what is revealed to Abraham as a result of his question, I can then see what is revealed to me in the answer to his question that I had not learned from my maker and has assumed to know on my own. I can then witness if that revealed meaning is true/better, more satifying than the meanings (in this case, the meanings of life and death and of bringing the dead to life) that is revealed by the verse. I can then witness what is revealed as true, helpful and a grace/favor or else reject it as false and useless. It must always be remembered that I am not able to say yes to anything in/as truth, if I were to assume I could never have said no to it.

It seems to me that I was expecting God to say something like: “look at that dead person over there. Go touch it and make sure he is dead. He is not breathing. No heartbeat. Or go to someone’s grave, for instance. Someone who has been dead and buried for a while. Someone unequivocally and fully dead (by my current, ‘pre-revelation’ understanding). Now stand back. Notice now the smoke? light? emerging on the horizon. And I looked (not only Abraham in the text but me, here and now, as I was reading this verse) and actually saw that smoke or light on the horizon. And then I heard (and Abraham in the text also heard) or saw a light, an angel carrying life that said “from God” on it in English. And then I see the angel entering the grave or the dead body and the person suddenly standing up as himself, the decayed body fully reconstituted. Now THAT would have made me easy!…..hmmm….would it? Was it an angel? Was it really from God? maybe the person wasn’t really fully dead anyway? Maybe this is a one-time thing and God has used all his resurrectionary powers to accomplish this feat this once but may not be able to do it for everyone or again? What if God can do this once and now this person will die again never to have life again? Can I really ignore all these doubts as baseless because I just witnessed what I described above for this one person? What meaning of life and death could suffice for the heart to actually be sure, and be fully satisfied about, how my sustainer gives life to what is dead?

The answer to this last question is what is told to Abraham (and therefore to me). I hear God saying: Your question, Abraham (and Faraz etc), is answered when you grab life or partake of life as if it were like some birds you get a hold of. You find life with you, endeared to you and clinging to you and as you do whatever you do to live, your situation is like of a person who is doing things (for example breathing and eating and drinking) to incline this ‘life’ (these birds that can fly away anytime) to remain with you. Life, Abraham, is with you like birds are with a person who feeds them. What you have lived of life, the parts that you have put on the hills and mountains you have traversed as a living being, might seem to you to be ‘dead’ or ‘gone’ but call them to mind and they hasten to you as if they are living parts of your life now. What you see as dead, Abraham, has never died but is alive with ME and I send a sign of it’s existence to you as a memory whenever you call (recall) it. What you found as life was from me in all its parts. The parts of it that you think “died” or passed are alive with me – call for them (in the world of meaning and not matter) and they come to you! The beauty, the mercy, the compassion and love – what is beloved to you about life has not perished. Don’t you see you can recall it? There is nothing that is actually dead Abraham! What you have with you, of life and all the parts/birds that make up your life (sustenance, love, friendship, care, forigveness, pleasure, sadness) are what I am giving to you. What you have gotten hold of is mine! And what you leave behind and consider dead, it is not dead in reality but it exists with me (I show you its existence in your memory/recollection of it). Your Lord is mighty – he owns life and death and keeps things alive with His power. And He is wise – it is His wisdom that you have the ability/inclination to recall parts of your life, especially the beloved ones, so that you may know that nothing has died but has only departed to live with the Lord who had sent it to remain with me for the time that it did. Your Lord is always, at all times, giving life to what is dead Abraham! There is not a moment and not a place that can exist except that it is something dead that is made alive by a Living Sustainer and there is no moment or place that has departed or become distant that has ceased to exist (your calling them and their hastening to you should ease your heart).

I hear this. I think this is a better, more truthful way of looking at life and death than the one i have on my own – where life just happens to exist, i just happen to be alive and then I happen to die and lose my life. I have no confidence or evidence that life is mine or that being dead means that the live i lived has gone to nothing! And to assume all this crushes my heart and soul and so it is an accursed understanding for my mind/soul. What I find revealed in the verse is like light to my darkness.I think this is what Abraham heard. It does ease my heart. And I am sure it eased Abraham’s heart.