Ayyam Allah (the days of God)

وَلَقَدْ أَرْسَلْنَا مُوسَىٰ بِـَٔايَـٰتِنَآ أَنْ أَخْرِجْ قَوْمَكَ مِنَ ٱلظُّلُمَـٰتِ إِلَى ٱلنُّورِ وَذَكِّرْهُم بِأَيَّىٰمِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٰلِكَ لَـَٔايَـٰتٍۢ لِّكُلِّ صَبَّارٍۢ شَكُورٍۢ

Indeed, We sent Moses with Our signs: Lead your people out of darkness and into light, and remind them of the days of God. Surely in this are signs for whoever is steadfast, grateful.

The claim here is that God sends messengers (here Moses) with God’s signs. What does the sign do or rather what does the messenger (and hence the message) aim to do? It’s goal, indicated here, is to bring people from the darknesses to the light (darknesses in the plural and the light in the singular). darkness and light are obviously metaphors and need elaboration – its hardly plausible that the signs bring people from a literal dark room into a space where there is light (literally). But the verse does not leave me without a clue as to where my mind should go to see the darknesses and the light. The clue comes into view when I ask (as the verse suggests I ask): what is the sign or where is the sign that would bring me out of darknesses and into the light’? The clue seems to me to be: “remind them with/of the days of God”. Days (ayyam, the plural of yawm which is a day or any period of time really) is a reference to time, which is, to me, a reference to existence as I experience it i.e. as a flow, a single connected unity, as a whole, encompassing the many states and conditions of the mind/heart and feelings and experiences linked together in a past-present-future (time!), the ‘back then, there and what was!’ to ‘here and now’ and to the ‘will be/not be’ of one’s hopes, fears and aspirations in the future.

The sign is the verse’s re-description of my idea of time as the “days of God.” It claims that for the patient ones and for the grateful ones, there are ‘signs’ in this i.e. in the “days of God.” I don’t read this to mean that there are some (already) patient and grateful people out there who will be told ‘hey..remember the days of God’ and then these already grateful people will come out of darkness into light. I don’t assume that I know what sort of patience and gratitude are meant here. Patient about what and with whom? Grateful to what and for what and why? And what is gained or lost if one weren’t grateful or patient? What is the alternative? I want to learn this from revelation and I want to be able to know if the claim it makes is true and helpful to me. I therefore ask the verse: what do you mean by the patient ones and the grateful ones? Is it the case that those who see the signs in ‘the days of God’ are able to be patient and grateful? Are impatience and ingratitude problems that I have and wish to (or should wish to resolve?) and am unable to really resolve without seeing the signs i.e. seeing time as ‘the days of God’? Did i need to hear this from my maker? Is it my maker speaking? Are my darknesses all those features of my life and world that leave me at the mercy of time? Time that passes, comes and goes, time that does not care how I feel? what I lose?

Is my ‘life with time’ a darkness to which my ‘life with the days/moments of/from God’ be the light? Am I unable to really appreciate life without pain of loss, to enjoy what is beautiful and to be grateful for not just a few things for a while but for things that I have and appear to lose (the darkness of non-existence, the passing of time, is what makes me not see those things anymore)? Are my darknesses due to the inevitable impatience I find in myself with what I find painful and intolerable (in the past, in the now and in the future) and that makes me sad and unhappy (unappreciative i.e. unable to appreciate whatever beauty and good there is)?. In other words, I understand the verse to be telling me that 1) you sufffer from impatience and ingratitude that is tied to not seeing the signs (i.e. not being aware of the signs in the ‘days of God’ and 2) the patience and gratitude you yearn for and seek (or should seek) are associated with (and come through) seeing the signs in ‘the days of God’. How does this help me? What good news and truth, if any, does this indication/verse deliver to me? Do i understand that I will either live with time or I will live with ‘the days of God’?

Patience could be a thousand things but for me, in the context of the darknesses of my life, is the expected or anticipated redress of the wrongs/losses I feel I have experienced/suffered or will suffer. So long as the expectation of redress/repair/saved-from-harm is sustained (and it must be rationally and emotionally sustainable on the basis of evidence that leaves no doubt about the end of that harm/loss), patience is possible and reasonable and even beautiful. If, and to the extent, I lose the expectation or hope of redress or find such hope unfounded and false, I am not patient but instead I feel anxious, despaired, oppressed and condemned to suffer the losses without redemption/recourse/redress/rectification/forgiveness/repair (use your favorite word!). To use a simplistic example: As someone who may, for instance, be suffering from not being able to travel to Hawai, I am patient while I have a ticket and a visa, money etc. to travel but the flight is not until next week. I can tell myself to “be patient!” without it being an oppression and an unreasonable ask or empty consolation or a lie! There is something joyous about the experience of a well-founded hope that the wait is about to be over and what one yearns for is about to arrive. I am despaired and devastated only when I am not able to find any means to get to Hawai and not able to hope that it can or will happen. If i were to now tell myself: ‘be patient!” and mean by it that i should simply cease suffering or drop the desire to go to Hawai and instead focus on something else, I am no longer speaking of patience but something else. Dealing with an irredeemable and irrepairable loss, without hope of redress, is not patience to me, whatever else it may be. It may be called a ‘stoic’ attitude though I am not sure if all stoic philosophy would fit this description. How then, I ask myself, can I look at the darknesses in/of my life in a way that I could be patient about them and not simply be left to “deal with it” or “suck it up” or “look at the bright side and ignore what is painful” or “enjoy while I can” or “do my best…others have bigger problems” and so on? How could I look at all that makes me unappreciative and ungrateful in life and be grateful about it and find it truthful and satisfyingly meaningful? I, for one, find it de-humanizing to myself to take satisfaction with what i find pleasing while bearing, with or without complaint, a million wounds that i suffer from. Every memory is a wound. Every “milestone” or event or previous moment of a life passing away is water under the bridge that appears to flow into nothingness, leaving me with more of the same (every experience bears the mark of separation and disappearance into nothing (which some people, unable to bear the pain of their life’s annihilation, call ‘the unknown’, desperately hoping inwardly that there could be something and it, hopefully, isn’t too bad). No amount of poetry someone may write about it, no good things I do that remain in this world etc can make up for the loss of my existence and life that comes from my view that I live i time and pass away with time. If instead of living with time, I realize each moment is brought into being by a sustainer, the entire universe and everything in my life are from my sustainer and remain with my sustainer as they depart from this realm, i exiset and live not with time but by the command of my maker and all moments of existence are the threads that tie my existence to the eternal owner and giver of existence, that each moment, each death and each birth of each moment, is a sign of his power and his life-giving and his will to give and preserve and sustain life and the complete dependence of any given moment on His power and Will, i live with the days/ayyam of God and I live in the light of eternal existence, a light not darkened by the passing of time or by death-as-end-of-life.