A New Year of Mercy and Certainty

Praise be to God, we find ourselves in the final days of 1443 of our Hijri calendar. A new year is just around the corner. This is usually a time, in our solar calendar, when we begin taking stock of the past year and making resolutions for the next. We should mark our spiritual calendars in much the same way. Has the past year been a time of increase and blessing, or of struggle and patience? Are we happy with where we find ourselves in our journeys toward God? What is our plan to move into the coming year with real, sincere intentions?

One collective intention we could make this year is to recalibrate our relationship to mercy. A common thread that unites many of the people who come through our doors at Taleef is a genuine desire to receive God's mercy. Many of us have, at some point, tasted this mercy and found Taleef to be a place where that experience can increase and deepen. Yet receiving mercy ought to be the beginning of a process whereby we grow strong enough to eventually show mercy to others.

As I have often contended in the past, Islam is a religion of mercy before anything else. We call upon God's names of mercy when pray or read the Quran. The Prophet ﷺ was sent as a mercy to the worlds. We are commanded to honor our mothers as the most tangible sign of God's mercy in our lives. Moreover, many of our teachers at Taleef taught us that that majority of people in this time are most in need of a message of mercy rather than one of rigor. Our communities ought to be a place that reflect these realities. 

At the same time, we can afford to expand the way we talk about mercy. Perhaps especially at Taleef, we tend to discuss mercy as something that belongs to God and which He bestows upon us. Indeed, this is part of our methodology of calling people to Islam: we point to God's beautiful names more often than we do His majestic names. We emphasize ease more than rigor. This is something we will continue, God willing. Yet we can also begin to discuss mercy as something that we ought to be showing to each other. This is a far different conversation. Showing mercy is not easy. In fact, it is rigorous and difficult. By definition, showing mercy is the act of forgoing your own rights for the benefit of another--often another who may not be deserving of your goodwill. More often than not, it requires us to experience a level of hardship in our own lives than teaches us the true value of being merciful with one another.

I began to think about mercy in this new light recently after hearing an interview with a young man named Colin O'Brady. If you've ever heard the expression, "the world is your oyster," this certainly applied to Colin. He had just graduated college at Yale University and was preparing to apply for graduate studies. During his summer break, he took a trip around the world that eventually landed him in Thailand. One night in a remote beach village, he came across performers who were jump roping with a flaming rope. Boys will be boys, so Colin joined in. One misstep later, the kerosene-soaked rope was wrapped around his leg. Colin suffered burns over twenty-five percent of his body. Worse, the rope had burned his leg so badly that the doctor told him definitively that he would never walk on it again.

Eventually, Colin's mother arrived in Thailand to help nurse him. However, unlike Colin, she would not accept the doctor's assessment. She told him that, not only would he walk again, he was going to set a huge, audacious goal that would require him to do more than walk. Colin protested. He was in a state of despair over what had happened. But his mother persisted and he finally agreed to enter the Chicago Triathlon.

When they both arrived home, she sat Colin in the kitchen one step away from another chair and asked him to walk to it. The way Colin tells this story, the infectious certainty of his mother was the only thing that motivated him to try. So he took the single step. The next day, the chair was two steps away. Eventually, Colin was walking across the room. The next year, he won the Chicago Triathlon. Eventually he went on to climb the tallest mountains on all seven continents and trekked to the North and South Poles.

Colin's story is amazing. However, for our purposes, I'm really more interested in his mother. It can be no wonder for us, with all of the emphasis that our religion places on mothers, that it was Colin's mother who was the source of mercy here. However, none of the mercy she showed him throughout this story could have felt good in the moment--either for herself or her son. She pushed and challenged him at a moment when her instinct was probably to comfort and soothe. Yet what is truly amazing to me is how she could tell him, apparently with absolute certainty, that he would walk again. Most of us would only be so bold as to set a manageable goal. We would hedge it by insisting that, no matter what happened, we would still love him. Our fear of his failure would push us to take an easier, but ultimately less merciful, path. Instead, Colin's mother had mercy on him by transmitting to him a state of absolute certainty that he would walk again. What hardships had she overcome in her own life to give her such certainty? Had someone else had this kind of mercy on her? Have I overcome enough hardship to do the same for my sons if the time arises?

Whether we are talking about mercy or certainty, states such as these have to be tasted before they can be transmitted to others. If we are to be merciful with each other, we must first experience mercy, both from God and from our brothers and sisters. This is why we will continue to emphasize mercy at Taleef. But let's start to go further in 1444. Let's allow those moments of mercy we experience during Jumuah prayers or the Burdah begin to teach us how we can be with one another when our friends and family need us most. Moreover, let's set a New Year's resolution: whatever hardships come our way next year, we will be certain that what lies on the other side is better for us. And we will do this not for ourselves, but so we may give that strength to others.