What is faith

Shazia on the right at Retreat House presenting at Wild Week!

Faith is the power to keep afloat despite life’s peaks and troughs

To know that it will be okay in the end.

Faith reminds that I am not in power nor in control of anything other than my own intentions,

which regulate the state of my spiritual heart.

Faith is to believe that the Creator has a plan for me,

Faith is to know

that God loves all His creation.

Faith affirms that I am here to fulfill my duty,

to strive against my own ego, not to fight others.

Faith helps endure hardship and suffering for a purpose greater than ‘I’!

To keep afloat, energy must be generated from within,

The energy can be fueled by evil or by the divine.

There are manners and rituals prescribed by God that the Prophets practiced

The Prophets were teachers to mankind as well as to the jinnkind.

Energy from the divine is what the soul will thrive upon,

the lasting one, the illuminator of the unknown path I tread, that to me is faith!

The energy from the evil will only flare and burn, leaving behind ashes

to be consumed and blown away in the storms of life.

Abraham the father of prophets,

taught how to keep afloat with the Divine

The prescription of belief in One God, no parallel no partner unto Him

Daily prayers with prostration, a sign of humility and submission

and remembrance of the divine words from the scripture

To Keep a sound moral code;

Preservation of life, faith, wealth, family and lineage.

Preservation of the intellect,

“O you who believe, speak the upright speech”!

Interestingly the evil energy requires an anti-moral code;

To pledge allegiance to other than One God

Strive and sacrifice in the cause of material, power, fame…

Do not pray nor purify your body for forty days! orders the black magic practitioner

Hence denouncing the proximity of the Creator and the assigned guardian Angels

“Indeed mankind has been created in kabad”! (Quran 90.4)

Man is designed to function amidst struggle and difficulty that this life has to offer.

Whether one chooses the path of the divine or evil, it will be a journey of toil.

The difference is that, in the end the divine liberates and vindicates the soul, while the evil

abandons it into a burden of sorrows and regrets.

What is faith was written by Dr. Shazia Anwar and originally published in House of Faith, a book in the House of series.