Loss or Gain?

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Loss or Gain?
Joan Booso

The catastrophic floods in Pakistan and the devastation they have caused, and leave in their wake, are a poignant lesson for us all. Lives, homes, livestock, crops and all the infrastructure have been swept away. We can learn that, as a certainty, everyone we love, everything we work for,  and achieve can be wiped out in an instant and be lost. Everything of this world is impermanent and the only certainty is death. When we die everything and everyone of this world is left behind and we take with us only our beliefs and actions to face God for judgment.

With Ramadhan upon us, it is a good time for reflection on all the worldly trappings that surround us and assess their real value. How precious is the drop of water to a thirsty person? How vital is a morsel of food to a hungry man? How would we feel if we had to spend even one night out in the cold, open air with our children crying? What must it be like to stand and see your whole life's work and livelihood destroyed, with little hope of restoration? In the West we experience every possible comfort, we are used to a life of acquisition but are ill-prepared for loss.

Large scale disasters make us stop and take notice but these losses are occurring around us all the time but we can be complacent when they happen to others. Each day we live is one day nearer our death, those dear ones around us, our fine houses, our high-flying careers, nothing  and no-one is exempt from this eventual loss. The only rock to which we must cleave,in this visible world, is our faith, it must be the guiding light for all our actions. Only our good works and intentions will be carried with us into the hereafter.

One of the most popular and well known, and indeed beautiful, Psalms is the 23 rd Psalm. It speaks of God being the good shepherd and our only consolation and hope in this life but also, more importantly, when we inevitably encounter death and the existence beyond, it is as follows:

The Lord is my shepherd;I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters;
He restoreth my soul;
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;
For Thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

By fasting in the month of Ramadhan, we are outwardly going without-which could be deemed as deprivation or a loss- but actually we are gaining. The main reason fasting is prescribed, and held in high esteem in the Abrahamic religions, is that it raises our consciousness of God and our conscientiousness towards worship on a ritualistic level but also reaches towards and stimulates a higher moral plane. In a state of fast we are more aware of God's presence in our day. When we are abstaining from all the prohibitions of the fast purely because of God our thoughts are automatically drawn towards Him, when we are prompted to for example eat or drink, and away from the day-to-day activities with which we are normally preoccupied. As a secondary benefit we are exercising self-control of our passions and excesses, we also focus more on charity and the plight of our fellow man. We are striving to gain God's approval because we are being compliant with His wishes and being obedient. We are gaining merit not only for this world but for the one to come; only our adherence to God's will in this life will benefit us in the hereafter. By concentrating our mind and attention on God as much as possible and performing selfless actions we are dealing in the only form of currency that will benefit our souls, the currency of faith and worship, the currency of the hereafter. All the loss of this world will be recompensed many-fold when our good deeds are judged as righteous by our one and only Lord and carried forward to reward us in eternity.

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