Contrasts

A ridiculously busy day today, but fortunately, at points at least, happily so. One of those points was a peaceful forty-five minutes or so at the mesjid for Friday Prayers, although for a moment or two events in the world outside threatened to intrude upon that peace. Well, not so much events as the weather which decided to show its rainy aspect midway through the sermon making me wonder if I was going to get wet-through making my way back to work. Fortunately the squall was over within ten minutes and the only part of me that got at all damp were my feet since the slippers I'd left outside were well and truly soaking by the time I put them on again. Mind you, I preferred that to last week when the sun had been blazing down upon them whilst I was inside resulting in me nearly blistering the soles of my feet when I had to very tentatively slip them back on.

But all this is by the by. Other than that brief panic my sojourn in the mesjid proved typically restful and I particularly enjoyed the slightly atypical sermon. The focus of today's khutbah was on health, and the need for maintaining it. Spinning off from a very interesting hadith with which I wasn't really familiar, the message was that you had a duty to eat sensibly and exercise to maintain health. Normally I can find all sorts of parallels in the sermons I listen to these days with those I was exposed to as a child in the Catholic church, but it struck me that this wasn't the sort of thing you were too likely to hear in a church.

It connects with something deeply characteristic of Islam - the sense of the religion as a 'deen', best translated I suppose as a way of life. In this respect there is nothing 'secular' within the deen as any and every activity relates back to ultimate purposes. Many years ago I suppose I would have thought of this, from the outside, as deeply constricting. Now I find it deeply liberating.