Of the heavens and the earth:
And all affairs are
Referred back to God.
He merges night into day,
And He merges day into night:
And He has full knowledge
Of the secrets of (all) hearts.
S.57 A.5-6
This verse put me in mind of something I have been trying understand for a long time, and I hope I haven't misconstrued it. I have talked in other posts about the fact that God knows our hearts and all the secrets therein, but I am thinking about how we prepare our hearts. I love the discipline of my faith, though I am far from adhering to it properly. I have long pondered the relationship between actions and thoughts, since my days studying psychology and philosophy at university. I suppose I originally believed that actions followed thoughts, but now I have a more sophisticated view of the dynamic.
I believe our actions can help change our thoughts - if we comply to specific behaviors long enough, those behaviors can impact our thoughts. That is one of the virtuous things about my faith, the discipline it demands. It is not mindless discipline, as I have tried to address in many of my posts - it is a discipline to help my mind focus and to center on appropriate thoughts, then appropriate deeds. Behaviors become habits, habits become thoughts.
I do not want to be an "acting" Muslim, where I do the right things, but do not have the right things in my heart or mind. I am reminded constantly that God has access to these internal places, and I want them to be worthy of his scrutiny. I have not traded in my intelligence for my faith, but I am challenging that intelligence with the word of God, discipline, and the other tenets of my faith. Most importantly, I am not working towards a particular mindset or scripted philosophy - I am using the tools I have, processing the word of God, and finding where that honest process leads.
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