“Now is the Time”

Now is the time to know

That all you do is sacred.

 

Now, why not consider

A lasting truce with yourself and God.

 

Now is the time to understand

That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child’s training wheels

To be laid aside

When you can finally live

With veracity

And love.

 

Hafiz is a divine envoy

Whom the Beloved

Has written a holy message upon.

 

My dear, please tell me,

Why do you still

Throw sticks at your heart

And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside

That incites you to fear?

 

Now is the time for the world to know

That every thought and action is sacred.

 

This is the time

For you to deeply compute the impossibility

That there us anything

But grace.

Now is the season to know

That everything you do

Is sacred.

 

– Hafiz

Hafiz approaches his readers, as always, with tenderness and compassion and a deep desire for us to have compassion for ourselves. For those of us raised in one of the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, or in cultures shaped by those religions, what Hafiz suggests might sound like heresy. We live and die by our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral. How else will be know whether God loves us, or not? How else could we determine if we are on the plus-side of the Divine accounting system?  Would Hafiz really have us throw it out?

Actually, yes.

And he’s not alone.  Most of the mystics I’ve studied share one message. Most people with near death experience share one belief.

There is nothing “but grace” on the other side.

If we knew that, would it really make us run amok? If we stopped throwing sticks at our heart, would we really behave more badly than we do today? If we knew deep in our bones that we are sacred, our lives are sacred, this earth is sacred, wouldn’t we treat it as such? And wouldn’t that change everything?