Colored pencil and paper cutouts
This was one of my favorite weeks of the semester, and one of my favorite pieces to make. In John Renard’s Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims, he makes a study of Islamic spiritual and religious tradition that “emphasizes the importance of experience and of the relationships among human beings, and between human beings and God, as Muslims have understood them” (xiii). His inquiry treats spirituality as a more specific framework than the broader culture tends to provide. For him it is that dimension of a religious-cultural tradition (in this case, Islam), that is focused “on the unfolding experience of a relationship, expressed both individually and communally, between the person and the source and goal of that person’s existence” (xiii). And religious life becomes then all “pious practice and creative endeavor that is inspired by and fosters spiritual growth” (xiv).
As one who studies spirituality and religious life across traditions, I have rarely encountered such a useful taxonomy of the two concepts. Renard uses it to enter seven so-called doors to Islam: foundations, devotion, inspiration, aesthetics, community, pedagogy, and experience. Here I am peering into the second door of devotion.
Light has been a constant theme for this course. I feel the Qur’anic verse to which we have most returned is the so-called Light Verse, or the 35th verse of the 24th Sura, which lends itself to both mystical contemplation and practical application, as in the many works of art and architecture depicting a lamp in a niche. I was inspired for this piece by Renard’s section on prayer, in which he quotes a prayer that was apparently a favorite of Muhammed’s:
Oh God make a light in my heart and a light in my tongue. Make a light in my ear; and make a light in my eye, make a light in back of me and a light in front of me; make a light above me. O God give me light (52).
The candles represent individual lights, which are all aspiring to become like and united with the divine flame. The bird is a nod to The Conference of the Birds, and its reminder that this light lives within each of us.