Blessings of Prayer — Page 45
45 for a while and then cease to function, and He would be disgracefully exposed. But our All-Powerful and Omnipotent God is not such. He is the Creator of all the particles of the * universe, the souls and all the infinite wisdom, because no Divine act is, or should be, without some underlying wisdom. What we do mean is that when He wishes to make water work like fire or vice versa, He brings His eternal wisdom into service, which controls each and every particle of the universe, though we may or may not be aware of it. And there can be no doubt that any action based upon wisdom does not render knowledge useless, rather it becomes the means of the advancement of knowledge. Just see how water is artificially turned into ice and is used to produce electricity; but does this ever lead to chaos, or does it render knowledge to be useless? Another subtle point that needs to born in mind is that, at times, when men of God show miracles, for instance, water is not able to drown them and fire is not able to harm them, the secret behind such manifestations is that at times when the friends of God focus their attention towards a particular thing, the All-Wise God—Whose infinite secrets man can never comprehend—shows a sign of His power, and their attention begins to exercise control in the universe. The convergence of the means which, for instance, cause the heat of the fire to cease casting its effect—whether these means are related to heavenly bodies, to some hidden properties of the fire itself, or to some subtle property of the body that is put in the fire, or whether it is a combination of all these—all such means come into operation through such attention and such prayer. It is thus that an extraordinary miracle is shown. But this does not cause us to lose faith in the reality of things, nor does it render knowledge useless, for it is itself a branch among the branches of Divine knowledge. It has its own dimension, just as, for instance, the burning quality of fire has its own. Let us understand it this way: these are spiritual elements that manifest themselves by subjugating the fire, and they are peculiar to their own time and place. Human intellect falls short of understanding the secret that the perfect man is the locus for the manifestation of the spirit of God Almighty. And when the time comes for the perfect man to display this manifestation, everything begins to fear him as it fears God. You may now throw him before a beast or into a fire, he will suffer no harm; for at such moments the spirit of God Almighty is upon him and everything is under obligation to fear Him. This Contd…