LABYRINTHINE WAYS, OR THE STRAIGHT WAY
by Dr. Mohamed Elmasry

As they do their regular daily prayers, Muslims pray to be guided into "the straight way". That prayer is stated in the first chapter of the Qur’an.

The Qur’an also teaches that God is Love, hence everyone who knows love knows God, loves God, adores God and worships God. Humans are created tolling for the most perfect qualities in everything; in knowledge, kindness,
goodness, generosity, power, justice, beauty, etc.

Islam teaches that God has 99 names, and even more besides. All of them point to God as the most perfect, most infinite and absolute in every way.
For example, God is the Most Perfect, Most Infinite and the Absolute in Mercy. So if you are seeking the ultimate source of all that is Merciful, it is God.

People who try to escape God in God’s own world will surely fail.

They can take labyrinthine ways, yet before long they will depart from this world and enter another, separated by death, but still in God's universe. So as they try to escape from God, they only run closer to Him.

True fellowship with God makes demands upon one’s soul, but they are tolerable demands. Loving the Divine will not make everything happy or solve all the problems we may encounter, but it will create a sweetness only lovers know.

Every pure friendship has an austere side that challenges our sincerity while summoning us to greater spiritual affinity; thus it is a mystery that any soul should want to evade the God of Infinite Love. But the deeper mystery is that Divine Love gives each person such high worthiness.

People of faith know that God enriches everything entrusted to Him.
But how can you explain this to those who do not believe in God? How can such people, in their labyrinthine ways, even relate to the experience of  God's "straight way"?

(Dr. Mohamed Elmasry is national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress and author of Spiritual Fitness for Life and Divine Love.