We live in deeply troubled times, and these will likely grow in our increasingly inter-connected world.
But happily once a year when much of the world gathers to celebrate the birth of the special child Jesus, we can take a break from troubles pressing upon us to reflect upon the mysteries of life on Earth and beyond.
Mystery surrounds us from the moment we arrive on Earth until we depart. At its most elementary the mystery is about what sustains this “brief crack of light”—as the great writer Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, phrased his opening sentence—“between two eternities of darkness.”
Is life merely this fleeting moment compressed between eternal darkness on either side?
This remains the most compelling question that men and women of varying intellects through the ages have pondered over and most, I suspect, preferred believing that life is a passage, in the words of William Blake, “through Eternal Death! And of the awaking to Eternal Life.”
Such belief rests on faith that there is an unseen power, eternally good, merciful, loving and beautiful beyond our earthly sight yet visible to our inner vision as Blake reminds us.
I refer to Blake, having gone back to reading him again during the past months, for he is perhaps the most loved mystic poet in the English language.
Blake was born 250 years ago in London on Nov. 28, 1757, and died there Aug. 12, 1827.
He was, in the words of one recent biographer, “a competent engraver, an eccentric painter” and “a devout believer in Christ as the embodiment of the human imagination.”
All his life Blake was moved by the vision of God whose love was incarnated in the human form of Jesus.
God in Blake’s vision was a personal Deity.
He was not lodged within the formal ornate settings of religious institutions or encountered in the lifeless pages of sacred texts.
In the long poem Jerusalem, Blake writes:
“I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and a friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.”
It is the mystic in Blake who cuts across cultural boundaries and religious divide to bring people together on the common grounds of a shared vision:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
For Blake it was not what we see, but how we see that was crucial. He wrote, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”
Blake’s vision was a needed rebellion against the arid philosophy of the rationalists with their mechanistic view of the universe that killed imagination.
It was also a vision informed by the despair of grinding poverty in the midst of rising wealth, of an England of newly arranged workshops and factories. And Blake warned:
“A dog starved at his Master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.”
Our age has invented instruments to see the outer edges of stellar space and map the universe of the infinitely small, yet Blake’s vision in our time has become perilously dim.
This Christmas we could do well sharing Blake with each other and discovering with him the peace that comes in knowing “All deities reside in the human breast.”
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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