God and Allah
Lesley Morris offers a personal reflection on God and the nature of worship
When I was nine we went to live in Egypt. I was lucky, being the daughter of a journalist, as I had already travelled a lot. I liked languages and foreign places. I started school in Cairo, made a few friends, and heard the call of the muezzin from the tower above the mosque.
It felt exactly the same as the nuns chanting at the school I had just left in England: the mystery, the calling – the pull towards something bigger. My parents, who were Church of England, were Christmas and Easter churchgoers. There was no discussion or real interest in religious or spiritual things, so I was not pushed in any particular direction. I was left alone to explore from where I was.
The nuns at school, which was chosen for its academic record only, naturally talked a lot about God, but none of it really impinged on me. I was largely ignored, as I was not a Catholic. I was curious, but most of it made no sense: so many strictures, so little joy. It bore little relationship to my own deep sense of Spirit – and if I aligned with anything at all of the Christian ‘Holy Trinity’ that I had heard about it was the Holy Ghost. This was something moving around and invisible, something that beckoned and loved, something unknowable but deeply felt.
I felt it in the apple tree outside my bedroom window. I felt it in the silent waves that moved about my ears. I felt it in music and, sometimes, in words. I knew that there was something, and I used the word God, as there didn’t seem to be another word on offer.
Then we moved to Cairo. I just assumed ‘Allah’ was the Arabic word for ‘God’ and that they were one and the same. I had no concept of the hundreds of years of conflict around who believed what, how they worshipped it and who was allowed to sit where in mosque or church. I had no idea that our spiritual evolution still had such a long journey to make.
Now here I am, in mature years, and I know no more than I did then – some history perhaps, some vague ideas about comparative religions, but I pray to ‘Allah’ still, and to ‘God’; sometimes I use the words ‘Divine Spirit’. But none of them are the word I seek, none of those words are the answer – they are all tiny puzzle pieces, various names that humans adopt to express the power/energy/love that makes this a living world.
I’m a musician and love sacred chanting. The voice keeps on chanting though my mind flits from topic to topic, discussing the jobs to be done when I stop. But I keep chanting. I have walked three times on the Camino de Santiago, (the Pilgrim’s path). My feet keep going step by step, while my brain chitchats about what I see, where I’m going, or what we will eat for supper.
When I sit in Meeting for Worship on a Sunday morning my body stays still, sitting upright, but the words still amble about in my head commenting, complaining, castigating. My voice, my feet, my body ultimately do the worshipping. I just start them off. I call upon God/Allah to help. I talk to whatever/whoever this thing is that my heart/mind yearns for. Whatever I call it, it ‘smells as sweet’. I know I am all ramshackle: I have huge contradictions in me; I seem to be unable to sustain a ‘spiritual discipline’; I am stubborn; I am slow; I rush things; I laugh; I argue; I prevaricate; and I am logical one minute and contrary the next.
I also know that something, a part of me, is ‘worshipping’, is ready, is waiting, is wanting to align itself with what is creative, blooming and heavenly of this world, and if part of me is doing it – that is OK. It is enough. It is, at the very least, a start.
