Spiritual Pilgrims
Komaruddin Hidayat
I recently watched a video of a performance by the golden-voiced African-American diva Whitney Houston. She was truly a world-class singer and actress.
Born in New Jersey on August 9, 1963, Whitney died in a luxurious housing estate in Beverly Hills, California, on February 11, 2012, at the age of 48. She was found dead in a bathtub, having suffered from a heart attack. She was also known to have a cocaine addiction.
Her beautiful voice and face slowly disappeared from my mind. Then, I was thinking about life – how it is filled with mysteries. There are times when one must work hard to find her talents and chase her dreams. At other times, one becomes a star at the peak of fame and lives a luxurious life.
As it often happens, when one is on top, horrors and terrors suddenly show themselves out of the dark. Gloomy visions on a bitter future emerge. The wrinkles of old faces, fragile bodies, fading popularity and illnesses lurk in the dark and are ready to pounce at any moment. All of this ends in the hands of death, ever so powerful. Bodies, no matter how strong or stunningly beautiful, will soon turn into rotting flesh.
We often forget that humans are merely pilgrims, journeying through space and time that no one knows when it starts and ends. They came from God; and will, one day, return to Him. Many of them do not even believe in or care about God. People can only build arguments – not use their logic – to explain their belief in Him. In the end, God is merely believed in without any debate.
For people of faith, the uniqueness and excellence of humans compared to other Earth dwellers lies in their dimensions and quality of spiritualism, considering that God has breathed into them God’s soul after creating the perfect body (Al-Quran 15:29). The Bible also says, “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7).
Thus, like a piece of white paper or an empty flash drive, every child of man is a born a pilgrim that records every event, no matter how small inconsequential, in his soul.
He moves in a capsule of time that knows not how to go back. Every moment is an event of pilgrimage that we may forget; and yet the memory will never truly fade away as it has been etched in the layers of the neuron. Getting old is inevitable and unavoidable. However, becoming wiser and striving for a meaningful life – this is where the struggle and sacrifice lies.
Religious and cultural pilgrimage
All major theistic religions involve pilgrimage. In the beginning, these religions were preached by the chosen prophets who lived and struggled in different eras. As these messengers of God worked across
different lands and eras, their languages and methods of preaching may be different – and so are several aspects of their teachings.
After these prophets died, their followers and disciples preserved and developed their various teachings, establishing various religious communities with their own inheritances of God’s messengers. Like rivers, religions come from the same spring of knowledge and call for all people to return to the same God.
Religious teachings from God arrive on Earth on the corridors of history and use cultures to meet and greet humans – thereby making possible the intermingling of religions and cultures. Religions also meet with and mix with one another, making religious traditions lose their exclusivity. Religious adherents also exchange experiences with one another, enriching and influencing one another.
These religious teachings and traditions are developed and interpreted in the logic and instruments of culture. Sometimes, religion stands out. At other time, culture does. However, the essence of all of these religions is fundamentally the same, namely belief in the one God, the creator of the universe. We may call God different names, merely because we use different languages.
Entering the era of globalization based on increasingly sophisticated information technology, meetings and dialogs are becoming more intense not only between religious adherents but also between religious ideas. There are pilgrimages of cultures and religions, enabling people to have diverse memories of various cultures and religions – instead of homogenous memories of only one culture and religion.
In the Middle Ages, the language of Islamic ideas was dominated by Arabic. Nowadays, however, English rules in books and international Islamic forums. People interpret religion using various theories and scientific disciplines developed by non-Arab and non-Muslim scholars. Therefore, we need to redefine the meaning and boundaries of pure religious ideas, considering that meetings and mixture between religious traditions have been going on intensively and extensively.
These freedoms are not free but must be used responsibly during one’s journey on Earth.
What does the future of religion look like? The essence of religiosity in the past, present and future is the same, namely a spiritual awareness that humans are pilgrims who came from God and will return to Him. The world is merely an object of cultural pilgrimage, in which humans’ spiritual entities are given physical and logic instruments to enjoy the freedoms given by God. These freedoms are not free but must be used responsibly during one’s journey on Earth.
Pilgrim humans
Religion, both as doctrine and as essential awareness inherent to every human’s conscience, always reminds humans of their status as pilgrims and to be responsible for the things they do during their pilgrimage.
We are all reminded that pilgrims must not ruin the earth. Pilgrims must be compassionate and helpful toward one another in establishing their civilization, making the earth ever more beautiful and comfortable for future generations of pilgrims.
Conflicts between religious adherents are commonly triggered by nonreligious factors, similar to characters in western films who are originally friends and yet turn on one another in a violent shootout because of treasures or women.
In the future, there will be increasingly diverse religious expressions among humans, filled with diversity and cultural and linguistic syntheses. This will leave only rituals as religions’ distinctive features. The emergence of new religions aiming to unite various religions with increased emphasis on spirituality and humanitarian ethics is highly possible. When someone claims to be religious, the question will be what he or she has contributed to sustainably enrich the civilization from generation to generation.
Religious movements should not undermine civilization. This journey will be beautiful if we can be friends with people along the way and leave behind legacies that improve the life of all men. However, it will be devastatingly sad if, upon reaching the end of our journey, we look back and see ourselves as destructive and immoral pilgrims.
Komaruddin Hidayat, Lecturer, School of Psychology, Jakarta State Islamic University
