I recently heard an interview on NPR with Rami Nashashibi, a professor of sociology who is also the founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago. Particularly memorable was a brief exchange toward the end of the interview, when Nashashibi told the story of how his four-year-old daughter came to understand the meaning of her name. He explained that his daughter’s name, “Niyyah,”
is in both Swahili and Arabic the word for “spiritual intention.” Muslims are asked before they pray or perform any act of service, before they engage in anything that has a sense of worship associated with it, whether it is being done for the right niyyah. Is it being done for the right purpose? Are you attempting to get fame or credit? As Nashashibi tells it,
Tere was a song that had used her name in that way and the light went off in the middle of it and she turned over to me on the couch and asked me “Daddy, do you have the right niyyah?” Honestly, I looked at her and I didn’t have an answer for I think a good twenty seconds. She nodded her head and said, “No, probably not.”
This four-year-old’s simple question has stuck with me ever since. So has her response to her father’s lack of response. It’s hard enough to figure out what the right thing to do is on a daily basis; adding that it should be done with the right intention, for the right reasons, seems like piling on.
Over the years I have frequently asked my students in various classes “What is more important—what you do, or why you do it? Actions or intentions?” They usually split roughly down the middle. And so do the great moral philosophers. There is one tradition which says that only results matter (since they can be observed and measured publically) and intentions are irrelevant. Then there is another tradition claiming that results are irrelevant—the true measure of the moral life is internal. Were your intentions pure? Was your heart in the right place? If so, then you are morally in the clear, even if the results of your intended action go “tits up” (to quote my brother-in-law).
It doesn’t take my students very long to realize that the “results or intentions” question is a false dichotomy. Because in truth, we care about both. Four-year-old Niyyah is right—we not only want the right thing to be done, but for it to be done with the right niyyah, the right intention or reason. And that sucks, because it takes things straight into the human heart. For those who profess the Christian faith, it also takes things straight into the world of grace.
One of the first things I ever learned from Scripture about the human heart as a young boy was from Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it? Far less attention was paid to the Psalm that is recited in liturgical churches during the Ash Wednesday liturgy: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. . . . Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.” Straight from the Jewish scriptures is both the problem of and the solution for right intentions. As a flawed human being, I am incapable of consistently doing things for the right reason. But through divine grace the heart is changed and turned toward the good. We seldom have the right niyyah, if that depends on our own energies and strength. But when the divine gets involved, everything changes.
The mystery of grace is exactly that—a mystery. Strangely enough, divine grace enters the world through flawed human beings. Grace is something to be channeled, to be lived, not systematized and turned into dogma or doctrine. Through many years of cancer treatments, the poet Christopher Wiman learned to hear God, then to channel God, in the most unlikely places, the very places where divine grace apparently resides. Wiman writes that
God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. . . . All too often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.
The right niyyah is not the result of struggle, training, or calculation. All I have to do to have the right niyyah is to open my heart and let it out.
What I crave now is that integration, some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates.
In my early years of teaching, I used to include one of Woody Allen’s insights in the syllabus for every one of my classes: “80% of success is showing up.” I don’t use Woody’s quote any more, since it doesn’t mention that if 80% of success is showing up, the other 80% is being prepared when you show up. I now tell my students that the key to success in my class is “do the reading and be here.” “Be prepared and show up” is also the key to divine encounters.
Be prepared. In Psalm 42 the psalmist writes “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?” Preparation is energized by desire, not the mind. I’ve occasionally described myself to my colleagues or students as a “God-obsessed” person. Fatemeh Keshavarz puts the question beautifully: “How is one to nurture this God buried like a ruin in the treasure of one’s being and let it permeate all of life?” Most important to answering that question is the word that begins the Rule of St. Benedict: “Listen.” Stop talking. Shut up and be quiet. If preparation were primarily about what you know and what you’ve read, I’d be in decent shape. Only when my sabbatical experiences anumber of years ago included a daily commitment to quietness did I begin to realize that, for me at least, preparation for God requires me to stop thinking and start listening.
Show up. This is more about internal awareness than external place. When I’m too busy, too stressed, or too lazy to see anything other than whatever is an inch in front of my nose, I’m failing to show up. When I assume that these texts, those places, these people, and those situations can’t possibly be vehicles for contact with the divine, I’m failing to show up. When I continue to forage through the books and experiences where I’ve bumped into the transcendent in the past, presuming that God will remain there on my terms, I’m becoming an idolater rather than showing up. When I rely heavily on my brain, with which I’m most familiar, rather than my heart, which I’m not as comfortable with, I’m failing to show up.
We live in a reality soaked in transcendence, sacramental to its core. Everything is important–nothing is disposable. Once at a workshop the leader frequently said that two things are key to the spiritual life–“Be where you are,” and “Do what you’re doing.” Sounds easy, but just try it–it’s a never-ending challenge to be present every moment of the day. But I don’t want to miss anything. As Annie dillard writes, “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is be there.”
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