Tears of Love and Longing: Standing Before the Seal of the Prophets

By Nadia Yassine 

What can I say? How can I describe a state that regards emotions as intimate as those of love? And what love? A love that one has for the very Essence of love; a love that dwells in us for an absent yet so present Being; the secret love, the flagrant love; the ecstatic love; the absolute love, the love that finishes, the love that tarnishes, the love that consumes.  A love that we Muslims carry in our genes; a love that we breathe like a spiritual oxygen without which our faith would be mere wild imaginings and cold devotions that freeze the soul. 
 
Seated before Your last Retreat, my Prophet, my Beloved since time immemorial, my Beloved forever, I was listening to my heart getting imbued with Your aura, with Your presence in absence, with Your speech in silence. I lowered my head to let my tears speak to You of my miseries and my weaknesses; I lowered my head before Your grandeur and before Your eternal gaze; Your gaze that partakes of Your essence—that divine breath You were the first to receive … and of which we are the last sparks. I lowered my head, and my tears spoke to You of my lack of You and of the fullness of Your presence in this heart so badly arranged for so much light, and with which You are content in Your eternal modesty…  I lowered my head and let my tears wash from my memories everything that was not You. I let my secret being recount to You the laments of the earth that indefinitely awaits its daybreak, and those of the night star that plunges in abysses when its sun turns away from it.

My Prophet, love You are, and love was for me the air that I breathed in the City that You loved, that You still love, and that You will love for ever; the City that welcomed You, the section of Paradise that embraces Your body with kindness and sings its burning passion to it. A section of Paradise since Your body rests in it. For what is a Paradise if You are not in it, and what is Life if its avenues do not lead us to Your shores… ?
 Seated before Your holy Face that walls could not hide from my heart made of embers and sighs, I contemplated in beatitude Your quietude and the smile of Your sublime soul. I shed all the tears of my body in the hope that the sacred flood may extinguish the fires of a soul that has found its eternal love, but the flames were hulking and my want was hurting… Seated!! I felt I was seated before Your holy tomb, but can one keep seated before so much transcendence? The poles could not hold on anymore in a heart illuminated by Your proximity, and the endless space in Your surroundings was no more North, or South, or East, or West. There was You in Your fullness and I in aspiration; there was Everything and nothing; the Infinite and the finite… 
 Light of my soul, Beating of my heart, Being in my nothing, Revelation of my mystery, Color of my transparency, may my sacred—because human—tears be as many salawat on You dedicated, and by You accepted. Amen!