#Seed032: An Homage to Abdel Majid
Or the beginning and the end of the Path unto the One are One
“All thoughts, all actions mean and are worth nothing, unless one's heart has been established on the Transcendent path of His Truth.” - Abdel Majid El-Amine (God shower Love on his soul.
Dear readers,
Thirteen years ago, my closest friend left this world. There is not a single day that my brother doesn't come to my heart. It was 4,749 days ago that my brother joined the paradisical stars and firmly established himself on the Transcendent path of His Truth.
It is both painful and comforting when someone you love dearly leaves this world and drowns in the Ocean of the Divine. But to have a part of yourself in the Divine Presence is perhaps the most valuable gift one can ask for.
My friendship with Abdel Majid was the catalyst for practicing philosophy as a way of life. We met as we were becoming men in 2002. Every night, we explored the depths of our souls, the nature of the cosmos, and the Reality of God. Aristotle argues that the highest type of friendship, that of virtue, is the catalyst to our pursuit of the good life. It is also the rarest form. I was heedless of that fact and assumed that all friendships were grounded in the search for meaning and truth. Now in my mid-30s, I can only testify how rare that is.
I don’t want to belabor the point. I do, however, wish for all of you to cultivate friendships of meaning, and ecologies of truth, beauty and goodness with your loved ones. Some of the greatest friendships in history were like this: Achilles and Patroclus, Socrates and Plato, Rumi and Shams al-Tabriz, Emerson and Thoreau, Tolkien and Lewis. These are but a few examples, but I believe that there are many friendships, forged between the lines of history, that led our fellow humans to live the good life.
Today, I want to share the final letter I wrote to my beloved brother after he left this world on August 1st, 2011. This letter is but a drop in ocean of our friendship. But I want to share these with you with the hopes that you also find a companion on your spiritual path, or that you express gratitude for those companions still around you. For as Mevlana Rumi writes, “friendship is the sweetest form of love.”
Abdel Majid,
As I just wrote those letters of your name, my heart began to throb. It began to throb the way you fall in love with the unlovable; the feeling of wanting to overcome the impossible. Is it painful? Yes, but not unbearable. It is like the pain we felt when we decided to sojourn from that ghostly mountain town Murdochville to Gaspé and you decided to march ahead of me ready for that treacherous two hundred mile hike.
I wasn't ready.
Every day I miss you. I miss our talks, our laughs, our prayers. I sometimes cry then find joy for what God has given me through you. When we were growing up, our questions guided us. There was one question that stuck.
How should I be?
It was a question of meaning. What was the sense of our existence? How can we understand the world around us? These were the questions that define a human being as philosopher. Every day, we would find ways to discuss this question. We exchanged ideas.
It's all absurd.
Camus?
It’s all about experience.
Carlos Castaneda?
Buddha is right; it has to do with enlightenment.
Let’s try yoga.
I want to be a pilgrim.
I give up.
Sadness.
I submit.
The submission came, I think, while we were trying to hitch a ride outside St. Anne-des-monts in Quebec. It was cold and rainy and you didn't have gloves. Of course you didn't have gloves! I gave you one so we could at least feel half the warmth of one glove. We were, amidst these conditions, content. You would remind me that the person that is going to pick us up is probably just having their cup of coffee. We just have to wait until God's decree reveals itself to us.
''Isn't it perfect,'' you said, ''the way every drop creates a perfect circle in the puddle, they come and they go, just like us.''
We are these circles, created, expanding until extinction, only to remain in the Infinite Grace of God.
Divine decree became apparent from then on. We would share our dreams and they would become signs for the path. We had figured out that the most efficient way of travelling was to go with our hearts. The first decision was the right one. Divinely inspired, we would collectively decide that we were going North. We knew that we were coasting the will of God.
It’s easy, however, to see God in all things. It is much harder to have a good character and to see God in yourself. The question of being was not answered. It took many hard lessons, many tears and heartbreaks to understand this. After you came to me with your dream of your grandmother Lady Fatima, you had an answer. It lay in the example of Fatima's blessed Father, the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him. You began following the path and you changed. You were kinder. You were more compassionate. You were more caring. And you listened. You had figured it out.
You brought the path to life and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this. You passed from this world with a beautiful character, a wonderful heart and a magnificent intellect. The ideal to live that we thought so long about is here. And now, I try my hardest to live by it, to live by you, to live by your grandfather.
I love you. You are my Shams al-din. The Sun of the Way. I am forever grateful that God spoke through you to help me. I pray that I may be in that Garden with you and all of God's Beloved.
Your friend and brother,
Stephane
Fourteen years later, I’m reminded that the spiritual on path is about establishing one’s heart on the Transcendent path of His Truth. All thoughts, feelings, attachments, actions are fleeting.
Masha'Allah. Beautiful. Fatiha for his soul.
This was so beautiful Stephane, thank you for sharing with us. To Him we belong, and to Him we return. May we all be so blessed to find such spiritual connections at least once in this lifetime.