On Trust (with extensive additions):

“Trust” in the way that people commonly use the word is different from true “trust” from a Sufi and Islamic perspective. Commonly people use the word “trust” to mean that you have an agreement or understanding with someone; and then you can relax and depend on them to follow through, like when you put your car on cruise control, you don’t have to think about the speed after that. Or you trust that you can leave your pet or house or business in the care of someone while you go on vacation and trust that they will be fine when you return.

True “trust”, however, in Islamic Sufism is different. It involves a constantly renewed vigilance, at every moment, to put our welfare (the welfare of our soul) in God’s hands, whatever God wishes to do with us, with no conditions, no strings attached, no hidden exceptions. Our trust is not that God will treat us how we would like, with benevolence. Rather our trust is that God will sometimes treat us with benevolence and sometimes with severity in order to guide and train us not to rest on our laurels, because we have a tendency to kick back and chill after surrendering and trusting once or a few times, as if that is sufficient to put us in Paradise.

So our trust is that God sometimes treats us with benevolence and sometimes with severity in order to guide and train us to keep entrusting our heart, mind, and soul to God, which trust is our deen, our surrendering, our islam. We trust that in our renewing our trusting and surrendering, this will increase the likelihood that the ocean of God’s Merciful rahma– which underlies both the superficial benevolence and severity of what happens to us in our lives–will bubble up into our hearts, sometimes as a trickle and sometimes as a tidal wave or eruption.

We do not trust that God will never allow our hearts to be stomped on. Rather we trust that when God does allow our hearts to be stomped on, God will also enable us to attempt (or intend) to sip the Merciful and Loving Rahma beneath the surface by enabling us to renew our trust and to continue our grateful surrendering.

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The Arabic word for this kind of trust in God is at-tawakkul ‘ala Allah.
At first glance it may not seem like the kind of trust that we are looking for, either when we want to trust that we are making the right decisions at various major crossroads in our lives or even when we are looking for the trusting assurance that we are making the right decisions throughout our day.

Some people, not wanting to ruin their lives or hurt others, when lacking such trust (even after seeking guidance from God through doing istikhara prayers or consulting with shaykhs), may become so fearful of making a wrong decision that they are unable to make a decision and take action. (The opposite extreme is arrogance, but I will have to deal with that on another occasion.) Fortunately, there is a way out of such an impasse.

Being fearful of making wrong decisions is incapacitating when one is unaware of or forgets that what God is asking of one, first and foremost, is not *to have or possess* trust, confidence, and certainty. Rather, God’s invitation to trust in God means trusting in God enough, at this moment, to direct your consciousness *to attempt to respond* with the hope (or intention) of being just the slightest bit grateful to God for your fear (or whatever you are feeling, thinking or perceiving).

Trusting in God means to trust (hypothesize or even gamble) that such fear (or other feeling, thought, or perception) is merely the wrapping of a gift that God is presenting to you. In theological terms it is trusting that such a feeling, thought, or perception may be the outer dimension (zahir) of a theophany (tajalli) or Divine Manifestation of an attribute or sign (aya) of God that God wants you to know fully (both the outer and the inner).

Such a trust consists of trusting that what is inside the wrapping, or the inner dimension, however, may be the ocean of infinite and all-embracing Divine Love and Merch (rahmah), in which we are nothing but a drop.

In other words, taken together, trusting in God means trusting (or even just positing) that such outer and inner dimensions of what we see as fear (or any other feeling, thought, or perception) may in fact consist of a momentary appearance of the face of God–the outer dimension of which consists of whatever we are experiencing and the inner dimension of which is the all-inclusive and ultimately transcendent ocean of unity, as we read in the Qur’an, “Wherever you turn, there is the face of God” (Qur’an 2:115 and “My mercy encompasses every thing” (Qur’an 7:156).

This trusting in God, which must be a Sufi’s primary response to every moment, is called the greater form of effort (al-jihad al-akbar). The more we unconditionally trust in God as I have described, the less our decisions and our actions in our lives –which are our lesser (but still highly signficant) forms of effort (al-jihad al-asghar)–will be bullied and distorted by our compulsive need to avoid the fear of making the wrong decision (or the less they will be compelled by our arrogance that we must have made the right decision).

This trusting in God needs to be unconditional at this moment, which fortunately is easier than it may seem–but it contrasts with the nature of the ego-self (nafs), whose grateful trust is conditional. When fear or whatever feelings, perceptions, and thoughts that the ego-self dislikes appear (and do not meet the ego-self’s instinctive or learned conditions for grateful or even loving trust), the ego-self defaults to its flight/flight instincts or early childhood conditioned behaviors.

At best, primitive fight/flight human behaviors and habitual behaviors learned mainly in early childhood (which behaviors comprise the nafs) do not generally provide us with the wisest or optimal solutions for assesing and responding to the complex situations we face in our daily lives. At worst, such behaviors can create great destruction and evil, which is why in the Qur’an we are strongly warned about the ego-self’s compulsive propensity for evil (Qur’an Surat Yusuf, 12:53).

Fortunately, gratefully and unconditionally trusting in God increases the likelihood of our being freed from the tyrannical compulsive conditions of the ego-self because in choosing to trust God unconditionally, we decondition the ego-self and retrain our consciousness, showing it that the conditions to which the nafs generally defaults and compulsively pursues are in fact not necessary for our survival and well-being. In traditional Sufi and Qur’anic terms this is call purification of the nafs, i.e., purifying it from its dependence on the conditions to which the nafs instinctively and habitually tends to default. This is referred to in the Qur’an “Whoever purifies it [i.e., the nafs] finds success” (Surat Shams 91:9).

Although gratefully trusting in God unconditionally might seem like an insurmountable task, practically speaking it is not as difficult as it might seem since the only conditions that we are being presented with now (or tested on) are whatever we are feeling, thinking or perceiving at this moment. The test is whether or not we will stop trusting in our grateful embrace of this moment’s appearance of the face of God (the outer form of which consists of our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions now). The test is whether or not we will refuse to gratefully trust in God (refusing to sip a breath in gratitude to God) when this moment’s appearance of God’s face does not meet one of the conditions of our ego-self. In Qur’anic terms the test is that in this moment, when God asks us “Am I not your Lord-Sustainer (bi-rabbikum)?” will we respond with “No, you’re not, since you are not meeting my ego-self’s conditions for a Rabb!”?

Or, will we respond with gratefully trusting in God, as if to say, “Yes” (bala) You are my Lord-Sustainer in just the way you are appearing now; I will attempt not to reject and deny you ungratefully”; Yes, I will attempt to embrace You now gratefully, without trying to impose any conditions on You?

In sum, fortunately, the more moments we chose to gratefully trust in God, embracing and surrendering to God in this manner on our greater jihad, the more we will become freed from the conditions and destructive habits of our ego-self, which will increase our ability to assess, make decisions, and act more wisely in our lesser form of effort in our lives since we will be less encumbered by the primitive and childish and often destructive habitual responses of our ego-self, inshallah.