A man approached a spiritual master with a question. "What is there to gain from reading the Qur'an if we will never fully understand it? What's the point of reading the same book over and over again?"

The sage took the man to a well, emptied a bag of coal, and handed the dirty bag to him. Fill it with water. "But master, this is cloth. The water will seep through." The sage said, "If you trust me, do as I say," and left.

For hours the man filled the bag bucket after bucket. Every time, the water pooled on the ground and the bag sat empty. By the time the sage returned, the man was exhausted and defeated. He looked up to find the sage smiling at him. "Why are you smiling? I have no water in this bag."

The sage picked up the bag and held it out. It was white and clean now, every trace of coal washed away. "You could not contain the water," he said. "But look what the water did to the bag."

The Qur'an does not fill. It washes. Every sitting, every recitation, every verse whose meaning escapes us is still doing its work.

Every one of us arrives in this world on fitrah, an original purity, an innate nature already oriented toward Allah. The coal is not who we are. The habits, the forgetting, the years of distance, they are what happened to the bag.

The revelation of God was not sent to give you something you do not have, but rather to remove every veil in the way of your seeing that you already are what you seek to become.

Reflect on this:

What would change if we approached recitation this week as cleansing before achievement?

^{Share your reflections in the poll at the end of the email.}