Romans 11:22 · World English Bible
See then the goodness and severity of God. Toward those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in his goodness; otherwise you also will be cut off.
Jalāl and Jamāl: Majesty and beauty Ibn Arabi's names for the two sides of how God appears, the side that draws close and the side that stops you cold. A person who has only met the warm side starts treating warmth as the whole arrangement, and the gift slowly begins to feel owed.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SUFISM
Jalāl and Jamāl: Majesty and beauty Ibn Arabi's names for the two sides of how God appears, the side that draws close and the side that stops you cold. A person who has only met the warm side starts treating warmth as the whole arrangement, and the gift slowly begins to feel owed. Holding both sides in view keeps the good in someone's life feeling like something they were handed.
Khawf and rajāʾ: Fear and hope Al-Ghazali treats these as a pair, the two wings a person needs to get anywhere. Hope on its own makes someone careless about how they live; fear on its own grinds them down until they quit. Carried together they make a person steady and awake at once, glad for where they stand and unwilling to assume it holds no matter what.
ʿUjb: Self-admiration Al-Ghazali's word for quietly taking credit for what you were given. The slide starts small, when someone watches others go down and begins to feel made of sturdier material. From there they stop asking for help, since help is for people who might fall, and the fall comes without warning.
The heart is between two fingers of the Merciful, who turns it as he wishes: no one owns their own standing A saying of the Prophet that Sufis bring up whenever someone gets too comfortable. Anyone who has watched their own confidence come and go knows the feeling; yesterday's steadiness is not banked for today. Being firm right now is a state a person is held in, which is why the ones counting on it are the ones caught off guard.
Istidrāj: Being drawn along step by step by good times The Quran describes people led on by blessings they read as approval. Someone whose life is going well takes the ease as a verdict in their favor and stops examining anything. Comfort settles nothing about where a person stands; it mainly makes the question easy to forget.
Istiqāma: Staying straight The Quran's call to say what you believe and then keep going in one line. Belonging holds up through ordinary continuation, not through a single moment of arrival. The plain stretches, when nothing feels warm and no one is watching, are where it gets carried, and staying through those is the whole of it.
Sufism lens
Do I live like the good in my life is owed to me, or like it was given?
Fill a cup to the brim and you will spill it. A life of nothing but ease and advantage is already tilting.
What you have is on loan and can be recalled at any hour. Loving it while knowing it is not owed is the only steady way to hold it.
The changing world hands out pleasant and unpleasant alike, and both pass. Staying even through the warm stretch and the cold one is the practice itself.
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Sufism