Imagine to Remember

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As a child I was taught to worship, to say my prayers at the appointed times, to honour my parents, to give charity; all the usual commands of religion. I was also taught that worship was for our own good, God you see, does not need our prayers. So I obeyed, or atleast I tried. But I felt that something was amiss. I was introduced to a cold, impersonal, distant God, who I feared like a referee was waiting for me to make an inevitable foul. Years later I was both surprised but also not so surprised (a part of me suspected that something, something very essential, was being withheld from me, although I am not exactly sure by whom), to learn that in my upbringing, despite their good intentions, the adults had done me a great disservice. They portrayed God as something other than what God is and in doing so committed their own accidental blasphemy, a falsehood that continues to reverberate in my mind, like an echo in an empty room. And the fault does not lie entirely with them because, they too were misled, like their parents before them, on and on, further back and back it goes. ⁣
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No one told me that a human, a lowly earthly creature like myself, could be a friend to God. That in their seeking these friends experience a deep intimacy. An intimacy that becomes the basis of all our human relationships.There is an Islamic tradition that says God created the world because He was a hidden treasure who wished to be known. So we each have the potential to be the means by which the Knower knows and is known, that is to be a friend. We all have this inborn potentiality, yet not everyone comes to realize this aspiration, not everyone is a friend of God. Is it a matter of not knowing how or not caring to? Or maybe, and what I guess, is that there are a great many who do not know it is possible and spend years, maybe even their whole lives wandering in a spiritual emptiness⁣