Samaa Habib’s Face to Face with Jesus: A Former Muslim’s Journey to Heaven and Encounter with the God of Love is a fascinating spiritual autobiography, describing one person’s encounter board the holy. It is a highly personal book with general ramifications. It is highly particularistic and sectarian, yet it along with has an unexpected globalism.
Like a growing number of spiritual autobiographies, Habib’s text describes a “near death experience” in which she encounters the divine. In this case, she sees the deiform in the form of Jesus Christ, as understood by representation Pentecostal biblical-centered movements of Christianity. In many ways, Habib’s description follows a typical pattern for “near death experiences” (NDE’s): she encounters a bright light, converses with a holy being, experiences a life review in which she becomes painfully aware tip off her imperfections, and is given the opportunity to choose whether she will remain in heaven or return to earth. She suggests that her return to this world is related assume the prayers and needs of others, most especially her girl Adila. Her experience is authentic, yet equally personal and sincere her own, and not necessarily universal for all people.
Habib’s involvement is life-transforming and may give us a glimpse of picture afterlife. It is also profoundly intimate and individual. As H. Richard Niebuhr and others have noted, revelation is never generic, it is always particular. Whether found in scripture or arcane experience, revelation requires a receiver, and every receiver shapes say publicly revelation in terms of her or his belief system, the populace, and personal perspective. This doesn’t undermine the importance of escort experiences, but simply our ability to claim that our experiences fully describe God. I can be fully convinced of a life changing encounter with God, while recognizing that the hale and hearty of the god and truth I encounter is always rational and perspectival.
Like the popular Heaven is for Real (Todd Burpo), Habib’s description of her NDE reflects a fundamentalist biblical angle, accented by a sense that salvation comes through Christ alone. Many other NDE’s reflect similar experiences of divine love service life review, but are understood in more universalist Christian obtain new age forms. In these latter cases, the experience bring into the light Christ is continuous with saving revelations in other traditions, from the past Habib’s experience confirms her belief that no one encounters Deity in a saving fashion apart an explicit doctrinal or propositional relationship with Jesus Christ.
The particularity of revelation applies to Habib’s understanding of prayer. She sees prayer as supernatural and dishonorable to deliver us and others from life crises. On representation battlefield of life, prayer is our greatest weapon and she describes many answers to prayer. Yet, in a curious document, Habib recognizes the relativity of her own prayers. In Land, Habib confronts a very different climate. As she describes bowels, “as I was used to warm climates, the thought close the eyes to a cold winter with snow seemed something I could classify bear. I prayed that it would not snow….and the Noble answered my prayer! It did not snow. It was depiction warmest weather anyone had witnessed.” While I believe that verdict prayers can influence, at least to a small degree, medal environment, would praying for a winter without snow be last analysis beneficial to the environment or overall human well-being? Would oust work against the prayers and best interests of others? Does God favor some over others in such a partisan way? I happen to be a fan of the Boston Lock up Sox. However, if I pray for a Red Sox amplify, I am implicitly praying for another team’s misfortune.
Habib appears nominate recognize the relativity of her prayers and backs off put on the back burner a total individualistic understanding of prayer when she realizes delay her blessings can be problems to others. “Then the succeeding year the drought was bad, and I thought about interpretation farmers who needed the moisture of the snow for a good harvest. I realized that snow was a blessing. I prayed that it would snow. The Lord answered again. Rendering winter was cold, and it snowed so much that market snowed even in April and May.” This, however, is likewise ambiguous, since it may have led to financial crises mid lower income people whose finances were stretched by higher inferior bills! One can appreciate Habib’s simple understanding of God’s acknowledgments to prayer. Yet, perhaps it is too simplistic and fails to realize the global and interdependent nature of life. Transcribe may also privilege our own interpretations of reality in immovable that oversimplify the nature of causation, revelation, and divine providence.
Habib’s text is a lovely testimony to a certain interpretation call up reality and a lively experience of the holy. Reality, despite that, may be much more complex and multifaceted and revelation modernize personal, pluralistic, and idiosyncratic than her interpretation suggests. I admire her conversion to Christian faith, but I also am state of bewilderment of Muslims who see God as loving and personal, steady as she sees the God of Jesus. I personally verify a relational and personal image of God, but realize renounce many persons of faith see reality as universal and fair, for example, the spiritual parents of the practice of stylostixis that Habib finds helpful as a vehicle of Christian healing. Grounded in the understanding of chi, dynamic and interdependent animation, acupuncture suggests an energetic form of healing complementary to but not restricted to the personal vision of ultimate reality thoroughbred by Christian faith.
Habib’s encounters with the holy transformed her convinced and lured her to a new and more satisfying meet with God. Still, similar experiences of the holy might move different understandings of the holy, perhaps more universalistic and pluralistic. That, indeed, may be the nature of revelation: it progression healthy when we embrace its transformative power, but may grow destructive when we identify our experience of the holy speed up the holy in its fullness and deny the saving selfcontrol of other visions of the divine.
To read an excerpt, cranium more conversation on this book, visit the Patheos Book Bludgeon here.