First Station

[This consists of five Signs]

FIRST SIGN

As is described at the end of the Twenty-Sixth Word, when making a precious garment, ornamented with jewels and embroidery, a skilful craftsman employs a poor man in return for a commensurate  wage.  In order  to display his skill and art, he dresses the man in the garment, then measures and cuts it, and lengthens and shortens it;  making  the  man  sit  down  and  stand  up,  he  gives  it  various  forms.  Does  the wretched man have the right to say to the craftsman: “Why are you meddling with this garment which makes me beautiful, altering and changing it? Why are you making me stand up and sit down, disturbing me and causing me trouble?”

In exactly the same way, in order to display the perfections of His art through the embroideries  of  His  names,  the  All-Glorious  Maker  takes  the  essential  nature  of beings as a model, then He clothes them all and especially living creatures  in the garment of a body bejewelled  with senses, and inscribes  it with the pen of divine decree and determining, thus displaying the manifestation of His names. In addition, He gives to each one of them a perfection, a pleasure, an effulgence, in a way suitable to it and as a wage.

Does anything have the right, then, to say to the All-Glorious Maker, who exemplifies the meaning of, “the Lord of All Dominion has free disposal over His realms as He wishes:” “You are giving me trouble and disturbing me.”? God forbid! Beings have no rights before the Necessarily Existent One, nor can they claim them. What falls to them is, by offering thanks and praise, to carry out what is required by the degree of existence He has given them. For the degrees of existence that are given are  occurrences,   and  each  requires   a  cause.   Degrees  that  are  not  given  are possibilities,  and  possibilities  are  non-existent  as  well  as  being  infinite.  As  for instances of non-existence, they do not require a cause. For example, minerals cannot say: “Why weren’t we plants?”; they cannot complain. What falls to them is to offer thanks to their Creator for having been given mineral existence. And plants may not complain asking why they were not animals; what is due to them is to offer thanks, for they have received life as well as existence.