2019.12.02 At the Turn of the Year

It is not the calendar year that turns in the bleak mid-winter. It’s the Church year. And the Season’s year. Looking outside at 4 p.m. to see the darkness begin to descend, reminds me that the day is turning itself downwards like the knob on the stove makes the bright fire of the burner’s flame slowly lower and lower and lower.

I understand why people become depressed in this season. I understand why people hasten to put up Christmas lights—prematurely. I understand why we rush to the stores to shop for glitter and glamor. I also understand why the Christian church calls for a slow-down, not a speed-up, a space where candlelight suffices. I understand why my heart thrills at the first silence of the first snowfall, a cold wet blanket of hush that says: Nurture the darkness. Let it wrap your soul in hope. Don’t rush. Wait. Listen. Every single snowflake has it own unique shape and its own silence. So, beloved, do you.

Poets and mystics in all spiritual traditions discover the full presence of the Divine in the stillness. Eastern traditions have lead the way. No wonder the Church sings the hymn, “People Look East” in this season. The East is where the sun rises.

One of the Islamic world’s greatest poets, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273), was a Sufi mystic, a lover of philosophy and of humanity. His followers began a school of mysticism for people to encounter the divine presence without mediation. The Sufi religious order was a mendicant order, so not noted for extravagance or shopping sprees. But they were noted for wild ecstatic rituals in which they danced and whirled and often howled. It is known to Westerners as “Whirling Dervishes.”

Notice these dervishes are all men. I find that exciting. Whirling wildly is a form of really letting go without getting drunk or high to do it. Women, then and maybe now, do dance wildly but not often in public, which could be dangerous—an invitation to sexual advances or rape.

Here is the poet Rumi to say it best.

Forget your life.
Say God is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is.
It’s time to pray.

You’ve carved so many little figurines, too
many.
Don’t knock on any random door like a
beggar.

Reach your long hands out to another door,
beyond where you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?” and no
one says, “How aren’t you?”

Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and
torn tonight, thrashing in the dark.

Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know
about. He’s not interested in how things look
different in moonlight.

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.

If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
you’re helping people you don’t know and
have never seen.

Is what I say true? Say yes quickly, if you
know, if you’ve known it from before the
beginning of the universe.


(NO, I don’t understand it either. So I just swallow it whole and say yes quickly—into the darkness, into the love, into myself, into God.)

2016.04.17 Oceanic Wisdom Of Islam in Easter

“The mercy of Allah is an ocean. Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean. It only has to open its beak.”
        from Minaret, a novel by Leila Aboulela

I love this image of the Divine Being named Allah. It’s in the first small chapter of Aboulela’s novel about Najwa, a Muslim girl from an aristocratic family who has been displaced from Khartoum, Sudan, as was Aboulela, and exiled in the wake of a 1985 military coup. Najwa struggles to adjust to the bustling urbanity of London where she cleans the houses of people who live as she used to live. The minaret in a nearby mosque becomes a symbol of hope and the hijab Najwa had eschewed at home, a garb of pride—and protection.

Minaret is a book about the power of religious symbols and traditional practices to be sturdy steadying anchors—assurances of divine compassion in any storm.

I can identify. When nothing makes sense and I have no sight, I perch, like the pigeon, in a pew, or before my home altar, on the edge of my bed or on a park bench, open my beak, and howl. Aboulela (left) is more quietly passionate.

Some days I feel like the ocean itself—vast and open and also glutted and sated with my own and everyone else’s shipwrecks stored up in my depths. Some days I’m like the pigeon staring into the ocean from a safe perch. I want to call out, assert my presence, but my "beak" is stuck in  mushy lumpiness. That’s what I feel like when I am mired in my own sin: the fear of being too exposed, too intimate, too transparent. The fear disconnects me from trusting goodness—in God, myself and others.

Aboulela’s image of sin as clay reminds me of the gray clay we used in kindergarten—all wet and squishy like mud. Our small fingers plunged deeply into the tough clay. It was like a jihad, which in Islam is the spiritual struggle within oneself against sin. I worked strenuously on my lump of clay to mold it into something that looked like something appealing that I could then put in the kiln to dry and take home to present to my parents. All of my great sculptures looked like turtles with longish legs. My mother adored every one, with a little too much adulation. My father stupidly asked what it was. It was a horse, of course! Whatever its identity, my offering fell graciously into the ocean of mercy.

My primary care physician, a Sufi Muslim named Noor, recommended Aboulela’s novel to me. In between listening to my chest for wheezes, taking my vitals, and recording my list of symptoms, she tells me where to go to enjoy the food she loves and recommends things to read. I return the favor. Noor is as sure of herself medically as she is about ethnic foods, spiritual books, and her absolute trust in Allah. Her trust in the unfailing compassion of Divinity is one-way and absolute. Mine is more two-way, favoring a co-creative process between humanity and divinity. Her husband, she says, would agree with me.

Noor, like Najwa in Aboulela's book, draws strength from her infallible faith in the oceanic Allah. Her trust is unswerving and never breaks, no matter the hardships of life on earth. My faith strengthens me, too, as the mercy of God, my Allah, participates with me, to mold my “clay"—even unto death. 

Either way, we both end up in the ocean where nothing is ever lost. Everything is nicely salted and preserved—forever. That is the most merciful outcome I can imagine.

Can We Divorce Spirituality From the Transcendent, Divinity?

I read an interview some weeks ago (New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2010) that shocked me.

The author Deborah Solomon questioned Deepak Chopra the man from India raised a Hindu and turned California guru of alternative wellness. Chopra is the founder of a wellness center in California.

I have read some of his work on meditation as a health practice. I confess I have not studied it, because I was not drawn into his thought save for his insistence on a holistic view of wellness.

I detected, however, a subtle suggestion that we could actually take control of our moments, days, even lives by meditative thought. We could almost MAKE or WILL ourselves well by this practice. Too much me and not enough God.

Where was there room for Divinity, for Spirituality meaning that transcendent mystery some call grace, others coincidence. Where was the Holy? Where was the divine/human relationship? Where human trust, faith, hope?

I suspected idolatry, worship of temporality with the expectation that would be enough.

If meditation became your god then what if a day came when you couldn’t do it?

If self-reliance your god on whom or what would you rely when resources dried up?

If science were your god and it had no cure or you couldn’t afford it, then what would you trust, where turn for healing?

Or...if your work was your god what happened when you couldn’t work or lost your job?

Where would meaning be found at the end of your rope?

I am not against meditation, know of its benefits myself, and often suggest it to people as a way to draw energy back from the distractions of a high speed culture and into the self or soul, a way to focus and center on Divinity, to bring together the transcendent dimension we call Divinity with the immanent dimension we call soul.

I call it contemplative prayer.

At any rate meditation is far from new to religious traditions. Neither btw is spirituality. Chopra seemed to me in this interview to calculate his thoughts in a dichotomous way; that is he offered an either/or mentality I didn’t find congruent with what he claims to represent: wellness.

For example, when queried about the Islam center in NYC and whether Sufism represented the reform branch of Islam, he responded, “Yes, traditional Islam is a mixture of obedience to Allah and if that requires militancy, so be it. Whereas Sufism exalts beauty, intuition, tenderness, affection, nurturing and love, which we associate with feminine qualities.”

Seemingly, male/female and Sufism/Islam do not easily co-exist in Chopra’s analysis.

I think growth toward wholeness, and incidentally wellness, happen when the best of tradition is supplemented rather than supplanted.

Asked if he believed in God’s existence, Chopra responded, “Yes, but not as a dead male.” I would agree if I thought the Christ spirit were dead or male. Mostly I thought it a snide slur.

Chopra defined his practice as “what I can only call a secular spirituality.” Can there be such a thing since secular still means any activity or attitude that has no spiritual or religious basis. Didn’t the idea of spirituality stem from religions’ awareness of Spirit beyond human boundaries but interacting within human process?

Or has it morphed to being just human values, nice cozy things like belonging? And aren’t humanistic values contingent, relative to culture? Perhaps Chopra means spiritual humanism?

Why try so hard to divorce spirituality from religion? Just because religion is unpopular in this age?

Spirituality and religion were also polarized in Chopras’ definitions in response to the question about how he would define spirituality as opposed to religion? “Self-awareness and awareness of other people’s needs.”

Spirituality is by this definition self-centered while religion is centered on other people. Is this another dichotomous solution? Aren’t self and other awareness part of holistic wellness?

Healthy spirituality can not be divorced from the need to be aware of the dignity of all human being and the whole created order. Equally, religion can not be sane if divorced from soul-awareness and nurture. Both/and.

The interviewer pushed on asking what religion he would say he is. “I say God gave humans the truth, and the Devil came and said, ‘Let’s organize it, we’ll call it religion.’ ”

No comment.

OK just one. Do you think meditation classes aren’t organized, that we students don’t know who the teacher/guru is and where s/he belongs in the structure? As long as no power abuses (and I know of such abuse in a meditation group in which the teacher, playing god, took physical advantage of a student’s vulnerability) occur the ordered/organized structure is in place for our wellness, just as in a functional family.

Trellis and roses make a necessary whole.

The interviewer soldiered on commenting that religion was free to worshipers and Chopra’s meditation retreats were costly. He countered with tax free donations to religions and the wealth of the Vatican. He thinks insurance companies should pay for his lifestyle management classes and they would save money.

That is a good idea and I agree we need to see, as Chopra said, “that alternatives medicine is now mainstream.” Another either/or?

I use traditional medicine and all the “alternatives.” Only I call them “complimentary.”

We need to remarry spirituality and religion—the best of both.