Perhaps the most distinctive mark of good reading, particularly in relation to its value in guiding the spiritual pathway, comes in the manner in which, well before the final pages close, a breeze has already freshened into and has begun returning from other works. Usually, but not always, the flow moves toward authors referenced in footnotes, sometimes and not too often a link goes to additional texts by the original author. And best happens when the spirit takes oneself outside language and into inspiring life experience itself. In any case, the flow carries one deeper, further into richer meaningfulness and awe: in brief, “Ahh” and “Wow!” echoing with “Amen.”
Before “finishing” The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (and already well aware that I’m properly advised to circle back to pages marked, back to the extensive footnotes, and better yet to return for another full reading), Chittick’s references to Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth had led to my taking it from the shelf and to doing so with almost-readiness to engage/absorb bits of the mystical text. I had been prepped by Chittick to be a bit more open about “angel-language” and to take a chance in terrain that I’ve usually detoured around because it smacked of “new-age” superficiality.
Reflecting on this hostile avoidance to angels, I find it’s strange. How can it be that angel-talk has tended to be a turn-off? Have I disconnected from the prominent presence of angels in the sacred Books? Immediately leaping to mind: The angels with Daniel & friends in the fiery furnace and the lion’s den (Daniel 3 & 6); The awesome that meets Mary and Mary at the tomb and transforms grief and despair into abiding faith (Matthew 28); and Muhammed’s guides for the Night Journey (including al-Buraq), as well as attendants in the Night of Power: “The angels and the Spirit descend therein, by the leave of their Lord, with every command” (Q 97:4, p. 1540 in The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary). Similarly, I’m asking how can I be so close-minded about angels while finding myself fascinated with Khidr, particularly the account of Khidr and Moses that involves the resurrected fish (cf. the Water of Life motif) and the highly significant theme around the surrender of legalism in favor of mind-bending re-creations, suggesting the possibility of direct transmission of personal truth.
Several possible, inter-related, reasons for resistance to angels spring to mind:
- Science rules the Academy crowning empirical proof and dismissing (even ridiculing) other forms of knowledge, especially anything mystical.
- Proliferation of stuff claiming to be spiritual (sometimes called “New Age”) makes difficult the discernment of material actually qualifying for the prophetic tradition.
- Fear of falling out of control makes a person wary of trusting anything outside rational knowledge.
- What about the devil!
I don’t listen much to music other than wind chimes, bird songs, and soft raindrops on fallen leaves; but the other day, while driving as these mysteries of angelic visitation were blurring about in my being, I tapped on the car CD and Carrie Newcomer sang: “…there’s bound to be some trembling, some risk and some mistakes, something lost and something gained, and Little Earthquakes. . .” (from album Gathering of Spirits). So perhaps it’s Little Earthquakes that happen when Angels enter the liminal edge. Of course, it’s safer to stay with scientific, factual certainty and to toss all angelology indiscriminately into a new-age bin.
But, then, doesn’t this resistance carry a whiff of noxious pride of intellect? Having spent forty-plus years in the academic complex proved to me that there are deadly limits in the narrow scientific worldview and convinced me something’s missing of vital importance. Retirement might be given especially in order to dedicate priority to what’s been squeezed to the margins, particularly that which concerns life beyond. Of course, the shenanigans of spiritualists persist and walking where angels tread is fearful; but time grows short and we have promises to meet.
While the connection slowly articulates, I’m drawn to explore the possibilities involving the degree of our relationship with the natural world (including love of animals and plant life) and the way this correlates directly with our access to the spirit world (including angels or other presences). In other words, our closeness to the voice of animals and plants corresponds to some degree with our capacity to hear God’s messengers. About a thousand years ago, a work by the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’, “a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad”) forecast the cost of human insensitivity; but “folktales” (especially those having talking animals) too often go unheeded, and so the environmental crisis resulting from human arrogance now threatens our existence because our “civilization” has burned so brutally. S.H. Nasr provides an introduction to a recent retelling of the Brethren’s Epistle recalling his engagement with the text when writing his doctoral thesis at Harvard in the mid 1950’s:
“The message of the story appeared to me to be particularly timely because even then there was a keen intuition in my mind concerning the impending crisis in man’s relation with nature, a subject to which I turned a decade later in my Man and Nature, written at the dawn of general awareness of what came to be known as the ecological and later environmental crisis” (p. xii, The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity, Fons Vitae, 2005).
This text by the Brethren of Purity offers a place for me to continue to contemplate and to allow the voices of animals to open. A helpful, although dense, complement comes in the flow mentioned earlier, particularly Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. For example:
“To come face to face with the Earth not as a conglomeration of physical facts but in the person of its Angel is an essentially psychic event which can ‘take place’ neither in the world of impersonal abstract concepts nor on the plane of mere sensory data. The Earth has to be perceived not by the senses, but through a primordial Image and, inasmuch as this Image carries the features of a personal figure, it will prove to ‘symbolize with’ the very Image of itself which the soul carries in its innermost depths. The perception of the Earth Angel will come about in an intermediate universe which is neither that of the Essences of philosophy nor that of the sensory data on which the work of positive science is based, but which is a universe of archetype-Images, experienced as so many personal presences. In recapturing the intentions on which the constitution of this universe depend, in which the Earth is represented, meditated, and encountered in the person of its Angel, we discover that it is much less a matter of answering questions concerning essences (‘what is it?’) than questions concerning persons (‘who is it?’ or ‘to whom does it correspond?’), for example, who is the Earth? who are the waters, the plants, the mountains? or, to whom do they correspond? The answer to these questions causes an Image to appear and this Image invariably corresponds to the presence of a certain state. This is why we have to recapture here the phenomenon of the Earth as an angelophany or mental apparition of its Angel in the fundamental angelology of Mazadaism as a whole, in that which gives its cosmology and its physics a structure such that they include an answer to the question, ‘who?’” (pp. 4-5).
Good readings, as noted above, best inspire life experience. A couple of places I’m attentive to find this include:
* When I’m with Leg’cy (riding or just alongside her), feel the form of Harmony coming through, often involving a sense of Power that carries light (lightness) and a thrill of joy. Notice how this contrasts with the perverted exercises of power evident in the material world.
* When I work/play/imagine with photographic images, attend to the “form” of Beauty that comes through. Engaging with and listening to different representations of the same view seems to open my being more present to the voice coming through the natural world from the Source. Perhaps the Earth Angel that Corbin notes is here somewhere.
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| photos taken this morning, Sunday, October 13 |
In mid-life years, leafless limbs of winter whispered forebodingly; old, now bare, trees prophesy life eternal. 
