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| Photo taken July 2019 |
So you’re telling me that the “slanderer,” the “blamer,” and the “spy” are relations to treasure?
“… some commentators have interpreted the slanderer as a guardian angel…”
Really? You’ve got to be kidding! No! Well, maybe it doesn’t mean… how could these be valuable soul mates?
In one of the Classics of Western Spirituality, Thomas Emil Homerin translates Umar Ibn al-Farid’s “Poem of the Way,” which includes these lines: “My ancient allegiance to you/ led me to see those wicked young slaves you entrusted to me/ as great and guarded treasures” (emphasis mine, from p. 89, Umar Ibn al-Farid. Sufi Verse, Saintly Life. Trans & Intro by Th. Emil Homerin, Paulist Press, 2001). Homerin comments:
“The ‘wicked young slaves’ correspond to the slanderer (washin) and blamer (lahin; laim) found in many Classical Arabic love poems, including those of Ibn al-Farid. Along with the spy, they are among the lover’s protagonists who seek to thwart his goal of union with the beloved; the slanderer denigrates the lover as unworthy of love, while the blamer criticizes him for wasting his time and tries to deceive the lover into believing that the beloved is beneath him. Like the spy, the slanderer and blamer may be read in terms of the lover’s psyche, as the first pushes the lover to further spiritual self-sacrifice, while the latter would pull him down into more selfish sensual pursuits. In addition, some commentators have interpreted the slanderer as a guardian angel, and the deceiving blamer as Satan.” (p. 88; his commentary on p. 74 adds that “In courtly love poetry, the spy guards the beloved.”)
According to this text, the Path to God seems to include a kind of flip by which apparent adversaries become integrated into the more developed soul. If we are each moving closer in a journey toward Unity, such a phenomenal happening would fit. Change, often enough, feels uncomfortable—even when we acknowledge problems with the status quo.
Upon reflection, we realize how discomfort sometimes signals a better direction. Remember the soreness that marked the aftermath of a long run, that follows a good workout? Also, mental fatigue sometimes accompanies a significant breakthrough, an “ah-ha!” And emotional exhaustion comes in the train of those hard conversations that may be essential in order to ease estrangements.
Peace. Whether inner or outer, family or international, human as well as “all-my-relations,” how much it depends on shifting the boundaries of the “other.”
This perplexing/amazing transformation from “I/it” to “I/Thou” constructs and opens a much needed window into the spaces that are so hard to see: the soul, spirit, heart, mind, as well as the absolute and eternal ecology in God’s creation.
Getting to Peace looks to be quite a journey. A book on spiritual retreat says:
“the first theme in your meditation is to think something is trying to transpire behind that which appears. It is not God exactly; but it is what the Sufis call ayat: signs, or clues…God can never be the object of your knowledge, but there are some signs: namely, wherever you see beauty. In your despair, beauty is the clue—if you can see it transpire. And, actually, it is to be seen everywhere; but one has to have the eyes to see it…
A more concrete way of doing this is to see the beauty in the faces of people behind the masks that they are wearing; and even the beauty of your own face looking in the mirror, if you can see what transpires instead of that which appears. Ascribe what you do not like about what you see to the fact that we have had to borrow the fabric of our ancestors, and that we have been subjected to stress and pain and deception. It is true that the outer aspect of our being has suffered from distortion and defilement—but we have to look deeper.” (pp. 37-38 in that which Transpires Behind that which Appears by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan)
One of the richest resources concerning this ability to “see” and to resolve the estrangement from our soul brother/sister, from the beloved/Beloved must be Martin Buber’s I and Thou.
I contemplate a tree.
I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.…
Buber elaborates on the objective viewing of tree as “other” and then notes the transformational option:
But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined,
that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. . . The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.
Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. (pp. 57-59, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Scribner’s, 1970
And, then, when this road of true relation is taken far enough, or perhaps when walked at all—we arrive at/in the divine gift of love:
“Jesus’ feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one ‘has’; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the feelings that he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, men emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness; and the good and the evil, the clever and the foolish, the beautiful and the ugly, one after another become actual and a You for them; that is, liberated, emerging into a unique confrontation” (p. 66).
