Certainty of a Higher Power

A recent dream played with finding the Way more by following a scent, like a dog tracking, rather than by logical planning, in the usual travel mode involving maps and guidebooks. The dream seemed to affirm the importance of going into the field of experience and trusting to revelation of the next step that’s taken expectantly with a nose sniffing the immediate moment. I believe the dream’s direction doesn’t say to discard the marvels of the mind, but instead it reminds that guidance for the individual pathway comes in attending to the edge of knowing, open to emergent consciousness, to liberated sense, to beauty and wonder. 

While still treasuring the written and spoken word, much of my journey has led into (re)sanctification of the body and into knowings that elude literacy. Early years were entrenched in fundamentalism, guarded against indulgence of the body (especially sex outside marriage); scripture was selectively forced to desacralize knowing through the body. Absolute priority was given to legalistic reading of biblical text as pronounced by persons asserting scholarly superiority. The decree was mind over body. 

         For many of us, this patriarchal model collapsed of its own bent when we pursued intellectual activity. Bart Ehrman’s account of his passage out of fundamentalism offers a clear example as he describes going from Moody Bible Institute to Princeton Theological Seminary (see “Commitment to Truth,” pp. 2-6 in Forged: Writing in the Name of God). As we advanced in academic degrees we found that sacred text yields a multiplicity of interpretation and not the prescriptive conclusions evident in fundamentalism. In a way, this emphasis on the mind leads back to the scripture in Philippians concerning the unique workings out of each individual’s prayerful accountability. (For more on this, see previous blogs: Oct 4, 2017, One God; many faiths and Mar 12, 2017, Going Where… )

                   The charge to work out one’s salvation with fear and trembling properly brings a person to one’s knees which can also occasion a feeling of need to reclaim the authority of the body, not as indulgence but as grounded knowing, true to one’s own fingertips. As noted in other blogs, my personal attempts to recover authentic voice of body have featured natural horsemanship (e.g., Mar 27, 2017 To Tell the Truth and Jan 4 2018 Faces of the Beloved  ) and plant ecology (e.g., Jan 3, 2018 These Frosty Woods). Special gifts from these engagements include increased sense of and appreciation for harmony, for beauty, and for the interconnection of power/love.

     It’s far too simplistic to discuss the pathway to God in only two dimensions: body and mind. A more complete and more provocative notion of the Pathway for “spiritual wayfarers on their journey to God” is given in the commentary on Quran 2:189 in The Study Quran:

“Ibn ‘Ajibah, for example, notes in his commentary on this verse that spiritual wayfarers on their journey to God have three houses whose gates they must pass through: the Law (sharīʿah), the Spiritual Path (ṭarīqah), and the Truth (ḥaqīqah), each of which has three gates. The three gates of the Law are repentance, obedience, and reverence; those of the Path are sincerity, the purification from faults, and the realization of virtue; and the three gates of the Truth (also translated as the Reality) are concentration, contemplation, and gnosis (spiritual knowledge). That is to say, human beings should approach God through the means He accepts, the means He has given them.” Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (p. 83). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

It may be presumptuous to hope for the ninth gate, but it is a fascinating possibility: gnosis! The term and concept refuse to be nailed down and, in that way, require a light touch, open to surprise and insight. In general, gnosis involves “intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths.” The doorway seems to demand appreciation for the mind, the body, and still more.

     A special treasure of retirement comes in the space to immerse in varied readings with less disruption from other external demands. It also provides space for playing the readings into experience, including solitude and meditation. Probably these are prerequisites for entering the doorway of gnosis. Feeling the expanse of time for slow reading and the bodily awareness sharpened in solitude, I’m trying again to find my way into the density of Frithjof Schuon’s Gnosis: Divine Wisdom. Perhaps the best, maybe the only way to approach gnosis is as a “bhakta.” In his glossary to this edition, James S. Cutsinger says a bhakta is a “person whose relationship with God is based primarily on adoration and love” (p.182). Schuon affirms the necessity of letting go the dominance of literacy and single-mindedness:

“It is easy to understand the slight respect shown by bhaktas, or by some of them, for ‘word for word’ exactness in belief or worship… there exists a de facto supremacy of the magic of the soul over the correctness of the symbol and that account must be taken of this supremacy if one wishes to grasp every aspect of the eternal interchange between man and God” (p. 15).

        This “eternal interchange” is what I take the gateway of gnosis to offer. It’s what takes my breath away with opportunity to let it return, more golden in wonder. The throne of intellect is smashed so that, by grace, admission to God’s Intellect may be accessed.

“… sacred Scriptures remain the necessary and unchanging basis, the source of inspiration and the criterion of all gnosis. Direct and supra-mental intellection is in reality a ‘remembering’ and not an ‘acquisition’: intelligence in this realm does not take cognizance of something located in principle outside itself, but all possible knowledge is on the contrary contained in the luminous substance of the Intellect—which is identified with the Logos by ‘filiation of essence’—so that the ‘remembering’ is nothing other than an actualization, thanks to an occasional external cause or an internal inspiration, of an eternal potentiality of the intellective substance. Discernment exists only in relation to the relative even if this relative lies beyond creation and at the very level of Being, and this explains why the Intellect coincides in its innermost nature with the very Being of things; and this is why gnosis underscores the profound continuity between the diverse forms of consciousness of the absolute.     And why this consciousness, some will ask? Because the truth alone makes free; or, better still, because there is no ‘why’ with regard to the truth, which is our intelligence, our freedom, and our very being; if it is not, we are not.” (p. 16)

Wandering in the house of gnosis, I’m humbled, well aware I’m not getting it clearly. And yet, the scent I pick up tracks the Way, best I can tell. I sense the significance of going back out to the trees, to tending the raspberry patch that’s just beginning to yield ripe berries, and to return to the arena with our horse where our mutual training readies the discernment by “filiation of essence.”

Also, in another way, readiness for Schuon probably follows from feeling reassurance through reading Susan Wittig Albert’s memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place. Albert paints the hill country near Austin, Texas, land to which I owe early wandering from the literalist one-right-way. Her tribute to time spent tending plant life as a medium for growing the soul reassures me about the faint sense of importance I have around loving our woods and gardens. Is the sweat, the time, and money we dedicate to this labor well spent? Although I know the answer is “Yes!” and that the beauty of images found by the camera resonates powerfully, the kind of certainty still wavers before institutional “truth.” 

Perhaps I’d find further support in Philip Sherrard’s Human Image World Image: The Death And Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Duane Johnson’s review of the book says: 

“His [Sherrard’s] plea is simply that we need to restore the ancient and more unabashedly 'metaphysical' outlook if we are to stand any chance of averting the political, social, and moral disasters waiting for us by virtue of our having collectively embraced an unalloyed scientific 'world image’.”

 While I’ll probably check out Sherrard, I suspect the certainty I’m longing to trust comes not in the word-world but in another texture more like light, known by warmth and inner vision, more like the sense that the air has turned a golden color and some beauty is calling, longing to be loved. This kind of knowing senses and feels the higher power found by tending the inner garden, the one yearned for by Antonio Machado: “llamo un claro dia con un perfume de jasmin el viento”—the wind one brilliant day called to my soul with the aroma of jasmine… 

Winter Solstice & the Imaginal World

December 21, 2018

Knowing, in this world, needs opposites to build meaning; and yet:

“If we look at the attributes of God’s Essence, such as life and knowledge we see that their opposites—death and ignorance—do not exist as such” (p. 131, Murata in Tao of Islam).

Today marks the winter solstice. This world’s extension of darkness offers an opportunity to reach further for the opposite, to strive toward the essence of light. Rumi gives a marvelous fable teaching the crazy difficulty humans have in finding the true light and in escaping the illusion of color. He illustrates with a rabbit tricking a lion. Nicholson’s commentary tells:

“…the whole fable is an allegory of the Divine Reason (manifested in the Hare) inspiring men to triumph over illusion and realise that essentially they are one with the Logos which knows all things as forms of itself and itself as the hidden ground of all” (pp. 88-89, Commentary on Book I, Mathnawi, lines 1111- ).

In order to further emphasize how susceptible humans are to confusion, Rumi brings in another figure (one close to my heart). Nicholson comments: “Reason or Spirit, the Divine element in Man, is compared to a horse which its rider cannot see, so that he thinks he has lost it” (p. 89). Rumi’s lines are translated by Alan Williams:

     “A man thinks he has lost his horse and yet

         perversely speeds his horse upon the road. . .

     That silly man, in panic and in seeking,

       goes searching on all sides from door to door:

     ‘Who is the one who stole my horse, where is he?’

       ‘Sir, what’s this one you have between your legs?’…

     The soul’s so visible and near, it’s lost,

       lips dry as dust and belly full of water.

     How can you see the red and green and brown

       unless you see the light before these three?”  (p. 109, Spiritual Verses)

As the Solstice pushes us to long for light and as we laugh at the silly rider (who is lost due to human presumption to know beyond human capacity), we might open to the teaching about Life and thus be better equipped to cope with our experiences involving death. Murata continues from the opening quotation about death not existing:

“If we look at the attributes of God’s Essence, such as life and knowledge we see that their opposites—death and ignorance—do not exist as such. What we call death and ignorance are relative lacks of life and knowledge. Only absolute nonexistence—which, of course, does not exist—could possess absolute death and absolute ignorance.” (p. 131, Murata in Tao of Islam).

And yet we are placed in this world where “there are no absolutes within creation” and therefore:

“things can be understood only in their relationships with God or with other things. There are two extreme poles, represented by spirit and body, light and darkness, heaven and earth, subtlety and density. Between the two poles stands a spectrum of created things that are in some ways qualitatively ambivalent” (p. 132)

One source for help in dealing with the inescapable confusion when caught between the poles comes through engaging an “imaginal world.”

“The middle world is ‘imaginal’ because, like an image in a mirror or a dream, it combines attributes of both sides and cannot be discussed in isolation without distorting its reality. It is neither a spirit nor a body, but it has certain attributes that are spiritual and certain that are bodily” (p. 132).

Here and now, this material is helpful to me because I need the imaginal world that helps me hold the invisible horsepower capable of dealing with the longest nights and with the loss of loved ones. By working and playing in this imaginal world, I move closer to the passage:

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” I Cor 15:55 which references Isaiah 25:8 Hosea 13:14.

Dec 21, "normal" setting for photo

same as above but perhaps into the "imaginal"

Transcendent Power

The transformation—caterpillar to butterfly—happening inside the dark of the cocoon calls to our sense of wonder, inviting us to join with our destiny in moving toward the great mystery. In similar manner, spiritual transformations also surpass the vision of human eyes, stretch the boundaries of language, and test the edge of faith. Perhaps we gain reassurance about life after life as we witness the metamorphoses of butterflies; since ancient times they’ve symbolized the soul. Transformational growth of the soul happens in this world as we advance in our experiencing the awe and bewilderment of transcendence. 

A primary place for spiritual transformation comes in a kind of death and rebirth of language. In Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Michael Sells asserts: “The transcendent must be beyond names, ineffable” (p. 2). One response to this challenge, modeled by many mystics, is the practice of silence, surrendering speech in the acknowledgment of a far superior knowing. The book of Job teaches the hard lessons of this pathway.

In addition to silence, engaging aporia (“irresolvable internal contradiction”) can bring us into the experience of awe, almost as if a rebirth of language into another power. This endeavor best proceeds through “himma” (intense spiritual resolve) toward the God who is both immanent (e.g., Psalm 139, “in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me”) and transcendent (beyond our thinking and imagining; e.g., Eph 3:20). 

Sells calls such discourse “the mystical languages of unsaying” and says it “begins with the aporia—the unresolvable dilemma—of transcendence” (p. 2). He explicates texts from Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart.

“At the high end of the scale of performative intensity are passages …in which the mystical discourse turns back relentlessly upon its own propositions and generates distinctive paradoxes that include within themselves a large number of radical transformations, particularly in the area of temporal and spatial relationships” (p. 3).

Sells shows how the “unsayings” provide a kind of experience in the field of transformation; they don’t just talk about it—we have opportunity to feel it.

“apophatic language attempts to evoke in the reader an event that is—in its movement beyond structures of self and other, subject and object—structurally analogous to the event of mystical union” (p. 10)“At the heart of that unsaying is a radical dialectic of transcendence and immanence. That which is utterly ‘beyond’ is revealed or reveals itself as most intimately ‘within’: within the ‘just act,’ however humble (Eckhart), within the basic acts of perception (Ibn ‘Arabi), within the act of interpreting torah or fulfilling the mitzvot (Moses de Leon), or within the act of love (Marguerite Porete). When the transcendent realizes itself as the immanent, the subject of the act is neither divine nor human, neither self nor other… The moment in which the boundaries between divine and human, self and other, melt away is commonly called mystical union.” (p. 7)

Even proximity to this mystical discourse takes my breath away, and I don’t seem to be able to stay there for very long. So I’m glad that additional spaces for spiritual transformation come through the arts and through play with language such as storytelling (e.g., tales involving metamorphosis such as Psyche, Beauty and Beast) and parables. John Dominic Crossan says

“When comedy ensures that language, rendered strange by literature, is seen most openly and acknowledged most freely as structured play, the narrow gate to transcendence has been opened” (p. 49, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges).

The “arts” extend beyond visual art. In “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag includes in the arts “the activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer” as stages for “the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions.” Like the paradoxes attended in Sells’ unsayings, Sontag situates contradictions in the “project of spirituality”: “plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.” (Her essay is included at the beginning of Styles of Radical Will, cited from p. 3-4.) 

Persons who know me will not be surprised when I add horsemanship to the arts listed by Sontag, especially because it participates in the spiritual project that involves the resolving of contradiction.  For me, the breath-taking-away event happens again and again when I experience the sweetest engagement with the massive power of the horse in the moment we meet on the most subtle level. For example, when we best transition from the trot to canter, it isn’t communicated through physical cues or even through verbal command but instead as if  in an imagination or wish or spirit.

This paradox of power in which the light rather than the heavy brings forth the transcendent is also (and probably more frequently) evidenced in its negative form when force is attempted and things turn ugly. Greatness (e.g., “Make America …”) is often viewed in terms of Power; tragically when the transcendent goes missing, results are ugly.  Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be your servant” (Matt 23:11). We teeter at a crucial time when being great depends on transforming the enactment of power and greatness into this transcendent level.

It’s not easy, and yet it is. It’s like reaching for the beauty and art of riding and how it comes in when letting go more than by using force. Similarly, approaching the mystics doesn’t happen by force. For example, it just doesn’t work if I force myself to read Michael Sells or Chittick, Corbin, etc. Instead, it moves by gradual immersion and absorption; and somewhat surprisingly, for me, “getting it” works when accompanied by easier reading, particularly mysteries (e.g., Ellis Peters) and novels (e.g., Iris Murdoch) whose narratives probe the paradoxical nature of truth, love, and power. 

This discussion opened with the butterfly as symbol for transformation. We might also do well to consider the plight of the butterfly as warning for the endangerment of spiritual transformation. The monarch butterfly merits special attention as it is under consideration to qualify as an endangered species; the eastern monarch has declined 90% in two decades. In a similar way, I believe the quality of tending the human soul has diminished severely; the transformational butterfly of our being has been sorely neglected. Signs are everywhere, but who sees? Who cares?

In his introduction to the biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Conradi focuses the forces that shook apart the foundation that (in my view) had supported a faith-field where spiritual transformation made enough sense to live by. Condradi set Murdoch’s “work in the context of the cultural/intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century, of the generation who struggled to come to terms philosophically and emotionally and artistically with Stalin and Hitler, with existentialism, and with the slow collapse of organized religion” (p. xxv, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch; see also, Diane Butler Bass' work). Today, especially in the U.S.A., I believe we’re still struggling to come to terms with all this as well as with the Vietnam War and subsequent exercises of power. If we cannot transform and transcend, we appear condemned to living with lies. As with any time of crisis, spiritual transformation is vitally needed in order to invoke the transcendent.

On Un-Abandoned Beauty

Iris Storm. Photos taken Spring 2018.

     Perhaps, like me, you wake up certain moments enough to find yourself thirsting for more from your personal experience of religion. Sharpening the awareness that spiritual nurturance is missing and is needed usually depends on cutting off distractions: electronic devices, absorption in work, sports, politics, and any other substitute imposed by the ego/nafs. And if we don’t tend the soul, sometimes it shouts “Pay Attention!” through an “accident,” illness, or other life crises that offer a glimpse or a hard view of what really matters. Wouldn’t we rather remind ourselves in a gentle way?

     I’ve very thankful to have reached retirement as I feel it offers increased opportunity to read material that’s beginning to mark well-springs that attend to this longing. I want an authentic spiritual path that offers divine tasting, “joie de vivre,” most every day.  For example, a month ago, 

I quoted a passage that flowed with the water of life. John O’Donohue pointed to a source previously unknown to me: Hans Urs von Balthasar on “theological aesthetics.” Having located a reasonably-priced copy of Volume 1, “Seeing the Form,” in his series: “The Glory of the Lord,” I’ve loved reading about the essential reconnection of beauty with truth and goodness. Although Balthasar does not focus on the art forms I love (particularly horsemanship/dressage and photography), his articulation of biases against beauty increases my sense of the importance of engaging with the aesthetic and in appreciating the connection with the divine.

     Photography has long been an important link for me with beauty. 

It’s helped me to look more closely for a composition that has balance, 

sometimes taking me down on my knees

  

or whisper-close to a dew-wet inner bloom. 

Probably more than anything, I’ve increased appreciation for the quality of light.  

          And what other term is so frequently and so significantly used in trying to articulate the spiritual dimension? For example, Balthasar quotes Matthias Scheeben: “Theology is ‘the dawn of the light of contemplation’” (p. 107). Radiance and illumination signal the pathway to the divine, often more so than our fine analytical reasoning.

     In reading Balthasar, I’m able to affirm the spiritual value of spending time with photography, and I see how I’ve been disconnected from this appreciation. Balthasar explains in detail how religious groups recognized misuse of beauty (e.g., “the ‘exchange’ [Rom I.23,25] of God’s incorruptible splendour and glory for the blasphemous image of the idols,” p. 46). He points out the way religious authority overreacted by expelling all art from the church. 

     This  mistaken “cleansing” simply leaves the allure of beauty for the devil to use, with results all too obvious in today’s commercialization of skin-deep “beauty.” The fatal error involves failing to realize that Beauty at the divine level demands dedicated development in the same manner required by the higher reaches of Power and Knowledge. To our tragic loss, all of these names of God have been left much too abandoned in our education and religion.

     Incredible teaching is available. I can scarcely believe that I’m just finding Balthasar who guides us beyond the superficial misuse of beauty toward a divine understanding. For example, referencing Karl Barth, he points out that “God’s beauty embraces death as well as life, fear as well as joy, what we call ‘ugly’ as well as what we call ‘beautiful’” (p. 56). In our recent trip to the southwest, we saw something of this in the art of Georgia O’Keefe. 

     Balthasar’s teaching also includes terms familiar from phenomenology:

“The quality of ‘being-in-itself’ which belongs to the beautiful, the demand the beautiful itself makes to be allowed to be what it is, the demand, therefore, that we renounce our attempts to control and manipulate it, in order truly to be able to be happy by enjoying it: all of this is, in the natural realm, the foundation and foreshadowing of what in the realm of revelation and grace will be the attitude of faith” (p. 153).

     The urgency of reclaiming our divine gift of Beauty is shown in the continuation of the passage quoted by O’Donohue. Balthasar elaborates:

“We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she [Beauty] were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love… The world, formerly penetrated by God’s light, now becomes but an appearance and a dream…But where the cloud disperses, naked matter remains as an indigestible symbol of fear and anguish. Since nothing else remains, and yet something must be embraced, twentieth-century man is urged to enter this impossible marriage with matter, a union which finally spoils all man’s taste for love. But man cannot bear to live with the object of his impotence, that which remains permanently unmastered. He must either deny it or conceal it in the silence of death.” (pp. 18-19).

     Instead of abandoning Beauty, I’m in favor of growing toward and surrendering into the embrace of divine Love that guides us in the way of a vision holding fast the union of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness (and Peace, Justice, Love, Power, Knowledge…).

"God is Beauty"

Looking north, Friday, June 15, ~5:30A

“God is Beauty” titles the final chapter of O’Donohue’s Beauty. It’s only one of the infinite ninety-nine names but perhaps among the most under-attended while most available. Sometimes the face of beauty just requires getting up at 5:30A and looking out the window. Other times the display depends on devotion to tending the gardens, both in the ground around us and in the inner reaches of the soul. Perhaps like all the names of God, beauty reveals the mystery as one travels deeper and deeper into the layers, by grace and by dedication. The gifts include interpenetration with other names of God and this opens vistas that have been veiled until their connection is realized.

“Thomas Aquinas and the medieval thinkers wisely recognized that beauty was at the heart of reality; it was where truth, unity, goodness and presence came together. Without beauty they would be separated and inclined towards destructive conflict with each other. Accompanied by beauty, truth gains graciousness and compassion. Beauty holds harmony at the heart of unity and prevents its collapse into the most haunted chaos. In the presence of beauty, goodness attracts desire and beauty makes presence luminous and evokes its mystery. There is a profound equality at the heart of beauty; a graciousness which recognizes and encourages the call of individuality but invites it to serve the dream and creative vision of community. Without beauty the Eros of growth and creativity would dry up. As Simone Weil says: “Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails…the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.’” John O’Donohue, Beauty, pp. 222-3.

Faces of the Beloved

photo from when Joseph & Leg’cy first partnered up,
circa 2007. Taken & framed by beloved Belqis.

The Religion of Love pretty much says it all, and at the same time leaves one free-falling, ecstatic, as if intoxicated, calling for imagery of taverns, love-making, and (especially for me) horses.* The Persian mystic poets leave me breathless that way. From a random page of Hafiz:

“…From the demonic rival, I take refuge in my own God;/ For the sake of God, that gleaming star might grant some help.//  If your black eye-lash has our blood in its sights,…/ When you set your cheek alight, you burn up the heart of a world…” **

Avery’s footnote to “cheek” states: 

“The “cheek”, izar (also rukh ): Shabistari defines the cheek as the stage on which the Divine Beauty is revealed. The cheek is the jamal, the beauty of God, the vestibule to God’s jallal, His Glory and Power. The cheek is the Divine Essence manifested in its names and qualities.” **

         This wonder-full especially happens when life-experience throbs deep in the heart and calls up in its inimitable, undeniable way: “Truth!” Within each individual, a feeling that eludes the meaning-making of the schooled-mind waits to be owned and known through the heart. It may have to wait a long time, to the end of time? Searching out, forging a good connection with passion deserves high priority. 

         Natural horsemanship requires collection. While driven by passion, my horsemanship demanded many years of riding and groundwork before I could claim to be true the subtle vibrations that my body had long known but could not get through to my conscious knowing because the schooled mind refused to yield. I say “schooled-mind” because Reason must not be devalued. The mind, when cleaned, plays a crucial role in discerning the path. It’s when a person’s thinking (or any other function) presumes to know more than God that it has to be dethroned by surrender. David George Haskell gives a marvelous example of this: “Lichens master the cold months through the paradox of surrender” (The Forest Unseen, p. 4; for elaboration, see These Frosty Woods). ***

         Usually, perhaps optimally, in order to feel heart-resonance fully, the surround space stands still, silent, as if bowed, waiting to be witnessed. Yet in a rushed, distracted world, this deep-bass-voiced “Amen” from a Hallelujah chorus risks never being heard. That’s why I look long into the winter woods, the patient leaves, gold-toned, drawing me further and farther in. 

It’s remembering dreams, both kinds. For me (as in Good Stories), it’s also returning to traditional tales, allowing old ones to come true again, at any moment, as they tell the meaning of otherwise inarticulate experience.

"All the tales of great lovers and the fables of the heroic champions of yore thus become part of the soul’s psychohistory. They pertain to the inner journey of the poet…These are not legends, but living facts of the heart that appear constantly in their verse; they are, as Emily Dickinson says, ‘Bulletins all Day from Immortality’. . . in the Religion of Love such circumstances fill the mystic’s presential awareness. These legends are tangible issues of the present moment that facilitate the lover’s pursuit of Eros, food for his soul that he consumes hoc tempore in the pursuit of knowledge, goodness and beauty, which incite him to excel in the only serious sport: Amor. "  Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, pp. 100-2.****

         When passion marks the pathway, the meaning of “God is love” continues to unfold. Even heartbreaks trace the mystery, perhaps more than the good times. Jesus is alive in any religion that has Hafiz.

"Likewise, the Sufi poets consider the appearance of Jesus as an ever reoccurring event sustaining them in the present, using in this context the metaphor of the Messiah’s breath of inspiration’ (dam-i masih). Hafiz alludes to this in two verses: ‘Love’s physician is compassionate and endowed/ With the breath of Jesus,/ But whom should he assuage/ If you are without pain?’  and ‘To whom may I relate such a subtlety?/ She killed me—my stony-hearted mistress,/ Yet possessed the life-giving breath of Jesus.’ "Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, pp. 101-102. ****

         When I trace passion’s pathway, I re-see my falling in love with horsemanship as it revealed the delicacies of power, more through the body than the mind. Another touch comes in the tender yet ecstatic touch of Beauty that clicks any second in the shutter release of a camera open to the master artist’s palette. The Beloved appears in the faces of whatever lines have been pre-formed in each human’s origin. From Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei’s section “The Primordial Disposition of Man and the Religion of Love”:

"According to the Qur’an, man was created with an ‘original disposition that God instilled within him’ (fitrat Allah ) and formed with a ‘fundamentally immutable God-given nature’ (la-tabdil li-khalqi’illahi , Q30:30). Basing themselves on this evidence from their holy scripture, Persian poets drove this classical theolgical doctrine up several theosophical notches higher, maintaining that man’s nature had been already moulded and framed to develop according to the nature of the divine attributes of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and inclined to follow the ‘Straight Path of Love and Mercy’ (‘ishq, mahabbat, rahmat ) long before birth."  Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, p. 87 ****

         In last night’s dream, I set a herd of horses free but with insufficient preparation for their safe passage to the intended pasture. Perhaps the dream meant to guide me toward providing context around the metaphors of intoxication: the tavern, the love-making, fast horses. My first taste of riding came in cantering narrow woodland trails and ducking branches. It was intoxicating and served to hook me. Without the wild taste it’s unlikely I’d have dedicated myself to a ten-year discipline of riding slow circles in arenas that was necessary for me to develop and to trust “feel.” I don’t recommend riding wild, and I no longer drink alcoholic beverages. Such experiences and images are meant to be contained and translated into the Religion of Love.

"If we approach the transcendental significance of some of these symbols, how the process leading to the sublimation of these metaphors occurred—and thus the raison d’etre sustaining them—is easy to discern. The phrase ‘it is delightful to be mad’, for example, poetically speaking conveys a self-evident sense. Understood spiritually, however, the phrase makes no sense whatsoever unless we understand it to imply a madness above and beyond reason, rather than below reason: the lower, irrational—psychotic—insanity. Likewise, the expression ‘the joys of intoxication’ makes perfect sense to every secular sensibility attuned to wine’s bacchanalian pleasures. But to the philosophical temperament focused on progress in the spiritual life, it makes sense only when it refers to the drunkenness that contemplation of the Beautiful inspires—or, as the Sufis say, the ecstatic rapture that the sight of the beauteous visage of the Cup-bearer (saqi ) rouses in the beholder—stimulating intoxication without any hangover. In the same vein, the joys of freedom extollled by the Sufi poets involve their liberation from the vices of greed, anger, pride and emancipation from the vanity of ambition for honours and high rank…That wanton witness-of-beauty (shahid-i harja’i ) celebrated in Sufi mystical poetry is that icon of supreme loveliness, whose ravishingly attractive countenance is everywhere reflected, both in man and nature alike." Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, p. 92 ****

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* Although I’m not finding it as evident in Lewisohn’s volume on Hafiz, references to horses and riding are abundant in the Persian mystic poets. For example, see Riding from Passion to Compassion.  Also, as I progress into the next chapter in Hafiz and the Religion of Love, “The Erotic Spirit: Love, Man and Satan in Hafiz’s Poetry” by Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, pp. 107-121, I find reference to Ahmad Ghazali: “Love exists first in an unadulterated form which flows to existence from God. Lingering on the border of existence, love waits for the human Spirit so that it can come down to the world. In Ghazali’s metaphor, the Spirit is depicted as the steed of love, which transports love to the earth. Here on earth, love assumes many faces—sometimes it is a sensual love, sometimes love between parent and child, and so on—but ultimately love seeks to return back to its place of origin. In its return journey, love is the steed and spirit is the rider, bringing love to its original abode” (p. 110). 

** Peter Avery, “Poem VI,” p. 27 in The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, Archetype, 2007. For a more accessible sampling of Avery’s translations, see Hafiz of Shiraz, translated by Peter Avery & John Heath Stubbs, 1957/2003. Also, Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez. Robert Bly & Leonard Lewisohn. HarperCollins, 2008.

*** David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen, 2012.

**** Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei’s chapter “The Principles of the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry,” translated by Lewishohn in Hafiz and the Religion of Love, pp. 77-106. The ghazals that are quoted come from Hafiz, Khanlari’s ed., #182 and #59. These ghazals, in complete form, can be found in The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, translated by Peter Avery, #182 on p. 242 and #59 on p. 96.

“and He is with you”

Perhaps a particular book falls open anywhere

to strike the perfect match for the intended person

igniting the moment of illumination, perhaps.

But would Book Five of Rumi’s Mathnawi pour

the “illimitable fountain”* without the preparing four,

flowing within; as if all books burn, the truth return?

Else the rider, already seated on the horse,

asks, “Where is the horse?” A person thirsts

though knee deep in the stream. An oceaned pearl 

in search of the sea. Bewildered of God,

the only direction remains wonderment.

* In Nicholson’s translation, about line 1072 of Book V. 

When desire burns too low, the fire goes out. Tending the spirit depends, essentially and finally, on that variant of desire called love, ineffable, beyond-words, breath-stopping, a consuming fire that burns off all the external inauthenticities because to know oneself is to know one’s Lord. [See, for example, Chapter 1 in Al-Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness (Claud Field’s translation, pp. 17-23).] 

     When motivated by external forces (such as the condition often characterizing graduate school’s assigned readings), it’s easy to develop the habit of skimming a “Preface” or just skipping ahead entirely to get to the real chapters in a book. While that’s the way I used to read twenty years ago (truth be told, grad school was closer to fifty years ago), now I’m drawn to giving close attention to the introductory material, especially when a book is being revised after a span of time. A good preface reveals contextual particulars needed if an individual is to absorb and appropriate the teaching across the external to the internal. 

     For example, Carl Ernst gives a Preface to the 2011 Edition in his book Sufism (published in 1997 as The Shambhala Guide to Sufism). He says the book has found a home among diverse readers and speculates it might be because it “illustrates the tension between the outsider and insider approaches to understanding religion” and adds “What is offered here does not pretend to be an esoteric revelation” (p. xii).

     Maybe I was in the next sentence or paragraph when I realized that something had clicked. Except it wasn’t a “click” or any other sound but more like a scent or a slight breeze easily missed or a sense of resolution. It’s a subtle sensation that I’ve come to hold in high regard. Maybe it’s a visitation or a knowing in the heart instead of added head-knowledge that’s isolated from the more integrated knowing in head/body/spirit. Anyway, I paused to reflect, to look back, and to wonder. 

     Perhaps the offering involves a more articulate discernment. I’m a person who thrives on the fusion of not-yet-connected, almost smoldering, bits of meaning; my work/play space looks littered with books on spirituality, horsemanship, folklore, mysteries, poetry, and more. Any additional clue that guides to the treasure is more than welcome. 

     That’s what came in. If I were to put the gift into words, it would say something like, “Listen, bud, you should be able to recognize which of these books is dedicated to the inner journey. Don’t waste time with ones that focus on the outer stuff. Pay attention because some are tricky and use esoteric terms, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about.” 

     Sometimes words fail the test of personal experience. Remember the three levels of certainty (hear about, witness, and live it). Push for that fire-tested truth. Thresh out the non-GMO grain from the fake and the chaff. And remember the risk of drowning in books. Always be on alert for a sign to put all books aside and fall into wonder.

     Certainly the languaging that the mind brings to experience can advance understanding and can sometimes power future action, but thinking can also be imperious and can shut down other knowing, especially from within, from the "eye of the heart" (also in the passage from Book V). Having been humbled many times in the riding arena where “feel” for “true unity” knows far faster, more sure than thinking, my mind’s tendency to presume to dominate has been corralled a bit. Rather than attempt to force closure or containment, bewilderment, in a special tone, may be the homing signal.

Foggy Steps in the Path of the Heart

About thirteen years ago my son left this world. The passing brought grief, anger, depression, despair, and life changes. Slowly, never completely, the memories turned from torture to treasure, not entirely. While heart breaking, the loss gradually brought along an increased presence, a visitation, even inner openings for spiritual guides, perhaps the one some call a "new heart.” The unsettled presence prompted contemplation, and the restless questioning led to readings such as Rabbi Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People, further into his Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person, and on from there in this continuous searching. 

The questions around the realities of pain, death, and evil drive humans from and to the Reality of God, All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and All-Loving. While I accept the short answer that as human I must surrender the presumption to know the mysteries of God because they far exceed my comprehension, I also feel spiritual guidance wants to move on into the Mystery in a path of love. For this travel, humans need guides that lead beyond human mind; and I find guidance in nature, with natural horsemanship, in friendship, dreams, prayer, and spiritual verse. 

My restlessness is regularly attended by reading from the almost-endless library related to the big questions. Currently, the edge of longing finds support for the next step in Frithjof Schuon’s Transcendent Unity of Religions, a text that would have made little sense without having read in Henry Corbin and before that William Chittick (e.g., Sufi Path of Love) and all along translations, versions, and commentaries on Rumi. I’m not attempting to prescribe a roadmap for anyone else but suggest that there are scaffoldings toward greater peace. Pain, despair, and addictive avoidance are not the end.

For me and I suspect for most everyone else, the journey goes by the path of the heart, discerned by the individual, with each next step coming through the fog, sometimes after wandering awhile, stumbling. It’s not thought out but is felt by likeness, trued by experience. The tonalities of love vibrate differently; the key of a faith journey differs from one of reasoned explanation. Yet it’s not cut off from the mind. I couldn’t manage to engage the dense text of Schuon without developing some hermeneutical acuity;  but the finding of good stories and spiritual verses happens through recognizing resonance and moving by likeness more than by following a manual and literal application.

      Corbin’s articulation of the imaginal world allows further entry into Schuon’s esoterism. These expansions build the space that’s needed if we are move in the heart-journey. The teachings allow me to absorb more of Rumi’s unveiling of the spirit guide as like unto Moses:

Without hunger the body makes no movement (towards God)…./ Though it weep and wail most piteously, it will never become a true believer. Take heed!/ It is like Pharaoh: in (the time of) famine it lays its head before Moses, as he (Pharaoh) did, making supplication;/ But when it has been freed from want, it rebels (once more)… What wonder (then) if the spirit does not remember its (ancient) abodes, which have been its dwelling-place and birthplace aforetime,/ Since this world, like sleep, is covering it over as clouds cover the stars?—/ Especially as it has trodden so many cities, and the dust has not (yet) been swept from its perceptive faculty,/ Nor has it made ardent efforts that its heart should become pure and behold the past;/ That its heart should put forth its head (peep forth) from the aperture of the mystery and should see the beginning and the end with open eye.

[Mathnawi, Nicholson trans., Book 4, from lines 3623-3636]