Faith: Light Seen by Heart

“… faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” 

 Thomas Merton is simply a treasure, speaking profoundly to timeless questions and now particularly into the immediate moment with our nation endangered by hatred. This season, the next few days especially, cry for compassion toward persons caught, unconsciously or not, in the terrible web of hate. Merton points out how our perception of haters also usually reflects darkness in the beholder. 

 “It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves” (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 112). 

     Cleaning the mirror and “seeing into the mystery at the heart of life," then, marks an essential work of a person who hopes to pray, to contemplate, to draw nearer to the Divine. What a time this is! 

      I was drawn to his New Seeds of Contemplation because Richard Rohr and others reference it as a primary text in discerning the “False Self” and the “True Self.” The book has so many gems. Today I’m touched by his teaching on the nature of faith. Faith needed, perhaps most of all, in a darkened time. 

“Too often our notion of faith is falsified by our emphasis on the statements about God which faith believes, and by our forgetfulness of the fact that faith is a communion with God’s own light and truth… But, above all, faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” (pp. 128, 130, New Seeds of Contemplation). 

     It’s a good season to listen for, to look for, and to soak up the special light, so manifest in the yellows of leaves, in the spaces created by fallen leaves, by the break in clouds and in the glistening given by stormy skies.

Convergence in the Timeless

Sunrise, Nov 27, 2018. Sky and Earth.

I’m in an almost bizarre convergence among three currents flowing from reading Iris Murdoch, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, and S.H. Nasr/Frithjoff Schuon. There’s no beginning; no end. So maybe the place to continue is in the timeless, the Reality that Nasr/Schuon and Sufi mystics assert is the only way to make sufficient sense of being today (or any other day). For example, Schuon warns against the peril of splitting the ideal and real:

“Nothing is more false than the conventional opposition between ‘idealism’ and ‘realism,’ which amounts to insinuating that the ‘ideal’ is not ‘real,’ and conversely as if an ideal situated outside reality had the smallest value and as if reality were always situated on a lower level than what may be called an ‘ideal’; to believe this is to think in a quantitative, not a qualitative, mode.” (Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 15, footnote 14).

True Reality resides in the absolute, that which transcends our mundane experience, best known in this world in the qualities God sends down, lent for humans to manifest. Trouble comes in when our knowing gets too limited by human restrictions such as those set by behaviorists presuming to be the sole proprietor of the true. The essence gets lost in ideologies of facts, data, cogito ergo sum, philosophy reduced to existentialism... And equally by religion stripped of mysticism when faith is dominated by the scientific mind and when theologians succumb to status as in the academy. Of course, educators already sold out in order to sit alongside physics, to get the grants, and to publish in journals that count. Who among us has clean hands?

Kingsolver splendidly explores today’s terrain by looking back a hundred years to when the theory of evolution struggled to find a place in culture dominated by religious fundamentalists as well as consumerism blindly eating up the environment. Alongside this, she weaves a contemporary and prescient collage of traumatic family life; although I wince at saying “life” because she portrays dramatically how distressingly distant today’s home may be from Life, from the Alive, the Loving. 

The poignancy of these streams’ convergence builds also from Murdoch’s portrayals of dysfunctional abuses of Power and Love. Her novels roam about over most of the 20th-century-world disheartened by war, environmental wreckage, abusive partners, and varied desiccations of culture (across arts and sciences). Much of this broken-down, broken-hearted condition seems occasioned through allowing the personal and social orders to be ruled by the pronouncement “God is dead.” The destruction comes whether players are conscious or not that their lives have strayed far from devotion to Truth, Beauty, Justice, and the other qualities necessary to approach the depths of love and the responsibilities of power.

Although Nasr and Schuon expose the catastrophe of science, particularly evolutionary theory, masquerading as God, they also argue that scientific knowing has a vital role in a proper ecology of epistemology and ontology.

“The religious view of the order of nature must be reasserted on the metaphysical, philosophical, cosmological, and scientific levels as legitimate knowledge without necessarily denying modern scientific knowledge, as long as it is remembered that this latter science is the result of very particular questions posed to nature” (Religion and the Order of Nature, p. 6).

Interestingly, Kingsolver’s gift includes the compelling drama evident when religion gets big-headed and heart-short. In this convergence of currents, the arrogant man of science looks scarily like unto the preacher man/woman blinded by God-less religion. 

I’m now in the midst of Kingsolver’s novel, having just been struck with a wash of empathy for the bigot I’d previously found impossible to like. I don’t expect to ever like this character, but I feel some compassion, some sadness for how he gave his life for the fake “American dream.” He’s the person who long ago dried up inside, who suffers greatly from a failing body, and yet clings to dead faith. Perhaps his bitterness is all that sustains his breath.

I’ve become pretty sure that any hope we have for moving ahead in this country depends on developing empathy that reaches across the political chasm. Instead of blasting at the “other” in Facebook-ish social media as well as in our intimate family spaces, humans who would be god-like just have to live a deeper level into Love and Power… Peace, Justice, Truth …

Sunset. Sky, Earth, Sea.

The Transforming Sanctuary of Nature

Probably for my entire life I’ve known, at varying degrees of awareness, perhaps in a deep level  more than any other knowing, the importance of getting into nature. I remember from early years when we lived on the farm outside Anson, Texas, how often I’d feel the need for walking into the unplowed acres, among the prickly-pear cactus and scrubby mesquite trees. not knowing why except that my being needed it. Interestingly, we called that area “the pasture” quite unaware of the potential link to “pastoral,” connecting to nature’s role of “giving spiritual guidance.” 

         Those walks evolved into hiking and then through midlife into jogging on woodland trails. The crucial purpose for these practices remained fuzzy, but I still learned to sense when my being cried out for the clearing, the cleansing available from the earth. These semi-conscious engagements with nature sustained me during the time from leaving the family farm for college in 1965 for forty years until the move from D.C. suburbs to our West Virginia 4.5 acre sanctuary. By 2005, my being was pretty desperate for the solace of nature, and my consciousness had awakened enough to push for significant and difficult commitments to the natural world. 

         Our new homeland already featured several organic gardens, but it also presented woodlands that were infested with thickets of invasive plants choking out the native oaks and maples. As we stewarded these grounds, nature more than equivocated by tending our souls. Then with the resources introduced by digital photography and computer editing of images, the nature/spirit dialogue opened further into frontiers of wonder. Now, with an expanse of time and energy made available through retirement, this relationship stands at the brink of an awesome landscape, or perhaps it’s better to call the opening a soul-space.

         A recent night, reading in Alan Williams translation of Rumi’s Mathnawi, Book 1, these lines leapt out: “The sciences of sensual men’s the muzzle/ preventing them from milk of higher knowledge” (line 1020). Even within the context, the meaning of these words remained terse, almost as if Rumi offered an intact puzzle, inviting each person’s mind to wander for personal meaning. The next morning, I checked Nicholson’s translation:

The sciences of the followers of (external) sense became a muzzle, so that he (the believer in sense-perception) might not receive milk from that sublime knowledge. علمهای اهل حس شد پوز بند ** تا نگیرد شیر ز آن علم بلند  (line 1016) 

In the third version of the Mathnawi that I have readily available, Mojaddedi translates: “Physical senses are like muzzles too/ That keep the milk of mystic truth from you.”

         Nicholson’s commentary on these lines (pp. 82-83, Commentary, Book I) admits “these verses are difficult,” and it offers “the whole drift of the passage exalts mystic knowledge (Adam) as opposed to intellectual knowledge (Iblis).” His elaboration in the commentary focuses on attaining knowledge of God (p. 83) and adds “the physical heart has an immaterial soul (jani rubani), which, when purified and illumined by love, develops another heart, viz. the spiritual organ that perceives the Unseen.”

         Almost certainly, the particular lines from Rumi struck me because of the reading I’d been doing in Nasr’s Religion and the Order of Nature. As mentioned in the previous blog,

Nasr’s text widens the window of nature as it informs the way humans have been cut off from feeling God’s presence in nature. Although I have long sensed my need to commune in the natural world, I’d been veiled from opening my heart to the treasure. Imagine the revelation made increasingly possible when we enter the holy place trusting that it’s “a living creature with soul and intellect.” Nasr’s elaboration on cosmos includes this:

“the Greek term for the world of nature in its vastest sense…meant not only order but also beauty, harmony, and intelligibility. It was never a bland word like ‘world’ in English whose original meaning as the ‘great man’ corresponding to Purusa or al-insan al-kamil has been totally lost. For the Greeks to call the universe cosmos meant that the universe was a perfect exemplar of order, both beautiful and intelligible, or according to Plato the highest sensible being, ‘in very truth a living creature with soul and intellect.’ [Timaeus] That is why this order was to be imitated by human beings, and the order of nature remained inseparable from the moral order as asserted already by Hesiod…” (S.H. Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature, p. 51).

         The photo at the top comes from our recent trip to Australia where the holy voice speaking from the natural world can hardly be avoided. A few lines later in the section from Rumi’s Mathnawi, we are advised “Be still so that your senses are transformed” (Williams’ translation, p. 101, line 1043). I’m pulling this line out of context just to affirm that our engagement with nature can be transformed, and I believe it can develop along the lines noted by Nicholson so that our hearts perceive more of the Unseen. In short, my experience of nature has been affirmed so that I’m more confident of attending for the Presence and resonate more deeply with the divine qualities, particularly Serenity, Beauty, Vitality, Majesty . . .

The World Turning Gold

About four in the afternoon on October 25, 2018, when I look through the window over my desktop, the world is turning gold. The alchemy of autumn.

unedited photo in "landscape"

The image shown above does not, of course, show exactly what I beheld, but neither does the one represented in the unedited “landscape” setting on the camera.

         A representation that is closer to the vision revealed might be forced in a slightly edited version of this second image—but I’m not showing that because a few moments later, sunlight drizzled the woodland forcing a third or fourth viewpoint to be considered.

unedited image taken in “aperture priority”

         If we’re looking for the Truth through our encounters with nature, our journey might lead into works such as S.H. Nasr’s Religion and the Order of Nature. Progressing slowly in order to absorb the rich material, I’m now about halfway into the book. Nasr details and interprets the modern framing of our world as it

“moved away from the almost universally held view of the sacredness of nature to one that sees man as alienated from nature and nature itself as no longer the progenitor of life (the very root of nature being from the Latin nascitura, meaning to give birth), but rather as a lifeless mass, a machine to be dominated and manipulated by a purely earthly man. It also divorced, in a manner not to be seen in any other civilization, the laws of nature from moral laws and human ethics from the workings of the cosmos” (p. 4).

Nasr’s opening paragraph asserts quite explicitly his concern for human destruction of the environment: 

“The world of nature is being desecrated and destroyed in an unprecedented manner globally by both those who have secularized the world about them and developed a science and technology capable of destroying nature on an unimaginable scale and by those who still live within a religious universe… (p. 3).

         In the 4.5 acres that my wife and I tend, we’re able to participate in eco-friendly stewardship, and through this our lives continue to be blessed both physically and spiritually. But a related and somewhat different focus seems to take a higher priority for me. My intended direction, especially in this late stage of life, focuses on capital T Truth which I find turned a different way from the one quite well known from the academic career.  Now retired, I seek devotion to Truth, and this requires a kind of knowing that differs from the truth needed to publish in academic journals, including those of the “arts and humanities” as well as those of “mathematical and scientific disciplines.” Academic truth has its role and importance. I don’t intend disrespect for that work; it’s just that I find it necessary to demand, for myself at least, a distinctly different take on truth.

         For one thing, this different track requires a tolerance for imprecision. Language for this Truth always falls frustratingly short, often calls for teasing paradoxes, and even lapses into significant silences. Yet words have been put to the pathway that sound right enough, although they must be handled with considerable care. A few titles gleaned from my bookshelves illustrate: Knowledge of God, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, and The Secret of the Love of God. 

         As suggested by these titles, movement along this pathway finds guidance from dynamic interactions, especially among Truth, Beauty, and Love. Each person engages these qualities in accordance with his or her God-given nature. My personal walking gets animated by looking into nature and playing with representations in an artistic and alchemical way, with consideration for realism but also letting the magical possibilities come through. To do this, I believe I must see and engage nature more in line with Nasr's radical direction away from the modern view. This, perhaps, opens more of the “imaginal” world (using Ibn Arabi and Henry Corbin’s terms) and allows for a closer walking with the beloved. I’m looking forward to the delight of wondering with photos taken during our week in Australia because the rain forest captivated me with my full consent toward an imaginal world. For this moment, a glimpse might come through a playful look in today’s window.

Proximity to Truth

     This past week I finished reading a book that a few years ago I’m pretty sure:

a) I would not have selected at all.

b) If I had started it, I would have shelved without finishing. 

c) And, if I somehow read to the end, I’d have trashed it—as I recall doing with only one book, a highly-rated novel with a similar plot line.

     Perhaps I’ve become able to appreciate the power of the way this author troubled the waters and in doing so reworked my thinking, feeling, valuing, and maybe even transformed conscience/consciousness. For this to happen, the novel was not working alone but was interweaving with other books that are especially contributing to my development, particularly Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying; John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges; and Attar’s Conference of the Birds (translated by Peter Avery and by Afkham Darbandi/Dick Davis).

     Rather than explaining, I’ll show portions of the book; but first, here’s the Spoiler Alert: these extracts might mess with the experience of reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle. If you plan on reading it, consider stopping now! 

     In the opening pages, Murdoch’s main character is portrayed: “He believed profoundly in complete truthfulness as the basis and condition of all virtue.” So, in the early chapters, he persists in telling the full truth to his wife even as he realizes “He could not now make his knowledge of her into love.” Soon enough, however, as he falls in love with another woman, he experiences that “truth” about the new relationship is a phenomenon he cannot express in words that will be comprehended by his wife. He’s perplexed in feeling unable, even if he tries, to tell the truth. Through the second half or so of the book, I am led (but not forced) by the author into a hard acceptance of truth as congruence instead of romance. His lover tells of the spinning (truth or lies or paradox) of the telling of their relationship this way:

“But now I can see. I see that it was you that tricked me—and I too that deceived myself. I saw it all so simply, with nothing to it but you leaving your wife whom you didn’t love and who didn’t love you. But a life has so much more in it than that. I had not seen that I would break so many many things.”

“If you love me—“ he said. 

“That word cannot guide us any more.”

     In other Murdoch novels, the congruence of parts includes the break-up of a marriage. Murdoch is not prescribing a case law in the sense noted by Crossan below. The truth of the full trajectory of the relationship of the lovers is best forecast in metaphors; in this novel, it’s in the title, The Sandcastle, and in lines spoken during the collapse of their romantic structure, “You are a growing tree. I am only a bird. You cannot break your roots and fly away with me.”

     The reason I’m compelled by Murdoch’s work may be explained in Peter Conradi’s biography:

“It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth, when she thought that setting people free was easy, that ‘socialism (of which we had no very clear idea) would bring freedom and justice to all countries, and the world would get better’. . . Her work explores, among other matters, those ‘irrational’ psychic forces within the individual which make Hitlers possible, and freedom problematic.” (Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch, pp. 78-79)

     Concerning freedom, in a somewhat similar manner, I’m reconsidering my position in relation to the presentation of narrative, particularly in the fable and in the parable. When teaching Good Stories, I wanted students to realize freedom in constructing meaning. Going against the usual approach to the fable as having an explicit moral, we worked at considering multiple possibilities so that each individual could attempt to discern one that fit for himself or herself. We followed the direction of Lloyd Daly’s Aesop without Morals and made interpretations of narratives that did not force a specific moral. Now, I want to be careful in giving freedom, especially in view of Crossan's treatment of parable.

     In his take on narrative truth and freedom, Crossan develops the parable with emphasis on the distinctive features in texts of Jesus and Borges. He articulates “the core elements of parable” in a way that shows the shaking up of a person’s thinking/feeling/valuing and then leaving the person with the freedom to reach into the beyond:  

"... the core elements of parable. The first is paradox. The second is story. This is accomplished by effecting a structural reversal on a traditional or expected story at the deepest levels… 'symbols which through their paradoxical form expressed the inexpressible without betraying it.'" (pp. 94-95 building on and quoting from Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox)

But Crossan also stresses the danger in the extension of freedom: “to abide with the Holy is more fundamental than any case law and is itself original ethics and fundamental morality. It is also much more dangerous” (p. 69). This radical activity of parable in Jesus and Borges circles back again to Murdoch’s realization that freedom given to person unable to “see,” unable to discern lies, allows the rise of Hitlers.

     Murdoch does not turn against freedom; instead her work pushes us to face the lies we tell ourselves and to engage the hard truths. Our thinking, our moral sense, needs to include paradox, and our realities marry imagination. The most important truth comes in a person’s approximation to discerning the touch of the divine in oneself. As Sells develops in the Unsayings, that’s what the mystics try to show us.

   It’s now early Sunday morning 

in pre-dawn meditations on dreams 

of marking the path, 

reflecting on Attar’s parable 

of surrender to the guide

reading time inside and out

eternal now. Time

is simultaneous line and circle

the eternal return.

Being/doing, identity & ?

Living this

as the game of labyrinth,

and whether there is a center or an exit does not matter so much

as the quality of the player, unending purification.

There is only the dance 

as Eliot sings for us & realizing

all this a poem not a line,

and a story not imitative rhyme

and not just a tale told by an idiot

but some beauty composed by

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.

"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.

Using the Sacred Imagination

     As Facebook friends know, we get flashbacks: “x years ago…” For today, March 2, Facebook reminds me that I posted two years ago “The Treasure in Good Stories.” So in looking back, I’m reminded of the gift of culminating a career with a sense of purpose, of feeling a fit that comes with accepting limitations, letting go of external expectations, and living into closer harmony with destiny. The treasure in Good Stories, at least one focusing, comes in the first sentence of that post: “Good Stories entertain and engage Big Questions such as: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?”

     Big questions like these don’t accept final answers. Instead, they offer direction and vitality for going farther, going further on. Good stories provide a schoolroom with always open doors for recess so that humans have room to continue growing up, even into retirement. They’re not so much for dispensing information as they are for opening imagination. Our imaginal capacities need developing as much, if not more, as do our ability to reason and to learn the scientific method.

     Having left the university, those years spent in Good Stories have opened now into more intense journey with imagination and further travels with the big questions. Just yesterday, I completed reading William Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. The one before was James Morris’ Orientations and before that Morris’ The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Meccan Illuminations. In it, Morris offers a connection with the bigger purpose of Good Stories:

one might say that his [Ibn ‘Arabi’s] method is one of using the sacred Imagination—in the sense of the archetypal images and stories provided by his own religious tradition—to awaken each reader’s individual spiritual imagination, to illuminate and reveal the recurrent ‘reflections’ of those scriptural likenesses in the ‘ever-renewed creation’ of his readers’ own unique spiritual experiences. (p. 161)

     I scarcely presume to select one passage from Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds to illustrate the illumination about imagination because the entire text wants to be included. The chapter “Death and the Afterlife” still draws my gratitude for better understanding God’s mercy, and the final section on the nature of belief adds hope for peace, both inner and in the USA.

     The world around us looks a mess. Our education system hasn’t proven to develop citizens who are capable of democratic governance. Of special concern are the failure to discern truth, bad judgment about character, and little evidence of love for self, others and the environment. In my view, part of the problem with our schooling comes from too much faith in reason and too much denial of imagination. Chittick explains how Ibn ‘Arabi asserts the importance and place of both reason and imagination:

imagination erases differences and unites, while reason discerns and separates. When people are left to their rational faculties, they tend to separate the Real from the cosmos and themselves. This leads to a loss of the vision of the divine presence in all things…[capacity with] imagination allows them to establish links and overcome difference. (p. 168)

There—I did finally select one passage, but doing so leaves a need to go back and re-read the many other pages with markers.  Let’s keep moving further into the imaginal worlds…

Heartbeat

The gospel for busy people: Love God.

How? Keep the commandments.*

In a world that lives by quick concrete answers, I fear that religion too often gets reduced (semi-consciously, at best) to this simplistic formula: loving God equals following rules, mostly the “Do Nots.” When this reduction happens, the Devil must be gleeful because the spiritual heart turns to stone. The experience of the Divine then remains surface-level, too superficial to overcome the materialistic, “carnal,” self.

     Let’s not be fooled by another simplistic move that flips to “Anything Goes.” No, that’s not the answer either because sacred scriptures does emphasize keeping commandments “for your good”*; and still the call of Love demands so much more. Yes, giving and following orders often provides safety in situations where a wiser one commands the more naive to stay clear of potential dangers such as the street, drug use, and fake-news; but to stay in that controlled zone limits Love’s dimension. Mature love expands freedom, enters paradox, and manifests God-given individualities.

     So, how do we learn to love God in ways that include and extend beyond the follow-rules-religion? I think that an initial step involves recognizing when dogma has dried up. For example, persons who call themselves Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or …) when doing racist, sexist, and other self-centered acts might wake up. Fake religion is not the path to God.

     Keeping to the Path to God demands hard honesty. True love is truth-telling; it’s not Hollywood, not SuperBowl, not status, drugs or money. At the birth of our first child, I knew without doubt that a powerful gift entered my heart. Why would I expect less in my relationship with God? Cold ritual, going to church/temple/mosque does not make the Religion of Love.

     Our spiritual guides try to tell us this over and over. Antonio Machado capsulized Jesus’ teaching: “I love Jesus, who said to us: Heaven and earth will pass away. When heaven and earth have passed away, my word will remain. What was your word, Jesus? Love? Forgiveness? Affection? All your words were one word: Wakeup.” Perhaps to love God, then, is to wake up, to feel gratitude both for the contraction as well as the expansion (but that’s a topic for another time).

     If we wake up and realize that the Love for God is missing, we might notice the dirty house, the veils, the extent of hypocrisy, within and around. Hafiz “considered hypocrisy in the form of the ostentatious display of religious piety to be the worst moral evil” (Lewisohn, p. 174), “the supreme sin” (p. 175).*** Lewisohn also quotes Ansari who “characterizes hypocrisy as shirk or ‘polytheism’” (p. 175) and Khurramshahi who says that Hafiz extended hypocrisy to include “self righteousness, smugness, conceited self-satisfaction, putting on airs, ostentatious displays of ascetic piety, vaunting one’s learning, considering oneself to be holy and sacrosanct, bragging of and setting stock in one’s own acts of pious devotion, superciliousness, mendacity, imposture, deceit, duplicity in one’s relation to God and man, cruel lack of feeling, being without love and wisdom, and so on” (pp. 174-5). Waking up leads to light coming in, feeling the hard realization of distortions, and bowing.

     When something terrible has become commonplace, what is a sacred poet or prophet to do? With Hafiz, I’m reminded of Hosea and his marriage to Gomer, considered “an adulteress, a common harlot, or a temple prostitute.” Gale A. Yee says the text and interpretation possibly call “into question the authority of traditional interpretations, which are embedded in the sexism and misogyny of Western culture, and calls for new ways of thinking about the body, woman, and the sacred.” ****

     To love God cares about that.

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* Deut 10:12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good.” (New JPS version). See also, Jn 14:21 “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (English Standard Version)

Qur’an 3:31 “Say, ‘If you love God, follow me, and God will love you and forgive you your sins; for God is Forgiving, Merciful.’" (3:31) See The Study Quran, p. 140, for elaboration of this passage.

** Antonio Machado. Translated by Robert Bly, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, Wesleyan University Press, 1983, p.109.

*** Lewisohn, Leonard. Hafiz and the Religion of Love. 

**** Gale A. Yee. “Gomer: Bible.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gomer-bible

Thanksgiving Eve

Breezy morning, November 22, 2017

Rumi says, “[The thought of sorrow] scatters the yellow leaves from the bough of the heart, in order that incessant green leaves may grow” (Mathnawi, V, 3680, Nicholson trans.). Four lines earlier, we are admonished to penetrate beyond the material world and to go on past the immediate emotional response in order to see the beneficence of our Creator: “Every day, too, at every moment a (different) thought comes, like an honoured guest, into thy bosom.” This guest arrives every moment and so we have to welcome the full range from joy to blah to nonsense (better taken as not-yet-sense), even into loss, like yellowed and falling leaves, like a diagnosis of cancer, a child's addiction, a loved one moving on. . .

We are urged to “see” beyond the bare branches, cling not to emptiness nor despair, but find certainty in the root: 

“Do not say it is a branch: take it to be the root, in order that thou mayst always be master of thy object of desire;    For if thou take it to be (merely) a branch (derivative) and pernicious, thine eye will be waiting to see the root.    Waiting to see is poison to (spiritual) perception [literally: taste]: by that method thou wilt remain perpetually in death” (lines 3704-6). 

Rumi delivers a strong teaching. In the previous blog, I noted three levels of certainty. It’s harder to trust in the third level, like seeing the root and not waiting at the eye-level until a surface sighting is shown. When sent a guest, at least for a person capable of spiritual discernment, Rumi says to stay at the first level (Eye of Certainty) is dangerous, poisonous, deathly.

I spend time looking at the autumn woods. The golden tones are beautiful; the opened spaces draw me further in. 

       The fallen tree that stood at least 75 feet into the sky now rests amid the 3 inch sprouts of oaks. Through our deeper vision, we know the decomposing leaves and the fallen tree flow into the roots underground. May we live in trust so that the moments of pain similarly feed our souls.

Sure Good?

My take on “certainty” might be undergoing transformation. For sure, I get confused about conviction. Early on came the pain of disillusion over the loss of confidence in passionate preachers. Later dealing with life taught coping with relativity and tolerance for ambiguity. A recent blog featured Carrie Newcomer’s lyric of the travel “from certainty to mystery”; and while I like that a lot, it seems I’m being challenged to reach a certainty within mystery. For example, Rumi says “knowledge is inferior to certainty.” What kind of certainty thrives outside knowledge? When is being sure good?

     Perhaps when consciousness shifts so does the nature of certainty. Maybe the sense of being certain takes on a different tone, like a reformulating of the relative mix among knowing 1) by cognition, 2) by feel, intuition, and/or “gut,” 3) by emotion, and x) inarticulate/unnameables. Certainty might also be affected by qualities such as 4) joy and 5) passion. I use different ones of these when trying to read a person or a text, with a high level of certainty, concerning whether he/she/it is telling the truth, and especially whether to trust. The world has abundant lies in service to the Master Liar, Satan; gaining discernment can serve to advance walking toward God instead of going other ways.

     Given the import of this topic, it’s not surprising that material I’m drawn to read amplifies the theme. For example, Martin Lings’ Book of Certainty recently found its way from the “saved for later” into “Buy Now.” Lings opens: “In every esoteric doctrine there are references to three degrees of faith, and in Islamic mysticism, that is, in Sufism, these three degrees are known as the Lore of Certainty (‘ilmu ‘l-yaqin), the Eye of Certainty (‘aynu ‘l-yaqin) and the Truth of Certainty (haqqu ‘l-yaqin).” He illustrates the three degrees in relation to Moses and the burning bush: hearing about it (Lore), seeing it (Eye), and “being consumed by it and thus becoming one with it, for this degree belongs only to the One” (Truth).

     Hardly a day goes by that I’m not reading something from Rumi. Near the end of Book 4 of his Mathnawi, we find the line quoted earlier: “For in the tested Way knowledge is inferior to certainty, but above opinion./ Know that knowledge is a seeker of certainty, and certainty is a seeker of vision and intuition./ Seek this (difference between knowledge and intuitive certainty)” [Nicholson’s translation, lines 4120-]. In this passage, Rumi also references Q102:1-5. On page 1556, The Study Quran elaborates on Rumi’s lines as well as on the material cited from Lings, and the commentary brings in another favorite writer, Ibn ‘Arabi:

“Most Sufis see the knowledge of certainty, the eye of certainty (v. 7), and the truth of certainty as the three levels of spiritual development. In this respect the knowledge of certainty can be likened to knowledge obtained through hearing about something, the eye of certainty can refer to knowledge obtained by seeing or touching something, and the truth of certainty can refer to sapiential knowledge obtained by tasting, or experiencing something directly. In his Makkan Openings, Ibn ‘Arabi says that the truth of certainty is what is obtained through knowledge of the direct cause, the eye of certainty is what is provided by witnessing and spiritual unveiling, and the knowledge of certainty is what is provided by an indication (dalil) in which there are no obscurities (Futuhat, II 132. 27-29). Basing his words on the famous saying, “He who knows himself knows his Lord,” he further states that “one who witnesses himself witnesses his Lord and thereby moves from the certainty of knowledge to the certainty of the eye; then when he returns to his body, he returns to the certainty of truth from the certainty of the eye, not to the certainty of knowledge” (Futuhat, III 390.1-3; cf. 2:42; 3:71).”

     The Study Quran adds to this theme with its commentary on Q27:7-8 which states “[Remember] when Moses said unto his family, ‘Verily, I perceive a fire. I shall bring you some news therefrom, or a brand, that haply you may warm yourselves.’ Blessed is the One in the fire, and the one around it.” The commentary elaborates:

In Sufism, this verse symbolizes the levels of certainty envisioned as progressive stages in the spiritual life: (1) having conceptual knowledge of the fire, (2) seeing that fire, and (3) being burned or consumed by it symbolize (1) theoretical knowledge about spiritual matters, (2) direct vision of spiritual realities, and (3) the realization attained when the substance of the soul is transformed by being consumed by the Truth.

As this material meanders around and within me, a passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians comes to mind: “For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain” (Galatians 2:19-21, New King James Version). It seems that if I aim at “sure good” I’ll need a “death” or “annihilation” in relation to the law, and this might connect with a loss of certainty in legalism or literalism, and this would be followed by a rebirth in another level, such as living in the path of Love and Truth.

Returning to Rumi, the dimension of Law receives further treatment. In Nicholson’s introduction to the fifth book of the Mathnawi, he notes that when composing it Rumi “was approaching his seventieth year,” close enough to my age, maybe even furthering the connection I feel with the amazing text. Rumi’s Preface to Book 5 continues the wandering and pondering on this elusive theme.

This is the Fifth Book of the Poem in rhymed couplets and the spiritual Exposition, setting forth that the Religious Law is like a candle showing the way. Unless you gain possession of the candle, there is no wayfaring; and when you have come on to the way, your wayfaring is the Path; and when you have reached the journey's end, that is the Truth. Hence it has been said, “If the truths (realities) were manifest, the religious laws would be naught.” As (for example), when copper becomes gold or was gold originally, it does not need the alchemy which is the Law, nor need it rub itself upon the philosophers' stone, which (operation) is the Path; (for), as has been said, it is unseemly to demand a guide after arrival at the goal, and blameworthy to discard the guide before arrival at the goal. In short, the Law is like learning the theory of alchemy from a teacher or a book, and the Path is (like) making use of chemicals and rubbing the copper upon the philosophers' stone, and the Truth is (like) the transmutation of the copper into gold. Those who know alchemy rejoice in their knowledge of it, saying, “We know the theory of this (science)”; and those who practise it rejoice in their practice of it, saying, “We perform such works”; and those who have experienced the reality rejoice in the reality, saying, “We have become gold and are delivered from the theory and practice of alchemy: we are God's freedmen.” Each party is rejoicing in what they have.

    Or the Law may be compared to learning the science of medicine, and the Path to regulating one's diet in accordance with (the science of) medicine and taking remedies, and the Truth to gaining health everlasting and becoming independent of them both. When a man dies to this (present) life, the Law and the Path are cut off (fall away) from him, and there remains (only) the Truth. 

Rumi "A Door" 

   I have lived on the lip

 of insanity, wanting to know reasons, 

knocking on a door. It opens.

I've been knocking from the inside.      

          [p. 352] 

   "Inside the Rose" last line:

  God's secret takes form in our loving.   

[p. 356, Coleman Barks' version, A Year with Rumi.