The Law of Love

I suppose we know (don’t we?) that following the law with resentment isn’t right or good. It’s really not keeping the Law at all. Because in the final rule, the Law is Love. And, at some point, it seems good and right to realize that we’re most unlikely to find our love for God through clenched teeth, pouting like a two-year-old as if we’re having to follow laws that keep us from having fun. Even trying to believe (like adults do) that we know the constraints are for our own good won’t work. This, too, separates us from Love. And it won’t work to play hermeneutical word-games so that a law gets to be whatever we want it to be. It’s not the Law that has to change—it’s the world we live in that spins. “Imaginal,” not imaginary, is a possible name for this, transmuting “idols into icons.”

     Sometimes a bit of fog brings appreciation for light, the subtle beauty of it; it’s more than perfect clarity. The opening pages of Tom Cheetham’s Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman point into this phoenix, this shifting spectrum that moves us through construction/deconstruction/(re-)creation of reality, cosmos, earth, and heaven.

“It is perhaps the chief merit of Corbin that he can help us, in his own words, to ‘transmute idols into icons’ and so defuse the destructive power of literalism and fundamentalism at the heart, in the imagination. To anticipate: Corbin was a master of the visionary recital, the dramatic narrative, and if we understand what this truly means then we will come to see that Fiction in this great sense is the repository of all knowledge, and all truth. Literal truth is always false…In reality, fiction is the only possible means of expressing the truth…” (pp. 14-15).

     As I’m reading into this work of Cheetham, I feel my grounding become a bit tenuous; and while excited in perceiving from his writing a better bridge between Jung and Sufism, I sense more certain positioning as I reach back toward Chittick’s explication and translation of Ibn al-’Arabi (Sufi Path of Knowledge). It seems I’m venturing into remaking my “lived experience” and re-mapping the “real world” with textures of soul and spirit so that the imaginal world revolutionizes the feeling of certainty. Strangely (or not, as I see a similar reporting in Cheetham’s narrative of his journey from secular rationalism to spiritual pragmatism), while reading Chittick (as the current engine in a long train including Corbin’s Creative Imagination and many other challenging texts as well as life experiences and simply getting older) slowly in order to allow it to absorb into dreams and reflections, something redemptive is happening with the Law. 

     Instead of succumbing to and indulging in the typical defensiveness that accompanies being confronted with religious laws, I’m taking a few deep breaths, relaxing shoulders, neck, and stomach. With guidance from the masters, let’s imagine the Law not as a burden but instead as a ladder for the spiritual pathway. 

“Again we are brought back to the fundamental human imperative: Man is bound by the reality of his own essence to strive after God, who is Good, Light, Knowledge, Being—everything to which he must conform in order to reach his own happiness and felicity. But God is unknown and unknowable, so the only way to reach Him is to follow the Law as He makes it known to us” (p. 291, Chittick).

     Instead of fearing the loss of each person’s individual fingerprint identity and destiny, let’s hold in remembrance it’s all given by God, of course. The same Source provides this gift of uniqueness as well as the Law capable of providing unique guidance to the Unity. To us, it may often feel paradoxical: the many and the One. Thus the need for the truth of an imaginal world.

From the time man begins to climb the ladder of ascent (mi’raj), he receives divine self-disclosure in accordance with the ladder of his ascent. Each individual among the Folk of Allah has a ladder specific to him which no one else climbs…However, all the steps of the meanings for the prophets, the friends, the faithful, and the messengers are the same… (pp. 218-219, Ibn al-’Arabi translated by Chittick)

Let’s not expect cheap grace. Stepping on this ladder demands all:

“When man renounces his own individual desire, shrinks from his own ego, and prefers his Lord over all else, then God sets up before him in place of the form of his own soul the form of a divine guidance, a real form from the Real, so that he may walk proudly in diaphanous capes of light. This form is the Law of his prophet and the messengerhood of his messenger. It casts to him from his Lord that within which lies his felicity. (p. 252, Ibn al-’Arabi translated by Chittick)

     The call of the spiritual pathway is freedom from imprisonment in idol-worship, both lawlessness as well as false conceptions of the Law. God’s Law is not a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. Failure to grow beyond the literalism of limited conceptions may enforce dogmas that fit the ego-mind but feel cold and harsh. To grow isn’t to become free from the Law but to become free from the ego, to move from a fear-based narrowness, from violent exclusiveness, from joyless rigidity as well as reckless indulgence and addiction, and instead to flow into the imaginal world, the Love.

“Interpret Your Own Self”

Sunrise March 28

Some weeks before attending the Radical Love event at the Garrison Institute, I was already well into Alan Williams’ Rumi: Spiritual Verses, his translation of Book 1 of the Masnavi. Soon after returning from the Institute and while completing that book, a particularly compelling passage called out: “Interpret your own self” (3758). Williams’ notes tell that this line is “almost identical” to 1088b. So looking back, I find, sure enough, a green sticky marker there pointing to #1088 in the way that I use for the few passages that jump off the page shouting: “Pay attention here!” So what might “Interpret your own self” mean and why is it so important? 

     I believe that this act of interpreting leads me further in the journey of knowing myself and thus connects with the awe-inspiring hadith: “to know oneself is to know one’s Lord.” This challenge continues to provide a bridge between authoritative text and personal construction of meaning.  Samples of previous explorations of the hadith include blogs from 2017: Sept 20, Sept 23, Nov 1, & Dec 16. When I look back at Chittick’s Me & Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi, I find this hadith frequently cited (see his listing on p. 357) and particularly in #58 (p. 69) that traces through Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad toward today: “He who knows his soul knows his Lord.”

     I’d probably been prepped for Rumi’s “Interpret your own self” by simultaneously reading Jawid Mojaddedi’s Beyond Dogma: Rumi’s Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories, followed by William Chittick’s Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. For example, from Beyond Dogma, I feel reassured in my sense that, properly approached with sufficient humility, it’s not too presumptuous to read and interpret Rumi’s Masnavi as direction, as a personal invitation to each individual, for moving closer to the Presence. In short, Rumi guides a person toward knowing him/herself in the way that knows one’s Lord.

     Mojaddedi discusses this ultimate access as coming through “contemporary Friends of God.” In other words, access to the Divine is not locked away in some remote revelation, in an almost indecipherable language where those saints who communicated with God are so unreachably far above us that we just have to follow recipes. Instead, Mojaddedi explains Rumi’s “assertions about the comparable loftiness of contemporary Friends of God, and especially the leading Friend of God of every era”:

“The priority of this concern for Rumi would also account for his emphasis on the shared potential of all people to reach the lofty level reached by Prophets and Friends of God, if they fulfill their mystical potential. . . Rumi’s predilection was to emphasize the closeness of all humanity to the divine…” (pp. 39-41)

This reminds me of Chittick’s calling the “human soul a potential intellect” (Science of the Cosmos, p. 127) and asserting “the only created thing that is omniscient in any real sense is the fully actualized intellect, the radiance of God’s own Selfhood” (p. 128; cf all of Chapter 6 on this potential).

     Mojaddedi elaborates on the basis for our means “to interpret”: “the most distinctive characteristic of [Rumi’s] mysticism is his celebration of the continual communication of God with His creation.” He provides a footnote: “I have decided to use the term ‘communication’ in preference to alternatives such as ‘inspiration’ or ‘revelation.’ The term ‘wahy’ is notoriously difficult to translate and has taken on two dimensions of meaning in relation to Prophets …” (footnote 5, p. 185). Mojaddedi further discusses the difference (and overlap?) between ‘verbal expression’ and ‘internal/non-verbal promptings’ and ‘inspirations.’ This discussion continues with lines from Rumi’s Masnavi as Mojaddedi says that Rumi “describes the Friend of God’s knowledge in the following terms:

The Tablet that’s Preserved was his director— / From what is that ‘preserved’? From any error.
Not through stars, magic or one’s dreams at night,/ But wahy-i haqq and He knows best what’s right!
Sufis may call it mere ‘heart-inspiration,’/ To hide it from the general population.
It’s ‘inspiration of the heart,’ since He/  Is manifest there—it’s thus error-free.
Believer, through God’s light you now can see;/ From error you have full immunity!”
(Mojaddedi in Beyond Dogma, p. 65, translating from Book 4 of the Masnavi, lines 1852-1856. In his more recently published Book 4, Mojaddedi translates wahy-i haqq as “God’s own words,” p. 112.)

So how does the direction to “Interpret your own self” play itself out? I’m finding that “the path of attraction,” as it applies specifically to listening for which readings stir the beating of my heart, is leading me back to the writing left by the guide whose hand I took. It happened like this: I noted my response (an “internal/non-verbal prompting” perhaps) to a comment Omid made in the Radical Love Institute about angel wings on donkeys. He told me it came from Rumi’s Fihi, translated by Thackston in Signs of the Unseen, somewhere in the middle of the 246 pages. I’d already begun reading in this book and, upon returning home, scanned to see if I could find the passage. Didn’t work; so, more properly directed, I started at page one and read forward, finding (pp. 111-112) the angel-feather-on-donkey-tail passage, and kept going. I noticed along the way that Thackston frequently referenced Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i and felt another point of attraction, this time to the Kisa'i text. But, as often happens on a travel, while considering getting a copy of Kisa'i, I felt drawn to other collections of similar tales already on our shelves (Ibn al’Arabi’s Bezels of Wisdom, Attar’s Memorials of God’s Friends, Heschel’s The Prophets) but these were not lighting up. Instead, I was caught by a book with which I hadn’t connected in earlier attempts--our Sidi’s Stories of the Prophets ( by Shaykh Muhammad al-Jamal ar-Rifa'i as-Shadhuli). It had not especially resonated when I’d tried it a few years earlier. Now it rings like a bell or maybe like the lovely chimes on our porch.

True Signs

        By March of 2018, I’d just about enjoyed enough of my first year of retirement doing nothing. Also we'd had about enough of winter. So we put together a plan, and on the 14th of that month we set out on the adventure to see our good friends who had moved away some three months earlier. In addition to spending time with them in Abiquiu, New Mexico, we’d arranged to see the Grand Canyon (where I took over 100 photos), Monument Valley (400+ photos!), and on the return trip planned to visit with family in Texas and South Carolina. As noted in the video,

we followed the advice of Robert Burns to change plans along the way: “The best laid schemes o' mice and men/ Gang aft agley” (from “To A Mouse”).

         Returning home, remembering the experiences, reviewing photos taken on the trip, and reading more about O’Keeffe, my reflections seemed to spiral around the Beloved, the soul, and b/Beauty. The capacity to enter the imaginal world happens as our soul takes form in the canyon beauties: the stone and earth formations, the trees and plants, as well as the creatures like the Evening Grosbeak that appeared in Bandelier National Monument Park. 

     Beauty in a dry, seemingly hostile environment, offers insight; perhaps more than thought, the experience and presence there feed more feeling for the fusion of jamal/jalal, the gentle inseparable from the hard, lovely interwoven with severe, both familiar and mystical, the One. It’s the rose, the lily, the cactus blooming that glows because it celebrates the union with the thorn, the skull, the dark mystery. Love draws the human into the divine. 

     Some changes we made to the planned itinerary can be attributed to the influence of an emerging fascination with the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. We found ourselves following the O’Keeffe track around Abiquiu, into Ghost Ranch, the White Place, Santa Fe, and Palo Duro Canyon. Back home, her art continued flowing from books such as: 

* Georgia O’Keeffe by Charles C. Eldredge  

“O’Keeffe’s work had, from her earliest days as a professional artist, elicited comments like ‘revelation.’ When Alfred Stieglitz first encountered her abstract drawings in 1916, he responded immediately to their power. As recalled by one witness to the moment, ‘They were a revelation to him.’ . . . William Fisher, for example, praised the ‘mystic and musical drawings,’ which he likened to religious ‘revelations’ in their ‘cosmic grandeur.’” (p. 13)

* Lovingly Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer edited by Clive Giboire. 

“Not only is [O’Keeffe’s painting] a piece of consummate craftsmanship, but it likewise possesses that mysterious force, that hold upon the hidden soul which distinguishes important communications from the casual reports of the eye.” (quoting Lewis Mumford, p. 295)

* Georgia O’Keeffe by Georgia O’Keeffe

“It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint” (p. 88).

     I wonder how those of us who do not paint or dance or play music deal with clarifying “the intangible thing.” The feeling for that marks a true sign, doesn’t it? I believe it’s the guiding inspiration that draws each person to participate in his and her life as an artist.

     Perhaps for me it’s doing photography especially when further expressed in digital media to play out a theme. “True Signs” swirls together art, photography, music, and words to explore the way I reach for and into relationship with the divine.  In producing the digital media project, I found myself wondering if the purpose of an artist, at least for me in this moment, points toward revelation; an artist aims at developing consciousness that is increasingly sensitive to and responsive to signs of God. How might our knowing, our evolving consciousness, attune more poignantly into the inner and outer presence of the divine? 

     Tracking signs of God is scarcely a new thing. About a thousand years ago, Hamid al-Ghazali opens The Alchemy of Happiness: 

“Knowledge of self is the key to the knowledge of God, according to the saying: ‘He who knows himself knows God,’ and, as it is Written in the Koran [41:53], ‘We will show them Our signs in the world and in themselves, that the truth may be manifest to them’” (Trans. Claud Field, p. 17). 

The Study Quran links this passage with Q 51:20-21 “And upon the earth are signs for those possessing certainty, and within your souls…”

As happens often with the Qur’an, we hear echoes of other religious texts: 

* Psalm 19 on the handiwork of God: “day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge…”

* Isaiah 7:11, “Ask a sign for yourself from the LORD your God; make it deep as Sheol or high as heaven.”

* John 2:11, “This beginning of His signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.”

* Matthew 16:3, “And in the morning, 'There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and threatening.' Do you know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but cannot discern the signs of the times?’”

The mystic Rabia expressed her relationship with the divine presence:

 “O Lord, I have never listened to the sound of animals, or the movement of trees, or the murmur of water, or the song of birds, or the sitting in the shadows, or the sound of the wind, or the echo of thunder, but I have seen them as a sign of Your Oneness showing me that there is nothing like You.”   The Knower of Allah,  Rabia al-Adawiyya

Contemporary historian of religion, Diana Butler Bass, elaborates the importance of persons today shifting consciousness in order to realize the presence of the divine. 

“Roiling around the planet is a shifting conception of God…unmediated and local, animating the natural world and human activity in profoundly intimate ways…the personal, mystical, immediate, and intimate is emerging as the dominant way of engaging the divine. What was once reserved for a few saints has now become the quest of millions around the planet—to be able to touch, feel, and know God for one’s self.” (Grounded, p. 9)

“Where is God? . . . The grounded God is a God in relationship with space and time as the love that connects and creates all things, known in and with the world. . . . God is not above or beyond, but integral to the whole of creation, entwined with the sacred ecology of the universe.” (Grounded, pp. 10, 25)

     In reading Grounded, in reflecting on O’Keeffe’s art, through meditating on sacred text, and while remembering the experiences of our journey, I’m wondering about the application of soil quality (ranging from fertile to depleted to rebuilt) in relation to the stuff a human has that is comparable to the soil, the earth. Is it helpful to consider our “ground” for consciousness in this sense? In addition to the purification process, there is also the rebuilding. Consciousness, like earth, has been decimated by erosion and poor management; but it’s reassuring to experience rebuilding it. Purified and rebuilt consciousness provides the ground for discerning the signs of God. Upon this fertile ground, God-consciousness can be built.

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Blog entries referenced in the video include:

* Love Memories in the Imaginal World  (Feb 19, 2018)

* Tracking on the Path of the Heart (Feb 10, 2018)

* Divine Intoxication   (Jan 18, 2018)

* Foggy Steps in the Path of the Heart  (Nov 8, 2017)

* The Cipher of a Mystery  (Sept 18, 2017)

* Truth: Sacred-Text/Lived-Experience  (Jun 22, 2017)

* The Infinite in One Step  (Feb 2, 2015)

* The Sense You Were Born With  (July 7, 2012)

Blessed Re-Emergent Spring

One week ago, the full blush of spring radiated from the azalea festival in Tyler, TX, highlighted by dogwoods, redbuds, wisteria, and even the smiling new-green deciduous trees. This we forfeited in driving northeast, returning home, still adorned in winter earth tones. And yet the loss finds redemption in allowing the feel of manifestation, the pre-budding, the reassurance of imagination, of intuitive knowing, of faith which is the evidence of the unseen. This tantalizingly slow emergence of spring feeds the soul.

“… opening of a window in the heart towards the unseen also takes place in conditions approaching those of prophetic inspiration, when intuitions spring up in the mind unconveyed through any sense-channel” (The Alchemy of Happiness, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, Trans. Claud Field, pp. 19-20).

        Yesterday shuffling through the dusty leaves fallen last autumn, I almost stumble over the pale blooms of bloodroot. This modest forerunner of spring holds the miraculous powers of rejuvenation. Its long history of medicinal uses includes promises such as these:

“to prevent certain types of cancer, protect against infections, boost heart health, improve the appearance of the skin (including elimination of conditions like eczema), speed healing and recovery, increase circulation, and soothe the pain of migraines . . . a very powerful plant and can be dangerous (even toxic) if used incorrectly.”  https://www.organicfacts.net/bloodroot.html

         Returning from our trip to the Southwest, we also stopped in Athens, GA, hoping to find the coffee-house where Coleman Barks tapped the life-spring of Jalalu’ddin Rumi. In the one we found, they told us Coleman recently did a reading there but that his coffee shop was probably no longer around. Like spring flowers so soon gone from sight. But not gone, just waiting. Ghazali again:

“The first step to self-knowledge is to know that thou art composed of an outward shape, called the body, and an inward entity called the heart, or soul. . . In truth [the heart/soul] does not belong to the visible world, but to the invisible, and has come into this world as a traveller visits a foreign country for the sake of merchandise, and will presently return to its native land” (p. 18).

        Back home, I’m catching up on reading from Coleman’s Year with Rumi , one window into that invisible space and treasure. For April 6, he gives “Blessing”: “I want to be where/ your bare foot walks,// because maybe before you step,/ you will look at the ground./ I want that blessing.”

Human-Divine Harmony

Part 3 in the year-long series of looking at our woods through the lens of David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen. 

   Haskell’s entry for January 21 focuses on comparing chickadees’ survival in extremely cold conditions with humans’ coping through fire, clothing, and food storage. In contrast with species that evolve to accommodate nature, I wonder about humans’ role in shaping the environment. When Haskell strips his clothes to simulate the bird’s experience, within seconds his body starts to shut down and soon he would have become unconscious and dead. Instead he covers up with warm insulating clothes and returns to his toasty kitchen, fueled by burning wood, powered by petroleum, sun, wind, or nuclear energy. When is this thing we call “civilization” in harmony with all-our-relations and when not?

   In our woods from January 20-23 in 2018, snow was melting, then temperatures peaked at 60 degrees, about 20 above normal, followed by rain and overnight freezing. On the warm days, I was working up a good sweat removing invasive plants from our woodland. This thing called “civilization” is crazy-making, and then perhaps it also allows a place to find/receive God.

   Perhaps humans just have to fall; in other words, to learn harmony, we first mess things up. Most of the mess in our woods came in by humans who thought they knew better. For example, "bush honeysuckle”:

…first introduced into the United States in the mid to late 1800s from Europe and Asia for use as ornamentals, wildlife food and cover, and erosion control. . . [But] Honeysuckle out competes and shades out desirable native woodland species, and can form pure, dense thickets totally void of other vegetation. . . While honeysuckle fruit is abundant and rich in carbohydrates it lacks the high-fat and nutrient-rich content that most of our native plants provide migrating birds. Wherever invasive honeysuckle shrubs displace our native forest species there is a huge potential impact on these migrating bird populations due to the reduction in availability of native food sources.  https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/F-68 

   Soon after we were adopted by these woods, the missing native trees along with our birds asked me to take care of a thicket. While doing this has produced buckets of sweat, effects of poison ivy, ticks, etc., it’s also brought the joy of stewardship and thus the presence of the Divine. Tending these woods and being tended by them: that’s a divine harmony. In my view, it’s allowed one of the “very special human doorways to true religious understanding…and finally as God’s true earthly ‘stand-ins’ or ‘Stewards...’” The passage comes from James Winston Morris’ forthcoming book, Openings:

"First, and most importantly, it is human Hearts (the Qur’anic qalb al-insān) that are the locus of true spiritual ‘Knowing’ (‘ilm) and of our awareness of God and Truth: that is, it is not simply our mind or intellect or passion. Hence the decisive practical importance, throughout the Nahj al-Balāgha, of Ali’s constant stress on the purification of our hearts, through inner surrender to the divine Will (taslīm), as the underlying spiritual purpose of the many divine commandments. Divine, inspired ‘Knowing,’ however it is outwardly acquired, can only be perceived as such by the Heart that has been ‘polished,’ emptied of this world’s distractions and attachments, and thereby opened up to the full significance and reality of the divine Word—and to the further rights and obligations (another dimension of the Arabic al-Haqq) flowing from that opening. 
     Second, the practically indispensable key to this human potential for religious Knowing is the real existence and efforts of a limited number of divinely guided individuals—again, not of particular books, rituals, doctrines or worldly institutions, none of which are even mentioned in this intimate, highly personal lesson. Ali refers here to those very special human doorways to true religious understanding by several profoundly significant Qur’anic expressions: the ‘divine Knowers’; the ‘Friends of God’ (awliyā’ Allāh); God’s ‘Proofs’ or ‘Clear Signs’ on Earth (hujja, bayyina); God’s ‘True Servants’ (‘ibād Allāh); and finally as God’s true earthly ‘stand-ins’ or ‘Stewards’ (khalīfat Allāh).” [reference to Qur’an 6:165]

   While Morris is not explicitly talking about tending woodlands, I find very helpful his elaboration of stewardship in the context of searching for the heart-space that connects the human with the divine. What a blessing it is to feel the peace, beauty, and harmony in mature woodlands.

“Pileated Woodpecker…a keystone species in mature and old forest”

Divine Intoxication

Our Tavern of Woods, Jan 17, 2018

In comic-strip pith, “Word” signals “That’s it!” as in “Truth!” But in real life, words only approximate and often miss the mark, frequently crafted with intention to deceive, witnessed poignantly in the discipline of rhetoric. Her cousin, Religion, focuses on guiding discernment into truth, plumbing the eternal word becoming flesh, tuning the human voice toward resonance with its Source. Both rhetoric and religion testify that not all, not even most, scratching on surfaces  approaches the sanctity of “Word.” And yet this writing and reading, this employment of words sometimes corrects a false step, sometimes allows a a scent or taste of the water of life, the "mystical intoxication."

   Concerning taste, this preoccupation with “word” came about, perhaps, due to the trouble stirred up by Hafiz choosing to feature “tavern” when “temple” is meant—isn’t it? Franklin Lewis, in his chapter in Hafiz and the Religion of Love (Ed. Leonard Lewisohn), comments:

“Thus the wine tavern becomes the locus—the ruins on the outskirts of town, where the non-Muslims drink clandestinely so as not to offend public morality, the liminal space outside society—while the dawn becomes the poetic moment when divine intervention arrives, allowing wine and relief, or mystical intoxication. [Lewis illustrates with the first line of Ghazal 479] ‘At dawn a call from the wine tavern, wishing good fortune/ It said come back, for you are an old haunter of this court.’” (pp. 274-5)

The next line from the ghazal extends the purpose of Hafiz playing the word “tavern.” In Peter Avery’s translation:

“A draught from us drink like Jamshid, so that of both worlds’ mystery/ The beam of light from the world-seeing cup might inform you.” (p. 580, Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz)

Of course, in the spirit of good mythopoesis, Hafiz wants to shake us, to wake us, in order that we might search out hypocrisy, alert for hidden idols, finding the ones that continue to separate us from the Love of God; that we might come back to the source of inspiration, walking in the mystery of both worlds. 

God invites us every moment to do this, to purify in order to live more cleanly. To help me enter the invitations, as explained earlier, I’m intending a year-long project that connects (A) David George Haskell’s study (The Forest Unseen) of his forest mandela with 

~14 cardinals

(B) the woods that illumine our windows. We’re now on his second entry, the one for January 17. On this date, his woods like ours are filled with snow. We wonder how the snowflake reaches its essential uniqueness, turning through the spirit wind, glistening in the illuminating light.

Haskell’s meditation (pp. 8-11) flows back to Johannes Kepler (1611) who “wrote that snowflakes are showing us the spirit of the earth and God, the ‘formative soul’ that inhabits all being.” Yet Kepler was frustrated in not showing “a material explanation” and still his “musings on the snowflake…contributed to the development of our modern understanding of atoms.” Haskell brings our contemporary X-ray analysis to the design of matter: our woods, water, and us.

“The basic hexagonal shape of snowflakes is elaborated in varied ways as the ice crystal grows, with the temperature and humidity of the air determining the final shape… Other combinations of temperature and humidity cause the growth of hollow prisms, needles, or furrowed plates. As snowflakes fall, the wind tosses them through the air’s innumerable slight variations of temperature and humidity. No two flakes experience exactly the same sequence, and the particularities of these divergent histories are reflected in the uniqueness of the ice crystals that make up each snowflake.” pp. 9-10

As a side note, Kepler has also received recent attention in relation to his role in enlightening dark consciousness evident in witch hunts, including the one involving his own mother.* 

The human defines the authenticity of word as the individual resonates uniquely back into the original promise, the timeless covenant between God and human, the affirmation of sovereignty. Humans also revolve through cultural drafts and shadows that challenge each of us to sound the authentic word that is true to the Source. Thus, again, the purpose of religion. 

        Sufis talk of this walking as the Path of Attraction. But life abounds with attractions, and so many are bewitchments from the impurities picked up in the currents of culture. The true calling is to discern, to follow, and to voice the Word. God is Everywhere. The purification back to the Source leads to and follows from entering more deeply into Beauty, Truth, Love, and the array of qualities endowed uniquely in each individual.

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* Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer and the Witch, Oxford, 2015.

James A. Conner, Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother. Harper, 2005.

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

Hardened Hearts vs the True Life

frozen “water of life” like the hardened heart

“Your True Life,” Rumi’s poem for the day, begins: “As you start to walk out on the way,/ the way appears” (Dec 26 in Coleman Barks’ A Year with Rumi).

     A big step for me (and I suppose for most everyone) involves personal embodiment of “career,” a term whose etymology appropriately points toward “road,” “racecourse,” or “wheeled vehicle.” Today’s “true life,” for better and worse, comes not just in walking, but in riding and racing. 

     My teaching career culminated in a course, Good Stories: Teaching Narratives for Peace & Justice. I loved teaching it, the class limit of 60 persons always filled, and it usually had a wait list of over a hundred. After teaching the course about fifteen times over the past six years, I’m still pondering the essence, the primary aim, and the secret.

     As 2017 wanes down to its close, while in my first year of retirement, I’m walking my way into more understanding and appreciation of Good Stories and True Life. This week, “the way appears,” in part, through a Christmas gift book from the top of my wish list, Hafiz and the Religion of Love. Leonard Lewisohn (who edited the book) articulates “the language of the invisible” and the almost impossible, although crucially vital, task of integrating “mythopoesis” into the “mental furniture of modern man.” His explanation of this aim resonates so tellingly with my experience of Good Stories.

“Albeit immanent in popular consciousness, most of Hafiz’s mythopoesis—his language of analogy and capacity for thinking in symbols—is no longer part of the mental furniture of modern man. The aesthetic premises of his poetry are incomprehensible within the conceptual framework of modern anti-art movements such as surealism, minimalism, abstract expressionism or ‘pop’ art, for the principles of his spiritual vision, being heart-based and focused on presential knowledge (‘ilm-i hudhuri), are completely alien to the presuppositions of the modern materialist society of the West. . . The central aim of the chapters in this volume is to enable contemporary Western students of classical Persian poetry to reconnect with that lost symbolic universe and hopefully re-initiate themselves into the mundus imaginalis of Hafiz and the entire galaxy of Persian poets who spoke his ‘language of the invisible’. . . In modern literary studies and critical theory, especially in the contemporary West, the vertical purport and spiritual import of his symbolic imagery by and large are deliberately neglected, and the esoteric doctrines and metaphysical teachings inspiring his verse are treated as irrelevancies.” pp. xxi-xxiii

     About the same time (around 2007) when Lewisohn and colleagues were drafting and presenting their conference papers that turned into Hafiz and the Religion of Love, I was developing the Good Stories course. If I had been able to articulate it, my central aim could have been worded as Lewisohn powerfully phrases it: “to reconnect with that lost symbolic universe and hopefully re-initiate themselves into the mundus imaginalis.” Perhaps it’s just as well, because if I had included those words on my course proposal the chances are pretty good that it would have been rejected by the university’s course approval process, “treated as irrelevancies.”

     Recent political events prove to me the consequence of our failure to nurture spiritual vision, heart-based knowing and caring. The sober intellectual lacks the capacity to counteract the ego-centered dystopia because cold rationalism fails to offer sufficient attraction against sensual materialism. In a strange way, the tavern and the house of love (primary images in Hafiz and other classical Persian poets) show closer affinity for the path to God than the strict legalistic rigidity cut by fundamentalist religions. Because approaching God surpasses human mind and body, the metaphysical stretch found in symbolic expression has to be called forth.

     Without this nurturing, the imaginal world disappears. Without mundus imaginalis* we lose the courage, vision, and strength to engage in social justice; these qualities are essential if we are to repel the self-centered tyrannies from within ourselves and from others. In language carried by the scriptures and prophets of our major religions, this loss can be related to the “hardening of the heart.” Teachings on this topic are abundant and a few samples follow:

* In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, statements about God hardening the heart occur at least fourteen times. The prime case involves Pharaoh dealing with the plagues. 

     If it’s God who hardens the heart, we wonder: Are humans absolved of moral responsibility? What if we do not wake up and “walk out on the way”? Are we freed from responsibility to teach the discernment between good and evil?

* Persons who are exploring the “hardened heart” explain the human part:

“When it says that the Lord made Pharaoh’s heart hard, the meaning in the internal sense is that Pharaoh himself made his heart hard. . . The evil that is attributed in the Bible to the Lord actually has its origin in human beings.”

* From an Islamic perspective, we find the responsibility to “soften our hearts.”

     In my view, the hardened heart relates to the failure to compose and engage the mundus imaginalis.* A person with a hardened heart has limited or no access to the eye of the heart and sees instead through the rational mind with a consciousness dominated by ego, the power drive, and materialism. The capacity for imagination (for a person having the hardened heart) has been corroded by sensationalism featured in media that are driven by gratuitous sex and violence. Imagination has been polluted. The higher calling demands that we continue to purify, resurrect, and re-create.

     Spiritual teachings have hardly been remiss in stating clearly that humans are wrong to place too much value on material possessions. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” How could it be put more plainly?

     When persons have hardened hearts and do not feel the problem in accumulating money in order to buy bigger houses, faster cars and phones, and other forms of instant gratification, a wake-up call may be in order. If “love” has deteriorated to getting applause, being admired for display of wealth, and feeling better than others (sexism, racism, superior-religionism, etc.), perhaps God has to harden the heart so that it can break before death ends the opportunity to bow before the Divine. If persons cannot see discrimination, hate, and ego-centered acts as opposed to God’s will, then the mirror of their heart might be shown in a ruler dominated by ungodliness. That seems to be the classic Pharaoh story, timeless, acted out once more.

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* For elaboration on mundus imaginalis, see Henry Corbin. 

For example, he says: 

"At the beginning of each narrative, the visionary finds himself in the presence of a supernatural being of great beauty, whom he asks who he is and whence he comes. Essentially, these tales illustrate the Gnostic's experience, lived as the personal history of the Stranger, the captive aspiring to return home. (from p. 2)

As a result of internalization, one has moved out of external reality. Henceforth, spiritual reality envelops, surrounds, contains so-called material reality (from p. 4)

We realize immediately that we are no longer confined to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology restricted to the empirical world and the world of abstract intellect. Between them there is a world that is both intermediary and intermediate, described by our authors as the 'alam al-mithal, the world of the image, the mundus imaginalis: a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely, imaginative power, a faculty with a cognitive function, a noetic value which is as real as that of sense perception or intellectual intuition. We must be careful not to confuse it with the imagination identified by so-called modern man with "fantasy", and which, according to him, is nothing but an outpour of "imaginings". " (from p. 5)