Mysticism and Spirituality Circle

Based on the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

This is such profound, disturbing, and finally hopeful writing, that I wanted to pass it on. With thanks to my friend and companion on our Sufi path, Azima Annalouiza for sending it my way.

Here’s the link to the article

Some excerpts:

“We are anxious. We are scared. There is no place to run. There is no place to hide. There is only our love and grief to hold us in the terror of all we are seeing, sensing, denying. We can’t touch the source of our despair because we can’t touch each other. And so we retreat inside when everything outside is screaming. We are sitting in rooms watching screens alone, waiting, as if this is a pause instead of a place, the place where we find ourselves now.”

“We have been living a myth. We have constructed a dream. We have cajoled and seduced ourselves into believing we are the center of all things; with plants and other sentient beings from ants to lizards to coyotes and grizzly bears, remaining subservient to our whims, desires, and needs. This is a lethal lie that will be seen by future generations as a grave, a grave moral sin committed and buried in the name of ignorance and arrogance.”

“We cannot breathe. This is our mantra in America now. We cannot breathe because of the smoke. We cannot breathe because of a virus that has entered our homes. We cannot breathe because of police brutality and too many black bodies dead on the streets. We cannot breathe because we are holding our breath for the people and places we love.”

“Grief is love. How can we hold this grief without holding each other? To bear witness to this moment of undoing is to find the strength and spiritual will to meet the dark and smoldering landscapes where we live. We can cry. Our tears will fall like rain in the desert and wash off our skins of ash so our pores can breathe, so our bodies can breathe back the lives that we have taken for granted.”

“I will mark my heart with an “X” made of ash that says, the power to restore life resides here. The future of our species will be decided here. Not by facts but by love and loss.”

One of my favorite Sufi poets, Hafiz, has been coming into my world these days, so here are three lovely and compelling poems from him:

“Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird,
But the God who knows only four words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
‘Come dance with me, come dance.’”

— Hafiz – (translation by Daniel Ladinsky)

The Happy Virus

I caught the happy virus last night
When I was out singing beneath the stars.
It is remarkably contagious –
So kiss me.

~ Hafiz – From: The subject tonight is love – 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky

Tiny Gods

Some gods say, the tiny ones
“I am not here in your vibrant, moist lips
That need to beach themselves upon
the golden shore of a
Naked body.”
Some gods say, “I am not
the sacred yearning in the unrequited soul;
I am not the blushing cheek
Of every star and Planet–
I am not the applauding Chef
Of those precious sections that can distill
The whole mind into a perfect wincing jewel, if only
For a moment
Nor do I reside in every pile of sweet warm dung
Born of earth’s
Gratuity.”
Some gods say, the ones we need to hang,
“your mouth is not designed to know His,
Love was not born to consume
the luminous
realms.”
Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men
Create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.

~ Hafiz ~ (The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

Dear brother Salim from Missoula wrote of his time in Yom Kippur and said,

“Tonight I learned of a prayer I’d not before heard. Part of the Mourner’s Kaddish, it goes like this:”

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give to them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live in your eyes
And not in your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands
By letting
Bodies touch bodies
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away

Center for Action and Contemplation

Some simple but urgent guidance to get us through these next months.

I awoke on Saturday, September 19, with three sources in my mind for guidance: Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his “Second Coming” during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic.

These three sources form the core of my invitation. Read each one slowly as your first practice. Let us begin with Etty:

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.

—Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

Note her second-person usage, talking to “You, God” quite directly and personally. There is a Presence with her, even as she is surrounded by so much suffering.

Then, the perennial classic wisdom of the Psalms:

In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
Men are but a puff of wind,
Men who think themselves important are a delusion.
Put them on a scale,
They are gone in a puff of wind.

—Psalm 62:5–9

What could it mean to find rest like this in a world such as ours? Every day more and more people are facing the catastrophe of extreme weather. The neurotic news cycle is increasingly driven by a single narcissistic leader whose words and deeds incite hatred, sow discord, and amplify the daily chaos. The pandemic that seems to be returning in waves continues to wreak suffering and disorder with no end in sight, and there is no guarantee of the future in an economy designed to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and those subsisting at the margins of society.

It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health among a large portion of the American population is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we are living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism or post-modernism (nothing means anything, there are no universal patterns).

We are without doubt in an apocalyptic time (the Latin word apocalypsis refers to an urgent unveiling of an ultimate state of affairs). Yeats’ oft-quoted poem “The Second Coming” then feels like a direct prophecy. See if you do not agree:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers in this sad time must be to first restore the Divine Center by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes it. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out, no matter who wins the election or who is on the Supreme Court. We cannot abide in such a place for any length of time or it will become our prison.

God cannot abide with us in a place of fear.
God cannot abide with us in a place of ill will or hatred.
God cannot abide with us inside a nonstop volley of claim and counterclaim.
God cannot abide with us in an endless flow of online punditry and analysis.
God cannot speak inside of so much angry noise and conscious deceit.
God cannot be found when all sides are so far from “the Falconer.”
God cannot be born except in a womb of Love.
So offer God that womb.

Stand as a sentry at the door of your senses for these coming months, so “the blood-dimmed tide” cannot make its way into your soul.

If you allow it for too long, it will become who you are, and you will no longer have natural access to the “really deep well” that Etty Hillesum returned to so often and that held so much vitality and freedom for her.

If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice for the next four months that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to—hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.

Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above.

    You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all. 
    And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose.
    And everything to gain. 

Richard Rohr, September 19, 2020

Center for Action and Contemplation

I don’t know about the rest of you my beloved friends, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying hit me hard. I don’t remember such a feeling of despair and grief since the 2016 election.

Out of that and the rest of this unique and difficult time, a new poem has been rising up. It may yet evolve, but here it is in its current manifestation.

From These Ashes
~ a poem in honor and remembrance of Ruth Bader Ginsburg ~

How does the phoenix
Rise
From these ashes?

My overstressed soul body
Already hunched nearly to the earth
Beneath
The weight of
Fear and Separation
Grief and Sorrow
Greed and Ignorance
Illness and Death
Smoke and Fire

Felt the blow of her dying
Like a final death stroke
Pounding my wounded, naked soul
into the deep ashes
Of the blackened forest floor.

How does she rise from these ashes?

The blow left me bleeding
Blood and sweat pouring down

The blow left me weeping
Snot and tears flowing

The blow left me dying
Shit and piss evacuated

Body and soul decaying into the ash.

How does she rise from these ashes?

How does she possibly rise?!

Blood and sweat
Tears and snot
Shit and Piss
Decay…
All mingle
and sink into the Ashes.

Absorbed by the earth
The microbes and mycelium gather
And feast, and dance, and nurture

And a single seed
Dormant beneath the black gray ash
Sparks to life
On my essence-enriched nutrient soup.

This is how she rises.

From the ashes below my prone form
Sprout tiny green leaves

Quickly,
Miraculously,
They grow
Surround
And lift that still
Silent soul bundle,

Through the mist
Through the dissipating smoke
Through the rain-soaked clouds

Ocean salt rain
washes away
Ash,
Shit,
Piss,
Tears,
Snot,
Blood,
And sweat.

A pristine
Glowing soul body is offered
in love, life, and light
To the warm golden sun
Which has risen
Again.

This is how she rises.
This is how we rise.
This.
Just this.

Sept 2020 – © by Wakil David Matthews