Rumi and the dervish

There is a story – surely it has grown over the centuries to include the more fantastic elements it carries – about the poet Rumi, that he began his religious life as a scholar of books and ideas. He studied texts and knew doctrines backwards and forwards. Until one day when a dervish – the texts usually describe him as “a man in rags” – comes to see Rumi. The scholar is hard at work at his desk and the man in rags asks him, “What is all of this?” Rumi responds dismissively as if to say, “You wouldn’t understand.” Then the dervish tosses the manuscripts onto the floor (or, texts sometimes say, he passes his hand over them and they catch fire). Either way, Rumi exclaims, “What was that?!” “You wouldn’t understand,” the man in rags replies.

Practicing without ceasing

There is a profound tale from the Desert Fathers that explains why spiritual practice makes sense even when we hold onto religious questions without clear answers:

A young monk approached an older, more adept one and asked, “Father, I am having trouble remembering the instructions that I have been given about living the spiritual life. I ask questions and I listen to the answers and I do what is asked of me, but then, I almost just as quickly forget what I’ve been told! What is the point to trying to learn if I am so simple-minded? Why should I practice when I do not know for certain what is true? Maybe I should just return to my worldly life.”

It sounds a bit like a set-up to a saccharine, simple answer, doesn’t it? A good occasion to say to the youngster, “Buck up! Try harder. Accept what you do not know. Or, be more diligent!” That sort of thing.

But the old monk doesn’t give the sort of answer one might suspect. Like a Zen master, he asks the younger man to do something in order to discover for himself the answer to his questions. He points to two empty bottles on a nearby table.

“Take those two bottles. Fill one completely with the oil that we use for our lampstands. As for the other, leave it empty, as it was.”

The young man obediently did as he was told.

Then the old monk said, “Now, take the bottle full of oil and pour it back where it was.”   The younger man again did as he was told.

“Do it again,” the elder instructed. “Fill that same bottle that you filled before, once again with oil.” And again he told him to empty the bottle once it was filled. This went on for more than an hour, over and over. Meanwhile the empty bottle sat empty.

With patience, the young man kept doing as he was told. It just so happened that this novice’s job in the community was to clean bottles used for holding lamp oil. He knew all about bottles and oil.

After a while, as they sat together looking on the two bottles now empty, the old monk said, “Please tell me, my son, what you see.”

“I see one bottle that has not held any oil and it is only dusty and dry,” the novice answered. “But the bottle that I have filled, unfilled, and refilled many times is clean, shining, and coated with the sweetness of oil.”

“Precisely!” the old man replied. “In the same way, you benefit from doing these spiritual things even if they make little sense or later pass from your mind. Whether you realize it immediately or not, over time they will change you. Filling yourself with these oils will leave you fragranced.”

Emily Dickinson on prayer

As she writes, in some respects, prayer is a pale substitute.

 

Prayer is the little implement

Through which Men reach

Where Presence – is denied them

 

-Emily Dickinson

Knowledge vs. passion

I was enthralled by the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein while in seminary in the late eighties and early nineties. Paul Holmer taught him to me at North Park Seminary in Chicago.

In the last few days, I have been returning to those books, and those ideas, and realizing how much they have formed who I am over the last twenty years. For example:

“I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

“It says that knowledge is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.

“The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you can follow it as you would a doctor’s prescription. But here you need something to move you in a new direction. Once you have been turned round, you must stay turned round.

“Knowledge is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.”

From Culture and Value, 1946

Head vs. heart

I enjoy reading the letters of writers. It is quite a loss to posterity that we will no longer have such books, collecting the letters that interesting thinkers and figures have written back and forth to their correspondents. All we have today are emails, and they are usually forgettable.

Anyway, I am reading William Butler Yeats’ letters tonight and came across this marvelous paragraph, which I had noted a few years ago on the first occasion when I read it. How terrific it is!

“I hate reasonable people. The activity of their brains sucks up all the blood out of their hearts. I was once afraid of turning out reasonable myself. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.”

Book review: Gandhi and the Unspeakable

Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth, by James W. Douglass. Orbis Books, March 2012. 158 pp. $24.

I understand why people sometimes find James Douglass mad. In the early going of this one, he reminds us of his earlier work on the assassination of President Kennedy, writing that Kennedy was murdered because he kept “turning toward peace” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and “Whether in response to Roman or Russian enemies, we had to love those enemies—for the sake of everyone—in a truthful, unsentimental way.” I am fairly certain that the Roman in that sentence is an allusion to Jesus on the cross, comparing JFK to Christ. So, I get it; Douglass can come across a bit mad, or at least, overly and unhelpfully pious. JFK was no satyagrahi.

However, this slim book is important. When analyzing Gandhi on his own terms, rather than analyzing others using Gandhian terms, Douglass illuminates murky waters. In the subtitle, Unspeakable refers to assassination used as a “nationally approved art to frustrate change in proudly democratic countries.” Douglass’s argument that Gandhi’s murderer was acting on behalf of Indian government forces will surprise some, and Douglass’s book is a plea for that murder to have a redemptive function in human history.

Above all, he wants to argue that satyagraha still can save the world, and that it originated out of deeply spiritual, primarily Christian, impulses. Hence the odd application of spiritual motivation to other non-violent or passive (in)actions, such as JFK’s. In the end, however, I kept remembering Tagore’s critique of Gandhi’s politics: “Passive resistance is a force which is not, in itself, necessarily moral. It can be used against truth as well as for it.” The notion that Indians should sacrifice their educations, families, and lives for the cause of satyagraha was unacceptable to Tagore’s mind. Then again, Tagore also never shared an appreciation for power in powerlessness, pedagogy in suffering, and embracing one’s enemies and even death – other ways that Gandhi lived the vision of Christ while in South Africa and India.

(I wrote this review originally for The Tablet, who published it in the UK, but it is only available to their subscribers.)

I am not once-born

William James, in his great book about religious experience, describes those who live their spiritual lives without darkness, without mystical interest, without much wavering from the original beliefs to which they were born. He calls theirs “the religion of healthy-mindedness,” and their faith as “once-born.”

I am not once-born, but twice, and more.

A few centuries ago

It is impossible for us to imagine what it once felt like to wake up in the morning and not know what is happening beyond our own village.

Simone Weil

An Encounter with Simone Weil — a powerful new documentary releasing in NYC this week and then on DVD this summer.

http://bit.ly/flwM2k

 

We cannot believe for each other

We cannot believe for each other

thought is too sacred a despot.

 

(Emily Dickinson)