The Project of God

BismiLlah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim
was-salat was-salam `ala sayyidina Muhammad
wa `ala ahli Muhammad wa ashabihi ajma`in

The Project of God

I.  Locating Our Discourse

Thank you so much for inviting me here today: it’s an exciting moment. “Longing for Peace, Exploring the Heart of God” is a theme that can draw out the best in us all, I believe.

This opportunity to come together is important to me, and I hope it will also prove to be important for you. Let me first give you an overview of what I have in mind for us during the next hour. 

I have a rather intense intellectual proposition to set before you about spirit and nature and the prospects for transformation in our world. It will take some time to unfold, but I will be lightening things up with two brief videos at the beginning.  There will also be a short guided meditation at close to the halfway point. Other than that, you will be listening to me read for an hour or so, and I hope there will be time for Q&A at the end. 

I am calling this paper “The Project of God.” The subject is so rich and complex that we can only begin to touch upon a few of its dimensions during our time together. Consequently there are likely to be quite a number of loose ends in my argument when we are done. Please don’t lose track of them! At some point, each of those threads may help us to find our way through some labyrinth or another, so I would be very grateful if you would share your observations, objections, or lingering questions when I am finished, whether it be here or elsewhere during the conference. No act of speaking is ever complete without the response of the listener, and what I am hoping might happen here today cannot be accomplished without your help.

Now everyone who is invited to speak at a conference is summoned to the podium on the basis of some kind of presumed authority, and all authority is fraudulent unless it rests on experience, so you have a right to know on the grounds of what sort of experience I am standing up here now. Everybody should ask this question from any source of information that makes a claim of expertise. Whether we are talking spirituality, science, or politics, “It must be true because I saw it on the Internet” really does not fly! 

I have got two kinds of experience that are relevant and that you may find interesting. 

The first is that I have decades of practice in multireligious bridging, and am presently deeply involved in a unique experiment, the Community of Living Traditions. CLT brings together Jews, Christians, and Muslims to live in each others’ presence, practicing nonviolence together through radical hospitality and the care of the earth. We are located at Stony Point Conference Center, a cousin of Lake Junaluska owned by the Presbyterian Church USA, and located an hour from Manhattan in New York State. To give you a flavor of this operation, I am going to show you about three minutes of a video from one of our Summer Institutes for Young People: I apologize in advance that the clip ends rather abruptly, but I did want to show you what sort of practical commitment accompanies the development of these theories.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyfZCTB_9JY  This is the link for the FULL 8:24 video]

This experiment in common life is the major collaboration of the Muslim Peace Fellowship these days. It represents a model for a very different kind of future. 

Now the other thing you need to know about me is that, though I was raised in a multireligious family of Christians and Jews, I embraced Islam back in 1978, so as to take up serious study with el-Hajj Shaykh Tosun Bayrak Efendi, a Sufi teacher of the Halveti-Jerrahi Tariqa, a 300-year old religious order in the mainstream Turkish Sufi tradition. I lived on the premises of the Jerrahi Mosque in Chestnut Ridge, New York for 25 years, graduating from that system of education in 2006. I don’t have a Jerrahi clip to show you, because I couldn’t find anything good enough that was only 3 minutes long, but I have an excerpt of a ceremony of the remembrance of God from a related Turkish order, that I would like you to see for a sense of the power and grandeur of the zikr (remembrance) ritual. This exercise in breathing and concentration invokes the unity and the many names of God  – topics that will also have our attention during the next hour. 

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AbZ54LCr-w]

Doesn’t that circle of remembrance look like a beating heart?  Like the heart at the center of our body, it is powerful, but peaceful. Practices like this arose to allow direct experience of the great Qur’anic question

Is it not through the remembrance of God that hearts find peace? (Surah Ra`d, 13:28)

The Sufis in all their variety have been the guardians of the heart of Islam for a millennium and more, despite their widespread marginalization in the 20^th century – a very important story that I am not going to tell you today. But I want you to know of my conviction that the revitalization of Sufism is essential to the spiritual welfare of Islam, and therefore of the world, and that it is in hopes of such a revitalization in our time that I undertake my work.

The final point I want to make to you so as to locate this discourse is that I will be rejecting the common assumption that authenticity of tradition depends on saying things the way they have “always” been said, and doing them the way they have “always” been done. As you shall see, I believe that sort of reactionary position to be a hopelessly lost cause. I have been formed by many more influences than the official Islamic sources, and so has every other Muslim alive today, and it is necessary to acknowledge the reality of that. The challenge to which we are called to rise, in my opinion, is not how to rid ourselves of outside influences, but how to understand them in God, and so bring them into spiritual conversation.  And I suspect people of other religions face an identical challenge.

So you will hear me quoting, tonight, not just from Qur’an and hadith, but also from the words of people from other ways of life who have made me think and feel deeply. There are so many of them, and I will mention such a very few.  But I will make use of what they have taught me: I mean to honor them as they deserve to be honored, because the project of God demands no less.

II. Formulating the Question We Face

I am confident that everyone gathered here today has a clear sense of the enormity of our current situation. A global shift of trans-historical proportions is underway: the climate is already changing, and massive extinctions and redistributions of species have long been noted by alarmed observers. Among the species changing their distributions is our own. Containing population growth is no longer a fashionable cause, but nonetheless it is the ballooning human population that underlies most of the headlines we read. Relentless growth is the real driver beneath the population transfers we call immigration and refugee issues, just as resource wars are at the bottom of most violent conflicts, even those that seem to be ideologically based. And of course, our climate impacts would be trivial if there were not so many of us. The experiential accompaniment of all this growth, and all this change, is a profound existential disorientation that currently afflicts the greater part of the human presence on the planet. Wherever we turn, it is easy to perceive the dissolution of the ancient natural sense of belonging to a place, and to a people, so that an elemental sense of security once taken for granted by nearly everybody has now been replaced by a pervasive sense of longing, and of threat. 

It is impossible for a weary soul not to ask, where is peace in all of this?  Or what amounts to the same question – where is God?

It is said of God in the Qur’an, 

Every day He is about some business. (Rahman, 55:29)

The text is telling us that God is active, that the work of God continues, that something divine is always underway. If this text moves us, if we find it provocative, it may suggest to us the possibility of cultivating a kind of attitude toward reality that is at odds with two other major attitudes that are prevalent in our times.  

The first of these is the attitude of despair. From this position, the world is incoherent. The center does not hold, and never did:  any sense of a center can only be a delusion. For people in the mode of despair, the idea of an invisible order underlying human affairs seems either foolish or dangerous. We are on our own, and increasingly out of our depth … because the heroic principle of human reason, which promised so much for awhile, now seems to be failing us too. Oh, there are still true believers in the onward march of progress to be found. But the antic self-intoxication of the techno-freaks, for whom all seems possible, while cheering sometimes, does not travel well outside of Silicon Valley. And though compulsive consumerism is also cheerfully intoxicating, beneath it runs a deep unease. In much of the cosmopolitan world, the optimism of the European Enlightenment is wearing off with the realization that human beings are rarely rational actors, and that the prognosis for their becoming so is not particularly good. It is this failing worldview that is derided by ISIL and its like, which claim to offer an alternative to the disaffected, and make their claim with passion. I suspect the passion frightens people as much as the violence with which it is pursued, because it seems so alien. People in the mode of despair are terrified by the irrational power of conviction symbolized by the suicide bomber.

But the other failing worldview is the one that is championed by ISIL, and by many other voices in many other traditions, religious and otherwise – some violent, some not. We might call this the attitude of paranoid certainty. From this viewpoint, the overall plan of the world is crystal clear, and I and the people like me are its logical center. Everything depends on us, the chosen few. God’s victory is waiting on our victory. Whether we stand at the pivot of a vast impersonal historical mechanism, or have shouldered the heavy requirements of a demanding taskmaster in the sky, our enterprise is the only enterprise that really matters and we are exactly right. All the misery around  is due to the villainy, blindness, or sloth of those other people, who refuse to see things as we see them, or do things as we do them. Should we finally win the power and influence that we deserve, only then will things improve. The whole world seeks to tempt us, but we must stay focused and embrace the sacrifices our noble task requires! This worldview dreads the abandonment of discipline, which means the betrayal of destiny. People in the mode of paranoid certainty are terrified by distraction, and distraction is often symbolized by ungovernable women and the sense of fun. 

Both these attitudes represent the dissolving remnants of previously vital ways of life. Those who hold one look at those who hold the other as the enemy; both blame the enemy for much that has gone awry. The horizons of both are either apocalyptic or utopian. And both are devoid of the experience of peace.  

These two attitudes between them define great swaths of contemporary existence – but they are far from being the only games in town.

Every day He is about some business. 

Now, I am a Muslim. That means I participate actively in a great conversation that spans centuries and continents, and have access for purposes of reflection to a great treasure-house of thought, feeling, and intuition whose terms provide me with my tools for self-discovery and my articulation of the meanings in the world. It means that I accept particular axioms and engage in particular practices and derive my sense of identity very substantially from the ideas and experiences that result from these. By calling myself a Muslim, I am affirming myself to be the inheritor of a tremendous gift, and I am recognizing myself as responsible to the originator and to the transmitters of that gift. I take this very seriously indeed.

But I also know that you are likely to call yourself something else, to know yourself the inheritor of something else and consequently to feel responsible to a different set of people; that your practices are different from mine and that a good many of your axioms, upon which you base all your logical constructions, are likely to be different as well. You will have a different set of parameters defining your sense of identity, and they are almost certainly as precious to you as mine are to me.  

Now, either we accept this situation, or we decide that somehow God has made a big mistake.  The tradition that I speak from takes a dim view of the notion that God makes mistakes. It follows, then, that you must be in existence for the same reason that I am in existence: because God wills it so. Both of us are wanted by God to exist. If we open up the focus of this consideration to its widest extent, we will have to conclude that all of us present in the world at a given moment – all our identities – are wanted by God to be here. This is why God is praised in the Fatiha, the most fundamental of Muslim prayers, as rabb ul-`alamin:  Cherisher and Sustainer of all the worlds. 

If we exist by the will of God, then it is fair to say that our identities, all of them, are rooted in God.  And it becomes very interesting and important to ask what God might be doing – not just with me – but with all of us together, as we remain rooted in God.

The question, in that case, is not where God is, but what God is up to. What is the project of God – in our time, and at every time?

III. “My God Was Too Small”

I have an old friend by the name of Doug Hostetter who may be known to some of you. Doug was, for a number of years, the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and now is Director of the Mennonite Central Committee Office at the United Nations.  As a Mennonite, Doug was, of course, a conscientious objector, but he came of age during the Vietnam era, and being a CO simply wasn’t enough for him when he was a passionate young man. He wanted to demonstrate that a commitment to peace was not just another name for cowardice, and so he took a teaching job in a Vietnamese village in the middle of the war zone. It’s a remarkable story, but I’m not going to tell you the whole of it here: only a single anecdote, which Doug points to as one of the great formative forces of his life – and which speaks directly to our question. 

Doug went to Vietnam as a devout Christian, hoping to serve the work of Christ the Peacemaker, and naturally looked forward to working together with Vietnamese Christians toward this spiritual goal.  It was a rude shock to him when he discovered that the majority of Vietnamese Christians he encountered were “rice Christians,” with no religious concerns beyond the food available at Christian missions. And of the “professional Christians”  he encountered, clergy and missionaries, most were obsessed with organizational or denominational feuding and one-upsmanship, so that they had little time or energy available to care about anything else. And yet Doug kept running into Buddhist monks and laypersons, whom he would ordinarily have been inclined to think of as heathens, humbly and unobtrusively devoted to the moral and physical welfare of the people around them. This was troubling and disconcerting. “Why,” he asked himself, “are all the best Christians I am meeting here Buddhists?”

Pondering this puzzle, Doug gradually came to realize that the picture of God he had absorbed as a boy from preachers, family, and peers really reflected the community in which he had been raised more than it did the God depicted in the Bible and spoken of by Jesus. And in order to acknowledge the palpable sacred presence he was encountering in the strangers around him as the work of God, as his truthful heart urged him he must do, he was obliged to put aside some of the doctrines and assumptions that had seemed intrinsic to religion when he was a child: specifically, that Mennonite Christianity was undoubtedly the best way to live and the only genuine road to salvation.   

Once he made that leap, however, an extraordinary number of doors began to open. He wrote about this journey years ago in a wonderful article entitled, “My God was Too Small.”

I would like to suggest to you that one major reason – perhaps the major reason – we have difficulty locating peace in this world is that all of our gods, for the most part, are too small.  And perhaps the Cherisher and Sustainer of All the Worlds isn’t satisfied with that kind of idolatry any more. 

Human images of God, or of ultimate reality, develop out of the conversations of particular communities, address the needs of those communities, and are validated by the methods current in those communities. The object of each is to sanctify and justify the life of its community by connecting the daily business of living to the absolute mystery that surrounds us. And there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that: it’s how things have to work when finite beings turn to face the infinite. It’s how we make sense of things, how we find meaning in what confounds us.  What lens do we have to look through but ourselves? And what self exists apart from the complex web of relations that constructs the identity of each of us?

Problems arise when we come to believe that we are working with definitions, rather than approximations: that our image of ultimate reality is ultimate reality. The thing is, whenever we do that, we are setting ourselves up to be disabused of our notion by reality itself.  Everything that we define out of existence, but that nevertheless still exists, will haunt us ever more urgently until we acknowledge it.  And the more we insist on denying the limits of our understanding, the more painful and humbling their acknowledgement will be when the confrontation with the unfathomable can no longer be evaded.  It is far better to be humble than humbled. 

Humility, however, is not exactly a popular virtue – particularly in the United States, with its entrenched culture of self-promotion. But even societies that frown on individualism are likely to be tempted by the grandiosity of the group. After all, self-congratulation feels good… and if we are all congratulating each other for the same thing, won’t we feel that much better? Unfortunately, it can be a very short jump from mutual admiration to delusions of grandeur.  Esprit de corps turns to exceptionalism, exceptionalism to “manifest destiny”:  everything we want should quite naturally be ours, and only something horrible would attempt to thwart us.  This is the phenomenon that Buddhist teacher David Loy has brilliantly termed “wego” – or ego writ large. (The Prophet Muhammad called it `asabiyya.) Such heedless self-absorption is not less troublesome in communities than in single persons.  It is more.  It is the fundamental mechanism behind every war. It is the root cause of social injustice. 

And it is extremely difficult to defuse. I have suggested that there is a sturdy biological basis to the enduring human impulse to push ourselves forward:  resource competition. Everywhere in nature we see the expansion of populations to the exhaustion of resources unless environmental changes, predation, or competing populations impose constraints on this expansion. It is part of the genius of the natural order that there are many such constraints, so that the resources necessary to the continuation of a given species are rarely even close to exhausted.  And when, occasionally, they are, then those populations inevitably die back until balance is restored, or else the population itself goes extinct, and some other species slowly moves into the open ecological niche.  

In nature, the drive toward expansion is only one part of an exquisite and complex feedback mechanism: everything that is, is kept alive through a whole galaxy of checks and balances.  What makes human beings uniquely dangerous is that we have managed to override many of these checks and balances, and constantly seek to override more, while the resources we now exploit to fulfill our desires are enormous. Consequently, on a small planet with limited resources, we currently imperil not only ourselves but many other species through the blind pursuit of growth…that is, through instinct. The huge open question before us is whether we will find the means to override this natural instinct – to become self-constraining. Such a step would require transcending nature for the sake of nature: we would have to find a way to stop looking at the world around us “only personally.”

What the human species has done as a whole, every human subcommunity is inclined to attempt as well. The dilemma of the whole is the dilemma of every part. Groups are driven to fulfill their instinct for growth, and that growth is routinely pursued at the expense of other groups. The members of an expanding group could stop themselves from tyrannizing others, but we rarely feel like it. While we are expanding we feel successful, we feel right, we feel justified. We build whole theologies of self-justification! Why shouldn’t everybody be just like us, or at least acknowledge our dominance?  Our success proves that our image of ultimate reality is ultimate reality… and so one after another, successful groups fall into the same trap. We begin to worship ourselves, which is the real meaning of idolatry. Our God becomes dangerously small. 

Idolatrous theologies are seductive because growth without constraint in a world of competition seems so much to a community’s advantage. The universal prophetic argument, however, states that these theologies are wrong, and that what people take for glory is catastrophically to our disadvantage.  It’s no wonder that prophets are unpopular. They never tell us what we want to hear.

When people are in need of justifying something they do, they talk about why it is so beautiful and necessary and right. The more we do that, the more we betray our own secret doubts, for the truly secure need no defenses. When we have secret doubts, the last thing we want to hear is some voice suggesting that what we’re defending is ugly, and unnecessary, and wrong.  Such a voice is rarely hard to come by, however – whether in the world of human beings or in the world of imagination, we will hear its accusations. It is the voice of the enemy. The voice of the enemy is the voice of illegal reality, of reality beyond our self-justifications. “That of God” which we have rejected speaks to us in the voice of the enemy. The voice of the enemy is often the prophetic voice.

IV.  Doing Without Enemies

But sometimes the voice of the enemy is not the prophetic voice. The true prophetic voice targets our acts – calling them into question, demanding their amendment, requiring us to strive to stay awake. This other voice resounding through the world targets our essence. It tells us that if we are not winners, then we are losers, and that there is no fate worse than being a loser. Losers deserve everything they get. Winners – to avoid being losers – must take all.  

To people in a condition of loss, this voice suggests self-hatred, or corrosive envy, or fantasies of righteous vengeance. To people in a condition of gain, it suggests self-satisfaction, hard-heartedness, and contempt. To everyone, it suggests fear – either of really being a loser, a loser in essence, worthy of the miseries we suffer or envision, or else of the imminent threat of being treated like a loser – humiliated, abased. If we listen to this voice as private persons, then every other person is a threat. If we listen to it as members of a group, the threat we fear is other groups. 

This voice will never tell you that you are safe, that your identity is safe, that you are rooted in God, and that God has honored you.  It will tell you to grab for security. It will tell you to kill or be killed.

According to the Qur’an, the outcome of the Fall from the Garden is that this voice will continually dog human beings, turning us into each other’s enemies. And it is a central, audacious, Qur’anic thesis that this voice itself is the actual enemy of each human being. The Qur’an names the whispering voice that terrifies us shaytan: the Devil.  

There is an old Sufi saying that the Devil is a great teacher. All you need to do is go in exactly the opposite direction from where the Devil is pointing, and there you will find God.

The indication would seem to be that if we want to find God, if we want to find peace in the world, then we must turn away from seeing each other as enemies. 

This sounds all very nice, even banal, but it is actually a demanding, transformational position.  From the biological point of view, seeing enemies is a default survival mode written into the early brain, and overriding it means rewiring ourselves, building new habits of perception through laborious practice. Not only must we be willing to do this, and to put in the sweat and pain it takes to accomplish it without any guarantees that we will actually manage to achieve the change we want, but we must somehow carry on our aspiration while being under no illusions about ourselves or our fellows. 

Just because I have decided to see no enemies and make no enemies does not mean that conflict will miraculously disappear. Conflict will continue. I will continue to get angry, and I will not love everybody all the time. The small aggravations will continue, and so will the major transgressions. Cruelty, stupidity, vindictiveness, small-mindedness, betrayal, and every kind of abuse will undoubtedly, sadly, continue. I must do without enemies while accepting the reality of all that. And I may not turn my back on the ugliness, either. I must look at it full on, in myself and others, minimizing nothing. Whoever does so will certainly want to act, to make the suffering less. But to take action for change when there is no longer an enemy to vanquish requires a radical shift in perspective. I believe that this shift in perspective lies at the heart of the project of God.

In the Qur’an, God says:

O human beings! Behold, we have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another. Verily the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of God.  Behold, God is all-knowing, all-aware. (Surah Hujurat, 49:13)

“Coming to know” is a process.  “The enemy” is a frozen concept. The project of God requires us to look at the world in terms of processes, rather than frozen concepts. 

I can give you a very simple, concrete illustration of what that means. When I was a young woman, I studied for a short time with a trickster-teacher on the fringes of the Gurdjieff circle; his name was E.J. Gold.  Although he was quite a slippery character, I owe E.J. a lot: his teaching set me certain spiritual questions whose nagging quality has been highly beneficial.  During the months that I was with him, E.J. prescribed his students a whole series of exercises.  The one that has stuck with me longest is the one that is relevant to our point.  It is called Allies and Opponents. It’s a kind of guided meditation. Here is how it works.

Imagine a problem that you are facing.  Visualize it facing you; it is your opponent. Now imagine –  or discover  –  someone or something in your inner or outer world who could serve as your ally in facing that opponent.  Who or what is that? Make your ally vivid for yourself, standing beside you.  Now you and your ally are facing the opponent and resolving the problem.

Now your ally becomes your opponent.  Your new opponent is standing across from you, and is the problem that you are facing.  What sort of problem is that?  Imagine – or discover – someone or something in your inner or outer world who could serve as your ally in facing this new opponent.  Make your ally vivid for yourself, standing beside you.  Now you and your ally are facing the opponent and resolving the problem.

It is interesting to continue this for some time, turning allies into opponents, and resolving them. You might also try running it in reverse.

Imagine a problem that you are facing.  Now imagine – or discover  –  that the problem is an entity, and invite that entity to be your ally against an unknown problem. See it clearly standing beside you, your new ally. The new opponent is taking form across from you. What sort of problem is that? Now you and your ally are facing that opponent and inviting it also to become an ally.

I hope this exercise gave you a little frisson. It always does it for me. But even if you happened to receive an insight into a problem, the real object of this game is not the resolution of problems. It is about making categories fluid. It is about breaking the identification of persons with the roles they play in particular situations. It is about the abolition of the boogeyman. It is about seeing ourselves and others as process, as moving rather than static, as not frozen.  

If we are moving all the time, if our relationships are moving all the time, then it’s impossible for anyone to “be” a winner or to “be” a loser, even though there is always gain and loss. Our essence is never involved. We are never at risk. Winning and losing are shifting, transitional, ephemeral, the one pointless to cling to, the other pointless to flee.  

Merely living our lives, we will certainly find antagonists from time to time – even persecutors, even terrible ones. We have no guarantee that some other person will not look at us through an obsessive lens of ice. But people who see us reductively as The Enemy are only momentarily frozen into a role, and if it’s peace we’re after, we must avoid freezing in place ourselves. The project of God is not the winter, but the spring.

V. Facing Our Fears

Doing without enemies and thinking in terms of process change the whole nature of competition.  These interventions in our habits of perception transfer the competitive impulse out of the realm of automatic unconscious drives and into the realm of conscious collaboration. Once it becomes accessible to consciousness, we can begin to use this energy, rather than being used by it. We can self-constrain in the most essential way. We begin to be able to compete together.  

Let me be clear: doing without enemies and thinking in terms of process will not do away with competition itself. Competition is a hardy perennial, essential to the natural balance and the continual development of better forms of adaptation. At the level of human experience, the biological push for expansion of populations that we have already noted manifests itself in the pressing urge to be Number One, to win one’s way to the top, or to the center. This urge is entirely natural, and will persist.  

Competition only becomes diabolical when the fear of losing becomes so intense that striving to outperform one’s opponents is no longer enough: the possibility of opposition itself must be eliminated.  For those afflicted with this fear, losing – losing face, losing ground – presents itself as equivalent to annihilation. To lose feels like ceasing to exist. Loss means shame, and shame to this degree is widely recognized as the most excruciating of emotions. We would often rather die than feel it. We would often rather kill. 

When there is no overarching environmental disaster, species in natural balance are rarely annihilated. Consequently it is very difficult to locate in nature, at the level of complex organisms, any behavior that aims at eliminating all opposition: perhaps we can observe something similar in certain viruses that destroy their hosts. The obsession with total domination is itself a kind of virus: a sort of mutated objective which, wherever it enters the natural process, moves the whole enterprise from a state of health to a state of sickness. I am suggesting that the demand for absolute supremacy may be the ultimate pathogen on the planet.

The Qur’anic argument is precisely this: that wherever we encounter a burning desire for domination at any price, its real origin is non-human, and the results of acting upon it will be catastrophic. It is a form of madness, a spiritual infestation. It has nothing to do with who we are –  any of us –  but it circulates in our blood, looking for opportunities, and I am no less likely to succumb to it than is my opponent. Perfectly good people, and perfectly good ideas, can be vectors of this virus, which travels invisibly, dormant in high ideals. Yet an outbreak is easy to diagnose.  When my opponent refers to me in terms that are less than human, then my opponent has become symptomatic. When I refer to my opponent in terms that are less than human, then I have become symptomatic. And if either of us seeks to obliterate the other, then there are no two ways about it: it is the sickness acting, and we must be enormously careful that the contagion does not travel further. 

An opponent exists because there is a problem to be solved, but its solution is beyond my current capacities. If I find myself seeking to wipe out my opponent rather than engage him, I am not facing that problem, and I am desperately, desperately ill. 

If I do not want to be a monster, then I must not see a monster, even though I may be looking at monstrous things. We all want to be a hero and slay a dragon, but we rarely grasp that the dragon is in ourselves: that when we see a dragon outside ourselves, we are looking in a mirror. While we feverishly chase after the dragon in the mirror, lest it devour us, the dragon in our own hearts is eating us alive. There are endless illustrations of this tragedy in history and in the contemporary world.  

No one present here is likely to contest the observation that the movement known as ISIS, or ISIL, has been disordered by grandiosity and violence. When the presumptive caliph of the movement, who (one hears) now calls himself Ibrahim b. Awwad, writes, as he did in May of 2015, 

“If you disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the east and the west will submit to you”

it is easy to be appalled. But when President Obama says, as he did in his speech of September of 2014, after declaring ISIL empty of vision and before lauding American values,

“America is in a better position today to seize the future than any other nation on earth….”

I hope that we will be disturbed by the echo.  And when we hear, as we did in the same speech,

“It will take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL”

I hope we will think to ask forgiveness and take refuge in God.  For ISIL is a movement of human beings. And no human being is a cancer – or a pig, or a bloodsucker, or a cockroach: all names that have been invoked on the threshold of pointless slaughter. No human being is a disease. But any human being may contract a disease, and stand in need of healing. The people of ISIL have contracted a grave spiritual disease, and do not know it. So have the people of this country – but my continuing hope is that a few of us know it, and therefore may find ourselves in a position to heal it. 

Healing is not destruction.  It is fruitless to try to destroy a village in order to save it.  Each time we destroy a village, we will need to be saved ourselves. Healing restores the natural balance by absorbing the testimony of the opponent. Healing does not discount the testimony of any opponent.  Healing knows that an opponent arises to make the nature of an invisible problem clear.  Healing makes an ally of the opponent by staying clear of the evil of the opponent’s acts. 

The Qur’an says:

The good deed and the evil deed are not alike. Repel evil with that which is better; then the one between whom and you was enmity will become like an intimate friend. ( Surah Fussilat, 41:34)

If Muslims take this sacred text seriously, we immediately inherit the profound ethic for engaging in conflict that I have been suggesting to you today. And if we are moved to read it even more deeply, then we may also inherit a great theological key: an intimation about the project of God.  Based on such a reading, I am claiming that the transformation from opponent to ally through the discovery of “that which is better” is the spiritual object of conflict – and this is why pursuing a transformational ethic is the only fully trustworthy conflict management strategy that exists.  We will come back to the visionary implications of this proposition in our final section. 

But first, one last thing about that dratted enemy….

In the Mathnawi, Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi tells the story of a small boy who is afraid of a monster under the bed. “Face it boldly,” his mother tells him, “and you will find that it will disappear.”

“But Mommy,” the boy asks her fearfully, “what if the monster’s mother told it the same thing?”

The monster’s mother may very well have told it the same thing.  If we want freedom from fear, if we want health, if we want peace – which are all names for the same reality – we will have to allow for our carefully constructed self-images to vanish along with our image of the enemy.   We must have the strength to see ourselves, not only as we would like to be seen, but also as the opposition sees us. We must grant them, humbly, what they are trying to say. 

The prospect may feel like annihilation, but actually nothing valuable is lost, while a very great deal is gained.  

A powerful yogi I met in my youth, an American named Yogeshwar Muni, taught me a powerful thing. “When we say that the world is illusion,” he said, speaking from his own tradition, “it doesn’t mean that the world doesn’t exist. It means that it isn’t what it appears to be.”

In this final section, I hope we will be able to peek past appearances toward a way, beyond the shadow-play of enmity, in which the world and the person – the twin mirrors of God – might actually be operating now.

VI. The Theology of the Divine Names

There is a way forward from where we find ourselves today, a way both old and new. You might call it a lot of things. You could call it the way of peace. You could call it the way of faith – but the faith I am talking about here is not a matter of dogmas. You could call it globalization from below. You could call it Gaia. You could call it, as Joanna Macy does, the Great Turning. You could call it, as the alchemists did, the Great Work. Or you could call it what I call it: the project of God. Signing on with this project begins with a single word: suppose.

Suppose that underneath the mess we have made of the world there is another world present, one that actually works. Suppose that this functioning world is not lost in the past or awaiting our perfection in the future but is here now, available, for us to live in every day. Suppose there is no impediment at all. Suppose all it takes is an affirmation – a profound affirmation, a decision of the heart – that every knowledge is encompassed by mystery, and that I’m willing to live with that. Suppose that our self-knowledge is encompassed by mystery. Suppose that everything we encounter here, belongs.

This is the position known in my tradition as tawhid, or affirming the unity. Nobody has to make the unity happen: it already exists. Accepting its existence has all kinds of implications for how we live, for how we might live. It’s up to us whether we act on those implications or not.

There is no obligation for us to act on them. No one can force us. It’s just that where the alternatives lead is increasingly obvious at the level of the planet. 

And we do, now, really think at the level of the planet: more of us every day. We may like it or we may not, but the presence of the whole overshadows us all, makes unconsciousness more difficult, and renders the old solutions obsolete. Not one of them works anymore – neither logical positivism nor staunch belief, neither tribal solidarity nor imperial ambition can show us a life worth living. The world is far too variegated, too complex in our actual experience to allow us to worship just ourselves and our own interests with impunity. God seems to want us to recognize more of God. 

It used to be that only mystics could see so far…but now many of us can glimpse a hint of this vision.  That’s why the old mystical traditions now have important things to say to people on a broad scale, and why I am sharing these thoughts with you today. We have important things to talk about, important things to share. For the heart of the situation is this: we have all been catapulted into each others’ presence because recognizing more of each other means recognizing more of God. 

The whole Sufi enterprise, in its length and breadth, rests on just a few axioms. One of them is articulated in a hadith qudsi, a saying of God held to be transmitted by the Prophet Muhammad outside the field of the Qur’anic revelation. According to this hadith qudsi, God says,

I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, so I created the world, that I might be known.

If your heart affirms that the divine project is, in fact, about self-revelation – if this statement resonates for you – then you may find yourself wondering about certain things.  For instance:  if the holy mystery is infinite, and we and the world are finite, then how is the infinite supposed to be known in the finite, and by the finite?  How can it fit?  One of the great spiritual perceptions has arisen through this contemplation, and it testifies:  through the variety of natures and the passage of time.  

Time passes – persons, communities, species, worlds, worldviews are all ephemeral – because the infinite always has another new aspect to reveal, and the new must either shatter or melt the boundaries of the old. 

In Sufi tradition, our shattering encounters with life in time are called jalali: they pertain to the majesty and distance of God. Our melting encounters are called jamali: they pertain to the beauty and closeness of God. And God invites us, as human beings, to draw near…as near as we can bear. Too close, and our separateness is lost. Our continuing existence as particular beings with particular self-images and particular histories depends on the maintenance of some degree of distance from the whole – yet as long as even the slightest distance exists, the possibility of shattering will never vanish. To have an identity is to be vulnerable. Life is risk. 

Wisdom would suggest that it is better to be melted by love than shattered by force – but that God created us to exist, rather than not to exist, during our given term. And so the best position of all, if we hope for a long life in service to the divine project, is the cultivation of a permeable boundary – one that is resilient enough to hold together what goes on within us, while still opening enough to share out our gifts to the world, and to welcome in the gifts that come from others. Such moments of dynamic equilibrium are called kamali: they pertain to the perfection and peace of God.  

What I have just described is the way that the cell, the basic building block of life, is structured. A flow in, a flow out, a permeable boundary, and a working process in the midst:  this is how every living system breathes. And this is how every living system testifies to the glory of God, for the mode of divine perfection is the mode of breath.   

To breathe is to melt a little, every moment. Life is sustained in existence because melting has priority over shattering, the flexible has priority over the rigid, embracing has priority over rejecting, at the very deepest levels of the cosmos. God says, in another hadith qudsi, 

When I created the creation, I inscribed upon the Throne, “My mercy overpowers My wrath.”

All creatures live through this universal mercy. But that is not all. We learn, from the Qur’an, that God has breathed into the human being not just the breath of life that we share with other creatures, but also the divine spirit of loving knowledge, for God has 

taught Adam the names (Surah Baqarah, 2:31)

which were unknown even to the angels. To name something is to recognize it in its particularity. Divine grace has given us the capacity to treasure discovery just as God treasures discovery, as an act of love.

We love to know lovingly. We love to be lovingly known. And we live like human beings to the degree that we participate in the common breathing of this spirit of loving knowledge, in and out of the mystery that never ends. Shock, at times, may lead to a catch in that breath – but we are not constructed to hold our breath for long.

Since God acts continuously so as to be known anew, another worldview – that is, another way of recognizing God’s presence – is forming among human beings. And because mercy and closeness are dearer to God than wrath and distance, God invites us, through this worldview, into a new intimacy. This melting has the power to forestall the shattering we fear.  

The new worldview has been forming for quite some time. All of us here are taking part in its formation, as are thousands and perhaps millions of people elsewhere. The new view bases itself on connectedness. It makes allowances for mystery. And it honors the amazingness of things. It draws strength from the sciences, from the arts, from the spiritual traditions, from the trading of stories, from struggles for justice everywhere, from the multifold testimonies of the natural world, and from the most private and fragile human perceptions. It draws quite a lot from the wisdom of women. It is the next thing. 

It is by no means a perfect thing – but it will be a different thing. It is forming through our common attunement, conscious or unconscious, to what the unknowable God is up to now. We are learning to recognize God through other names – names God has taught to people other than ourselves, to creatures other than ourselves. We are learning to wonder at the immensity of the names.  Every day He is about some business. 

Once you enter into this new worldview, someone who comes to you bearing an unknown name of God cannot possibly be your enemy. Instead, she is your teacher. She demonstrates your ignorance and offers you a chance to grow in knowledge.

“O Lord,” the Prophet was instructed to pray, “Increase me in knowledge.” (Surah Ta Ha, 20-114)

Something I do not remotely understand: what an opportunity!

According to the teaching of Ibn `Arabi, the master called by the Sufis ash-shaykh al-akbar, “the greatest teacher,” every human being carries a different name of God. The existence of conflict among people results from individual differences, and those differences rest on the deepest structure of reality. The relationship of the finite to the infinite determines that no two divine names can be identical in their qualities, even though all of them represent traces of the same holy mystery.  

The question arises: when two incompatible divine names come into confrontation, which one of them will spiritually prevail? The Shaykh tell us that the more inclusive of them will prevail. However, it is not always so obvious which name is the more inclusive. 

Inclusion is generosity. Mercy is more inclusive than wrath. Therefore in any situation of conflict, the real competition is to determine which of the opponents is able to manifest the most mercy. The Qur’an puts it succinctly:

If God had so willed He would have made you all one community, but He wishes to try you in that which He has given you, so compete with each other in what is good. (Surah al-Ma’idah, 5:48)

To compete with each other in what is good allows what is better to appear out of the competition. It is an evolutionary process: whatever name prevails in such a contest will not be pronounced in the way that it was before. And inclusion rules out destruction as a goal. We either end up offering hospitality to our opponent, or our opponent ends up offering hospitality to us, in a conditional manner, until the competition starts up again, and something yet more beautiful has a chance to appear. A virtuous circle is the emergent property of competitors who recognize each other in God.  

And it is this possibility of recognizing each other in God, I believe, that the new worldview is offering to human beings on a large scale for the first time. It is the parallel, at the level of spirit, of what ecology means for us at the level of nature: a realization of belonging that calls us from our restless dreams of endless growth toward a beatific vision of ever-changing wonder at what is. 

This is the vision that we serve, in our small way, at the Community of Living Traditions, and it is also the vision that you and I are serving here today.   

If all this is a little too exalted for you, let me summarize it this way: we need each other –

not only for our physical, but also for our spiritual survival, and the things we fear in the world around us represent nothing more than the last convulsions of the refusal of this truth. And as servants of truth, we need to acknowledge that we have no chance whatsoever of bringing an end to conflict – but we have a real chance of radically increasing mutual respect. And that could make all the difference in the world. 

I would like to close with two sayings, one a hadith qudsi, and the other by writer Ursula LeGuin.  I think they mutually illuminate each other. 

In the hadith qudsi, God says:

My heavens and my earth do not contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant contains Me.

What a paradox, and what a calling – that the heart of God might receive us from within the human heart!  

Though doubtless she never anticipated such a usage, I read a few words by LeGuin as the best commentary on this hadith that I have ever encountered. She wrote:

“Life is not an answer. Life is a question. You, yourself, are the answer.”

Is it not through the remembrance of God that hearts find peace?

Wa Allah a`lam
…And Allah knows best.

Rabia Terri Harris
Community of Living Traditions
Stony Point, New York
stonypointcenter.org
November 9, 2015 / 27 Muharram 1437