Dear All,
Yesterday we mingled Sufi zikr and the energetic practices of David Spangler, building up by stages to a human encounter filled with love, but not about preference. We steeped in a shared intensity.
These practices don’t necessarily require experience or expertise on any of our parts. They do require the good will to take a risk -- the risk of human interaction. That is what any preparatory stages lean toward but can never force. Each person takes the risk individually, and for that very reason it becomes what the Quakers call a “gathered meeting.” A good that none of us owns or controls arrives to embrace us.
We’ll keep going for a while with this kind of practice, undergirded by meditation on themes from Rumi, Kabir, Hafiz, Ibn Arabi and others. I am happy in it partly because it is so tempting in our time especially to turn away from Islam, to make it a terrible Other, and here at least we turn toward one essential strain within it. Those who are inspired by John’s certainty in 1 John 4:8 that “God is love” should not find it all too alien.
What takes on any form? The heart. The attention. Massimo Scaligero, a big inspiration for Georg Kuehlewind, used to say that the I is that which can take any form without changing.
all blessings to all,
Michael
