Honoring the Inner Light of the Soul

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Winter Solstice Blessing
• Solstice Eve: Honoring the Darkness While Remembering the Light
• Brigit Anna McNeill on the Meaning of Winter Solstice Time
• “Silent Night, Longest Night”
• Soul: The Connecting Force in Life
• Thomas Moore on the “Ageless Soul”
• Your True Source
• Where Soul Would Have Us Go
• Trust and Surrender
• The Soul’s Beloved
• Awakening the Wild Soul
• My Love, “Return to the Root of the Root of Your Own Soul”
• Brigit Anna McNeill on “Winter’s Way”
• Brigit Anna McNeill on Hearing the Wild and Natural Call to Go Inwards
• Winter Light
• That Quality of Awe
• To Dream, to Feel, to Listen
• Reclaiming the “Hour of God”
• Celebrating the Coming of the Sun and the Son
• The Light Within
• No Stranger Am I
• The Source Is Within You
• Like the Sun
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Chadwick Boseman and That “Heavenly Light”
• Light and Dark: “Both Holy, Both Life-Giving”
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2020)
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2019)
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2017)

Progressive Perspectives on This Moment of Rising Class Consciousness

– Luigi Mangione on December 10, 2024.
(Photo: Benjamin B. Braun | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP)

Luigi Mangione’s violent act against UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson [on December 4] is already being framed as the work of a deranged mind. But this interpretation risks obscuring the broader reality: a healthcare system so broken that it left a man in unrelenting pain with nowhere to turn. Mangione’s actions, while extreme, demand a deeper examination of how systemic failures in healthcare and class inequality drive people to such desperation.

I believe this moment of class consciousness is significant, though I worry that in the wake of his capture and inevitable sentencing, it will be forcibly reversed by media outlets, pundits, and politicians labeling him as “crazy.” Americans are notably hesitant to align themselves with someone labeled insane, so his mental state will likely be exaggerated to discredit his actions as the deranged work of a madman. It will very likely be suggested he was undergoing a psychotic event when he carried out the calculated murder of Brian Thompson. While unceasing pain can degrade anyone’s state of mind, at this point, such claims seem unlikely to me. Nonetheless, psychopathy will likely be posed to dismiss his actions as irrational, separating him from his humanity and rendering him undeserving of empathy in the eyes of a deeply ableist and saneist public.

– Rori Porter
Excerptyed from “Luigi Mangione, Healthcare Despair,
and Class Consciousness in America”
Medium
December 10, 2024

After the killing of the CEO of United HealthCare, the largest of [the] billion dollar insurance companies, there was an immediate outpouring of anger toward the health insurance industry. Some people have stepped forward to condemn this anger. I am not one of them.

The anger is 1000% justified. It is long overdue for the media to cover it. It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger.

Because this anger is not about the killing of a CEO. If everyone who was angry was ready to kill the CEOs, the CEOs would already be dead. That is not what this reaction is about. It is about the mass death and misery – the physical pain, the mental abuse, the medical debt, the bankruptcies in the face of denied claims and denied care and bottomless deductibles on top of ballooning premiums – that this “health care” industry has levied against the American people for decades. With no one standing in their way! Just a government – two broken parties – enabling this industry’s theft and, yes, murder.

And now the press is calling me to ask, “Why are people angry, Mike? Do you condemn murder, Mike?”

Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry.

. . . But don’t get me wrong. No one needs to die. In fact, that’s my point. No one needs to die – no one should die because they don’t “have” health insurance. Not one single person should die because their “health insurance” denies their health care in order to make a buck or Thirty Two Billion Bucks.

– Michael Moore
Excerpted from “A Manifesto Against
For-Profit Health Insurance Companies”
MichaelMoore.com
December 13, 2024

Re. Luigi, the issue isn’t about “should” or “shouldn’t.” Obviously no one should commit murder.

The issue is about what IS. As JFK said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

The soullessness of crony capitalism is going to be held accountable. Its sociopathic careless disregard for the safety, health, wellbeing – even lives – of many millions of people is an unsustainable assault on nature itself. And it will not stand, regardless what any of us think.

Any politician or business leader refusing to heed the rage of the people right now is an irresponsible, at best a naive conspirator in the dawning of a very dark chapter in American history.

We can choose wisdom instead. We can choose ethics. We can choose love.

– Marianne Williamson
via social media
December 13, 2024

The outpouring of gleeful public support for Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been as striking as it has been polarizing – but not along the familiar left/right fault lines. Rather, it’s highlighted a divide between those perceived as cultural insiders – politicians, media figures, and pundits – and the rest of the public.

As politicians and commentators across the political spectrum moved to condemn the shooting and chastised those celebrating it, the response has been equally ferocious, directed not only at mainstream Democrats but also at conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, who found themselves skewered by their own audiences for failing to read the room.

. . . The bipartisan outrage reveals a deeper truth: what has often been framed as a backlash to the ‘radical left’ – and ruthlessly exploited by figures like Shapiro and Walsh – is, in reality, a much broader rejection of the status quo. The reason this anger appears partisan is not because it targets left-wing ideology, but because Democrats appear to be the only party still rhetorically committed to defending the existing social (and political) order. This perception endures even in the face of real policy differences between the two parties on issues like health care. In the public imagination, the symbolic fight against the status quo matters more than the substance of governance.

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party in 2016 severed its rhetorical ties to establishment politics, allowing Republicans to position themselves as the party of populist rage. From the moment he descended the gilded escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, Trump positioned himself as a wrecking ball aimed at the system.

His appeal wasn’t rooted in ideology, but in rage – rage at institutions that, in the eyes of a significant portion of the electorate, promised hope and prosperity but seemed to deliver only corruption and dysfunction. His campaign wasn’t about conservatism. It was about contempt for everything Washington represents. And this anti-establishment stance, more than any policy position, is what resonated with millions of Americans across traditional party lines.

This scorched-earth approach to politics forced Democrats into an uneasy defensive crouch – and a rhetorical trap. By shielding the system from Trump’s onslaught, they unwittingly cast themselves as its champions, tethering their credibility to institutions many Americans had long since deemed hopelessly broken and corrupt.

The credibility gap was on full display in the 2024 election, as the party rallied around its familiar “save democracy” pitch. But for millions of voters, the notion that there’s even a functioning democracy worth saving was laughable. In a country where the preferences of the bottom 90 percent of Americans have a near-zero impact on public policy, until Democrats shake their image as defenders of the status quo, they risk becoming a marginalized political force.

The tragic irony, of course, is that Trump’s movement offers no solutions to the problems it claims to address. His administration will not alleviate the struggles of ordinary Americans. It will only further entrench the plutocratic status quo. Similarly, nothing is likely to come of the morbid fandom surrounding Luigi Mangione. He is a meme, not a movement.

But both Trump’s re-election, then, and public’s reaction to Mangione’s actions reveal a harsh truth about the political moment we are living through: Americans are increasingly fueled by rage at society’s failure to address the everyday problems they face, but are not seeking solutions. The public’s contempt for the establishment is not a controlled fire, it is a consuming blaze; what they want, above all, are personalities who can channel that.

And in harnessing that rage, both Trump and Mangione reveal a culture willing to tolerate – and even celebrate – vile acts, so long as they are inflicted on those who symbolize what we have come to collectively despise.

– Jason Chukwuma
Excerpted from “Donald Trump, Luigi Mangione and
the Political Power of Raging Against the Machine”
Daily Beast
December 17, 2024

Following is Hard Lens Media’s December 14 interview with Jason Chukwuma, a law student at Harvard Law School and a graduate of Harvard College. Chukwuma runs the @truthispeaking account across TikTok, X, and Instagram, where he discusses politics and culture.

In this 40-minute segment, Chukwuma and Hard Lens Media host Kit Cabello discuss the ongoing outpouring of anger against the health insurance industry in the U.S. They also talk about the role the Democratic Party can and should play in recapturing from the right the political discourse on this and other important issues. As Chukwuma says in both this interview and in his article highlighted above, the right in the U.S. has become an extreme political movement.

The first 15 minutes of this interview in particular provides an excellent analysis of not only what where witnessing in this moment of rising class consciousness, but how the Democratic establishment has failed in offering any kind of meaningful response.





Related Off-site Links:
Exclusive: Luigi’s Manifesto – KenKlippenstein.com, December 10, 2024).
Luigi Mangione Charged With Murder as “An Act of Terrorism” for Killing of Insurance CEO – Eloise Goldsmith (Common Dreams, December 17, 2024).
Luigi Mangione, CEO Oligarchs, and America’s Hidden Majority Party – Will Bunch (The Philidelphia Inquirer, December 19, 2024).
A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies – Michael Moore (MichaelMoore.com, December 13, 2024).
What Luigi Mangione and Daniel Penny Are Telling Us About America – Caleb Brennan (The Nation, December 13, 2024).

UPDATE: UnitedHealthcare’s Decades-Long Fight to Block Reform – Branko Marcetic (Jacobin, December 21, 2024).

International Migrants Day

Today is International Migrants Day, a day designated by the United Nations in 1990 to annually recognize the plight of migrants worldwide. Each year on December 18 the United Nations, through the UN-related agency International Organization for Migration (IOM), uses International Migrants Day to highlight the contributions made by the roughly 272 million migrants, including more than 41 million internally displaced persons, and the challenges they face.

In marking International Migrants Day this year at The Wild Reed I share something I recently found in an anthology entitled The Living Spirit. It’s followed by Jenny Morris’s song “Pain In Your Shadow,” a track from her 1996 album Salvation Jane which speaks to the plight of poor and displaced mothers around the world.

We want to place special emphasis on being with rather than doing for. We want our presence among refugees to be one of sharing with them, of accompaniment, of walking together along the same path. I so far as possible, we want to feel what they have felt, suffer as they have, share the same hopes and aspirations, see the world through their eyes. We ourselves would like to become one with the poor and oppressed peoples so that, all together, we can begin the search for a new life.

– Jesuit Refugee Services
From The Living Spirit
Prayers and Readings for the Christian Year
a Tablet anthology edited by Margaret Hebblethwaite
Sheed & Ward, 2000

Related Off-site Links:
Sudan War: Towns and Cities Stretched Beyond Limits – Norwegian Refugee Council, (December 12, 2024).
Understanding Sudan Through the Eyes of a Mother and Novelist – Reem Gaafar (Kosmos, April 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Prayer for Refugees
• 2000+ Take to the Streets of Minneapolis to Express Solidarity with Immigrants and Refugees
• “What We’re Seeing Here Is a Tipping Point”
• Rallying in Solidarity with the Refugees of Syria and the World
• Fasting, Praying, and Walking for Immigration Reform
• Honoring Óscar and Valeria
• Sanctuary for Gay Syrians Danny and Aamer
• On Holocaust Remembrance Day, James Martin Labels as “Appalling” President Trump’s Plan to Demonize Immigrants
• Jeremy Scahill on the Historical Context of the Trump Administration’s “Pathologically Sick” Anti-Immigrant Agenda
• Something to Think About – November 27, 2018
• Christmas in America, 2018
• Stephen Mattson: Quote of the Day – January 25, 2017
• May Day 2007

Image: Writes Reem Gaafar: “More than a year ago, Sudan plunged into war, resulting in a catastrophic toll. Thousands have died, and millions are displaced, suffering from hunger and disease in the absence of aid. The UN describes it as one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history, affecting around 25 million people and causing the largest displacement crisis worldwide. . . . This war, unlike previous conflicts in Sudan, lacks significant international attention, partly overshadowed by crises like Gaza. The indifference of the global community has allowed the violence to persist unchecked. Despite the devastation, the resilience of the Sudanese people is clear. Communities have come together, sharing resources and providing aid through volunteer efforts, underscoring the unbreakable spirit of Sudan – a glimmer of hope amid the ongoing tragedy.” (Photo: Photographer unknown)

Held in the Presence of God

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

This Advent I’m reading Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s book Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart. Perhaps for some it might seem a strange text to be reading during the Christian liturgical season of Advent. After all, isn’t Sufism the “mystical branch of Islam”?

While it’s true that Sufism has undoubtedly achieved a beautiful, unique, and profound flowering within Islam, its foundational truths have been embodied by women and men from the earliest days of humanity, and it exists today both within and beyond Islam. As expressed in the cultural milieu of Islam, Sufism is known as “classical Sufism,” while outside this milieu the term “universal Sufism” is often used.

I’ve come to recognize and understand Sufism as but one name for that great underground river of mystic thought and experience that wells up in and through all of humanity’s religious and spiritual traditions. This perspective mirrors that of poet and Rumi interpreter Coleman Barks, who notes that the Sufi Way is not religious but instead the “origin and longing inside religiousness.” (1)

Accordingly, Sufism is not a doctrine or a belief system but rather a tradition of enlightenment, a way of life that emphasizes love as the path to an ever-expanding realization of ourselves and our relationship with the Divine Presence, the Beloved One. This transforming and liberating realization takes place within and through our individual and communal journeys and leads us to recognize and celebrate God within all aspects of creation. The mystic, after all, is open to the sacred in all things, and Sufism, as Doris Lessing once wrote, “is always, has ever been, evolutionary in spirit and action.” (2)

For quite some time now I’ve been drawn to the teachings on universal Sufism promulgated by Inayat Khan (1882-1927). In particular, I appreciate Khan's emphasis on God as "the Beloved." He writes, for instance that:

The person who makes God his Beloved, what more does he want? His heart becomes awakened to all the beauty there is within and without. . . . When a person arrives at this realization, then he, so to speak, lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. To him God is all-in-all; to him God is everywhere. If he goes to the Christian church or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. In the wilderness, in the forest, in the crowd, everywhere he sees God. (3)

Indeed, it is because of the deep universality of Khan’s life and work that I’ve come to understand myself as a Sufi. That being said, I generally prefer to define my path rather than myself in spiritual terms. Accordingly, I describe my spiritual path as “mystico/prophetic.”

I first encountered this path when reading theologian Albert Nolan’s book, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom.

Reading the signs of the times, Nolan says, is prophetic work, and such work was integral to Jesus’ spirituality. We know this because Jesus recognized and spoke out against the oppressive assumptions, practices, and structures of the social and religious establishment of his time. He “turned their world upside down,” Nolan reminds us, and “the conflict that this created became so intense that in the end they killed him to keep him quiet.” (4)

Jesus was not only a prophet, however; he was also a mystic, a person who longs to experience oneness with God. Because he was both mystic and prophet, Jesus, says Nolan, was rooted in a “mystico-prophetic spiritual tradition,” one embodied by the Jewish prophets who came before him and which lives on to this day in those whose perspectives and actions provide a powerful example of “prophesy and mysticism forming an inseparable whole.” (5)

Vilayat Inayat Khan, son of Inayat Khan, reminds us that Sufism, like all mystical traditions, seeks first and foremost to awaken us to our oneness with God (6); or, in the words of Marianne Williamson, to align us with the “living light.” (7) Meditation, which involves cultivating stillness, plays an important role in this type of awakening and aligning.

At its deepest level of meaning, Advent is about actively waiting and preparing for one’s awakening to and alignment with the Christic consciousness longing to be birthed in and through our lives. This Christic consciousness is, in the words of Sufi writer Kabir Helminski, “the current of love that runs throughout all life, the unity behind all forms.” (8)

With all this in mind and heart, I hope you will agree wth me that a book about the mystical path of Sufism is indeed appropriate for Advent. The section of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart that I’ll be highlighing in this year’s Wild Reed Advent series focuses on abiding in God, on being “held in the presence of God.”

________________

Love is the greatest power in the universe. The Sufi path uses the energy of love to cleanse the heart of impurities and turn it back to God. When the heart spins with love it can carry the human being beyond the horizons of the ego to where the mind cannot follow. To quote the Sufi master Bhai Sahib: “We are simple people. But we can turn the heart of a human being so that the human being will go on and on, where nobody can even imagine it.”

Sufism is a science of love, for it understands how to ese this energy to transform the wayfarer and send her Home. The Home we seek is not a place but a state of being in which the heart is aligned with God. The remembrance of the heart is this state of being when the inner awareness of the heart is a part of our conscious life. Reconnected to the source of our own Self, we hear the heart’s continued affirmation that He is Lord. We are held in the presence of God.

We begin the quest with a longing for something we cannot name or place. The pain of the heart’s awakening is the pain of awakening to our own forgetfulness. We begin to remember that we are exiles who have forgotten from whence we came. The heart holds the secrets of our origin, and yet the door of the heart is obscured by the ego and its desires. What we long for is so close and yet unobtainable, as Ibn ’Arabi expresses:

God deposited within man knowledge of all things, then prevented him from perceiving what He had deposited within him. . . . This is one of the divine mysteries which reason denies and considers totally impossible. . . . “We are nearer to him than his jugular vein” (Qur’an 50:16). In spite of this nearness, the person does not perceive and does not know. . . . No one knows what is within himself until it is unveiled instant by instant.

The work of purification, confronting the shadow and the attachments of the ego, prepares us for this “unveiling.” Inner work takes us deep within to the root of the root of our being. Then we can stand on the rock of the Self, without which we would become unbalanced by the slightest glimpse of what is hidden behind the veils of separation.

What stands between the wayfarer and her divine nature is the ego, the “I.” Bayezid Bistami saw his Lord in a dream and asked, “How am I to find you?” He replied, “Leave yourself and come!” The wayfarer’s own self, her personal identity, is the illusion that separates her from her goal. We are the barrier between lover and Beloved. This simple but paradoxical reality is the basis of fana, the annililation of the lover that leads to union with the Beloved: “Listen, riffraff: Do you want it ALL? Then go, go and become NOTHING.”

To become nothing, to “die before you die,” is the only solution to the pain of separation. What we think we are has to be burnt in the pain of longing, destroyed [I would say transformed] in the fire of love. . . . The Sufi path is a journey of self [i.e., ego]-destruction. . . . As long as the ego rules the human being, there can be no lasting experience of the Self. Two cannot live in one heart, either the ego or the Self must go.

The ego has to get out of the way in order for the seeker to realize the truth of love’s union. But it does not want to surrender its position and power, and will fight with all its strength, trickery, and powers of illusion. We need tp persevere and keep the heart’s desire burning, and still it is not enough. Alone we cannot renounce our own self. This is why we need a teacher and a spiritual tradition to hold us while we make this transition. The grace of God that flows through a spiritual tradition breaks the pattern of attachment while holding us Somewhere. We are held in the heart of God as He[/She/They] takes us Home.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart
The Golden Sufi Center, 1995
pp. 141-143

NEXT:
The Act of Surrender

NOTES
1. Barks, C. Rumi: The Book of Love – Poems of Ecstasy and Longing. Harper San Francisco, 2003.
2. Lessing, Doris. From the preface of Seeker After Truth: A Handbook by Indris Shah. ISF Publishing, 2018.
3. Khan, Inayat. “The Object of the Journey” in The Inner Life. Shambhala, 1997, pp. 10-11.
4-5. Nolan, Albert. Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom. Orbis, 2006, p. 73.
6. Khan, Vilayat Inayat. Awakening: A Sufi Experience. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000, p. 5.
7. Williamson, Marianne. Illuminata: Thoughts, Prayers, Rites of Passage. Random House, 1994, p. 60.
8. Helminski, Kabir Edmund. Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self. Tarcher Putnam Books, 1992, p. 174.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• Jesus and the Art of Letting Go
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Jesus: Mystic and Prophet
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”
• Called to the Field of Compassion to Be Both Prophet and Mystic
• Mysticism and Revolution
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• Advent Thoughts
• A Threshold Season
• Advent: The Season of Blessed Paradox
• An Advent Prayer
• Advent: A “ChristoPagan” Perspective
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism: An Introduction | Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• A New Beginning
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: Niki Bowers.

Neoliberalism vs Neofascism

Cornel West on the state of U.S. politics
Author, scholar, and former independent presidential candidate Cornel West was recently a guest on The Katie Halper Show where he talked about his presidential campaign and the current state of U.S. politics. It’s a very informed, insightful and, in many ways, inspiring interview.





For more of Cornet West at The Wild Reed, see:
• Thoughts on Cornel West’s Presidential Run
• Three Progressive Voices on the War in Ukraine
• “Our Anti-Imperialism Must Be Consistent”
• Cornel West on the Legacy of James Baldwin
• Cornel West on Responding to the “Spiritual Decay That Cuts Across the Board”
• “Of Course America Is Racist”
• “Two of the Most Dedicated and Enlightened Heroes of Present Day America”
• Cornel West: Quote of the Day – December 3, 2020
• Eight Leading Progressive Voices on Why They’re Voting for Biden
• Progressives and Obama (Part 7)
• Progressive Perspectives on the Election of Donald Trump
• “The Next Step Is a Green Step”: Cornel West Endorses Jill Stein for President (2016)
• Hope, History, and Bernie Sanders
• Rocking the Cradle of Power

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in the 2024 Election
• What the Republican Party Now Stands For
• The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview

Advent Questions for These Times of Challenge and Change

This past Thursday, December 12, I shared a reflection at the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet’s monthly “Signs of the Times” prayer service.

Specifically, I was invited to share my thoughts on the Advent reading of Luke 1:26-38, which is the story of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she would conceive and give birth to Jesus. I was asked to reflect on this story in the context of current events in the U.S. and the world. I then facilitated a discussion around a number of questions – Advent questions; questions that guide us in mindfully considering and remembering how we are called to bring forth Jesus into the world today through our thoughts and actions.

Following are my words of reflection.

__________________

Friends, it is a great honor to be with you as together we explore the signs of our times and our response to them. And what times we are living through! As always, we embark on this journey of exploration and response in a spirit of trust and with a love of God and the dear neighbor without distinction.

The wisdom we heard from the Gospel of Luke is a fitting resource and guide for our shared journey. Perhaps like me, you appreciate the depth dimension of the wisdom literature of our faith tradition. What do I mean by this?

Well, on one level, today’s reading is a story that took place 2,000 years ago. At this level we recognize and celebrate Mary as a woman who lived and responded within her specific time and place in history.

But we can go deeper. All types of wisdom literature – both within our Christian tradition and beyond it – speak to humanity in the here and now. Yes, on one level, Mary, Jesus, and Joseph are historical figures. Yet on a deeper psychological and metaphysical level they serve as archetypes, as representatives of aspects of our own psyche. This is true of biblical figures we admire as well as those whose actions we abhor.

I’ll give an example. In the Christmas story, of which our reading today is really the beginning, we can recognize that part of ourselves called to – and longing to – bring forth into the world the light of Christ. Said another way, we all have a Mary aspect to us. Yet, if we’re honest, we also have to acknowledge that we have an ego which, like Herod, fears what this light will illuminate for us and within us. We have a part of ourselves that fears and seeks to avoid the hard work of recognizing and overcoming our own fears and perceived limitations.

Yet here’s the beautiful thing in which we can trust: As we heal and transform these false and broken aspects of ourselves, we contribute to the healing and transformation of the world. This is because at the deepest level of who we are, we are not only one with the source of all creation, but with all creation itself.

Friends, we are living in and through a time where our world is under great stress and strain, where the most justice-seeking and life-honoring structures and institutions of our society are under threat from political figures and movements opposed to justice, democracy, and compassion.

Many of us have been shaken by the election result of last month and the shifts in our society that this result both signifies and seeks to expand in ways that many of us find profoundly disturbing. It’s hard to know how to respond to this.

We can look for guidance, however, in the wisdom of Luke – and specifically in the story we’ve come to call the annunciation. The setting of this story is not unlike our own present moment. Mary and her loved ones lived under an occupying imperial force. Such forces of empire – both corporate and military – continue to dominate our world, causing untold suffering.

Yet like Mary, we are called to bring forth Jesus – the “Light of the world.” In that deeper, mystical understanding of which I spoke earlier, Jesus is one of many names for that divine, transforming love that all of us share.

Can we, like Mary, trustingly say “Yes!” to birthing this Love?

How do we hear the call to do so? Who or what are our Angel Gabriels?

How do we connect with – and stay grounded in – the Mary aspect of ourselves?

What does our unique manifestation of the Light look like?

These are the types of questions that surface when we open ourselves to the deeper significance of our wisdom literature. Indeed, it’s our questions, our exploration of them, and our response to them, that makes these stories sources of wisdom and guidance in every age – our troubled and troubling one included.

So let us start our shared journey of exploration and response with this question: In these times of challenge and change, what am I drawn to say “Yes” to?

__________________

In the discussion that followed, many of those in attendance said that in the midst of the challenges and changes of our times, they felt renewed to continue being an informed, hope-filled, proactive, and loving presence in the world – starting with how they interact with their family and friends during the approaching holiday season. Many also said they were renewed in recommitting and/or seeking out new ways to help those who will most likely be negatively impacted by a second Trump administration, immigrants in particular.

One attendee, a friend within the CSJ community, voiced feeling totally overwhelmed by recent events, so much so that she simply didn’t know what she can or should do. I talked with her afterwards and acknowledged how she is feeling. I also reminded her that Mary too felt confused and unsure at one point in the annunciation story, but that her story – and ours – doesn’t end there; it goes on. We can sit in the midst of unknowing, surrender our discomfort and uncertainty to God, and trust that the way will open for us; that we’ll discern what to do next. My friend appreciated this perspective and was, I believe, heartened by it.

Right: With friends Jane and Christine at Thursday’s Signs of the Times prayer service at Carondelet Village in St. Paul.

Related Off-site Link:
The Advent of Divine Love – Marianne Williamson (Spirituality and Health, December 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Chill of Winter, a Prayer of Light and Love
• For 2015, Three “Generous Promises”
• The Vatican and U.S. Women Religious (2009)
• Beginning the Process
• Making My Consociate Commitment
• The Inspiring Brigid McDonald
• In Wintry Minnesota, An Australian Afternoon Tea
• Celebrating the “Sisters of Peace”
• (Old) Catholic Thoughts on the Feast of the Theotokos
• Celebrating the Dormition of Mary
• Something to Think About (and Celebrate)
• How the Light Comes
• Christmastide Approaches
• Clarity and Hope

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism

My exploration of – and walking on – the mystical path known as the Sufi Way continues.

Today I not only share an essential writing by the great Sufi musician and teacher Inayat Khan (1882-1927) but I also declare that, based on Khan’s deeply universal understanding of Sufism, I am a Sufi.

To be honest, I think I’ve known this for years, but the following words of Khan have brought this truth home to me in a very definitive way, and one that very much mirrors my work as an interfaith chaplain in the field of palliative care. I often share with patients who are on the threshold of the “sweet beyond” and experiencing some trepidation or fear, my deep trust that “we all come from God and we all return to God.” Imagine, then, both my surprise and sense of deep and calm resonance when I read this same sentiment, almost to the word, in the following description of Sufism by Inayat Khan.

Sufism is the ancient school of wisdom, of quietism, and it has been the origin of many schools of mystical and philosophical nature. Its roots can be traced to the school which existed in Egypt and from which source all the different esoteric schools have come. Sufism has always represented that school and has worked out its destiny in the realm of quietism.

In the different schools the ideal remained the same, although the methods varied. The main ideal of every Sufi school has been to attain that perfection which Jesus Christ has taught in the Bible, “Be ye perfect [i.e., whole], even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” The method of the Sufis has always been that of self-effacement. But which self? Not the real, but the false self upon which man depends, and upon which he prides himself as being something special; and by effacing this false self he allows that real Self to manifest in the world of appearance. Thus the Sufi method works towards the unfoldment of the soul, that Self which is eternal and to which all power and beauty belong.

The Sufi sees the one truth in all forms. If anyone asks a Sufi to come and offer prayer in the Christian church, he is ready to do so. If someone would like to take him to the synagogue and ask him to pray as the Jews do, he would be quite willing; and among Muslims he will offer nimaz as they do. In the Hindu temple he sees the same God, the living God, in the place of the idol; and the temple of Buddha inspires him instead of blinding him with idolatry. Yet his true mosque will be his heart in which the Beloved lives, who is worshipped by both Muslim and kafir alike.

. . . Sufism is a religion if one wants to learn religion from it; it is a philosophy if one wants to learn wisdom from it; it is mysticism if one wishes to be guided by it in the unfoldment of the soul. And yet it is beyond all these things. It is the light, it is the life which is the sustenance of every soul, and which raises a mortal being to immortality. It is the message of love, harmony, and beauty. It is a divine message. It is the message of the time; and the message of the time is an answer to the call of every soul. The message, however, is not in its words, but in the divine light and life which heals the soul, bringing to them the calm and peace of God.

Sufism is neither deism nor atheism, for deism means a belief in a God far away in the heavens, and atheism means being without belief in God. The Sufi believes in God. In which God? In the God within him and outside him; as it is said in the Bible, we live and move and have our being in God. That teaching is the teaching of the Sufis.

The Sufi believes in God as the idealized Self within the true life, as the collective Consciousness, and also as the Lord of both worlds, the Master of the day of judgment, the Inspirer of the right path, and the One from whom all has come and to whom all will return.

In reality there cannot be many religions; there is only one. There cannot be two truths; there cannot be two masters. As there is only one God and one religion, so there is only one master and only one truth. The weakness of man has always been that he only considers as truth that to which he is accustomed, and anything he has not been accustomed to hear or to think frightens him. Like a person in a strange land, away from home, the soul is a stranger to the nature of things it is not accustomed to. But the journey towards healing and wholeness means rising above limitations; rising so high that not the horizons of one country or of one continent only is seen, but that the of the whole world. The higher we rise, the wider becomes the horizons of our view.

– Inayat Khan
From The Heart of Sufism:
Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Edited by H.J. Witteveen
Shambhala, 1999
pp. 3-6

In the following video David C. Lane reads from Inayat Khan’s 1923 book, The Mysticism of Sound. About this classic in spiritual literature, W. A. Mathieu writes:

Inayat Khan says that music is the “picture of our Beloved” and then draws the picture stroke by stroke from every angle and plane until we see it. He is the only holy man I know who delivers an authentic and inclusive spiritual message from a musical sensibility. He does this rigorously, poetically and spontaneously, until we perceive our own actions as music. Open to any line on any page: you will be opened.

Lane’s reading of Inayat Khan’s words is accompanied by the music of the Sufi Music Ensemble.





See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• The Soul’s Beloved
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• Be In My Mind, Beloved One
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• New Horizons
• Adnan and the Winged Heart

Let Someone Love You . . .

. . . just the way you are.

Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.

– Marc Hack

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• David Whyte: “To Be Courageous Is to Stay Close to the Way We Are Made”
• “God Made Me and Loves Me Just As I Am”
• The Challenge to Become Ourselves
• Tian Richards’ Message to Queer Youth: “Every Part of Your Identity Is a Superpower”
• LGBT Catholics Celebrate “Being Wonderfully Made”
• Seeking Higher Perceptions
• Your True Source
• “Queer Love Is My Divine Companion”
• Awakening the Wild Soul
• The Dance of Life
• Love’s the Only Dance
• Love as “Quest and Daring and Growth”
• Love Is My Guide
• Love as Exploring Vulnerability
• To Know and Be Known
• To Be Held and to Hold

Art: “Seated Half in Shadow” by Kendrick Tonn.

Quote of the Day

As another country falls to Islamist forces, we should remember that Islamist terrorism was sourced by one main thing: the United States invading Iraq. No generation of Americans should forget it, and every generation needs to learn it. A million Iraqis (and thousands of Americans) died because of it, plus it unleashed the scourge of extremist Islamism that continues to this day. Both Republicans and Democrats participated in the Iraq War madness, and none of them have been held accountable for the criminality, irresponsibility and sheer stupidity of that decision.

– Marianne Williamson
via social media
December 9, 2024

Related Off-site Links:
The Fall of Bashar Assad After 13 Years of War in Syria Brings to an End a Decades-long Dynasty – Zeina Karam and Abby Sewell (AP News, December 8, 2024).
Assad's Fall in Syria Weakens Iran But May Fuel Islamist Resurgence – Samia Nakhoul and Andrew Mills (Reuters, December 9, 2024).
The Fall of Assad and What it Means for the Mideast: An Interview with Alastair Crooke – The Chris Hedges Report (December 9, 2024).
Syrians Are Celebrating Fall of Assad, Even as “the Bigger Picture Is Grim”: An Inteview with Scholar Bassam Haddad – Democrack Now! (December 9, 2024).
“A Tool for Empire?”: Mehdi Hasan Courts Backlash for Weak Syria Take – Due Dissidence, December 9, 2024).
U.S. Bombs Over 75 Targets in Syria After Assad Falls – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, December 9, 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Perspectives on U.S. Military Intervention in Syria
• Rallying in Solidarity with the Refugees of Syria and the World
• Rallying to End U.S. Militarism
• Phyllis Bennis on the Crisis in Afghanistan
• Saying “No” to War on Iran
• Quote of the Day – March 20, 2018
• Saying “No” to Endless U.S. Wars
• Something to Think About – June 18, 2014
• The Tenth Anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
• “Our Anti-Imperialism Must Be Consistent”
• Norman Solomon’s “Objective Look at U.S. Foreign Policy”

Image: Kristen Solberg.

Interiors

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• November Vignettes
• October Vignettes
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – October 12, 2024
• September Vignettes

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Something to Think About . . .

– Dr. Butch Ware
Former Green Party 2024 vice presidential candidate
December 7, 2024

Above: Butch Ware in Minneapolis – October 14, 2024.
For The Wild Reed’s coverage of Dr. Ware’s September 8, 2024
meet-and-greet event in Minneapolis, click here.

Related Off-site Links:
Single Payer Has Been Part of the Green Party Platform Since 2000 – The Green Party U.S. official website.
Killing of Insurance CEO Reveals Simmering Anger at U.S. Health System – Mike Wendling and Madeline Halpert (BBC News, December 6, 2024).
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s Killing Shines Light on Health Insurance Denial Rates – Lukas I. Alpert (Market Watch, December 6, 2024).
“Deny, Defend, Depose”: Top Healthcare CEO Assassinated – Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs, December 6, 2024).
After Public Stood United, Blue Cross Blue Shield Reverses Greedy Decision – Kit Cabello (Hard Lens Media, December 6, 2024).
The Deep Roots of Americans’ Hatred of Their Health Care System – Dylan Scott (Vox, December 6, 2024).
A Murder on the Streets Has Fear Rising in the Suites – Sam Pizzigati (Inequality.org, December 8, 2024).
Healthcare in America: A Conversation with Dr. Steve Farber – Marianne Williamson (Firelight Chat, August 9, 2023).
The “Silent Violence” of Corporate Greed and Power – Ralph Nader (Common Dreams, December 8, 2024).
Butch Ware, Former Green Party VP Nominee, Announces Next Run for Office – Kaitlyn Kennedy (MSN.com, November 11, 2024).

UPDATES: Police Say Luigi Mangione, Suspected Killer of Insurance CEO, Had “Ill Will Toward Corporate America” – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, December 9, 2024).
Healthcare CEO’s “Unnecessary Care” Rant Prompts Another Tidal Wave of Fury – Zachary Folk (The Daily Beast, December 9, 2024).
The Hated U.S. Healthcare System Is Why Government Shouldn’t Be Run Like a Business – Thom Hartmann (Common Dreams, December 9, 2024).
ABC Anchor Rebuked for Claiming Popular, Cost-Saving Medicare for All Won’t Happen – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, December 9, 2024).
For-Profit Insurance Industry Rife with “Greed”: An Interview with David Sirota – Rising (December 9, 2024).
62% of Americans Agree U.S. Government Should Ensure Everyone Has Health Coverage – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, December 9, 2024).
Deny, Defend, Depose: UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Slaying Highlights Widespread Rage at Healthcare Industry – Democracy Now! (December 10, 2024).
Healthcare Is a Right: CEO’s Killing Ignites Calls for Reform Amid Trump’s Plan to Privatize Medicare – Democracy Now! (December 10, 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
• Quotes of the Day – June 28, 2019
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in the 2024 Election
• Jill Stein: “We Give Reasons for People to Come Out and Vote”
• The “Green Smoothie” Option
• We’re Witnessing a Liberal Meltdown Over Jill Stein
• Jill Stein in the Twin Cities
• Anti-Genocide Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Reflects on the First Anniversary of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
• Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
• Butch Ware: “You Can Actually Vote Your Conscience”
• “This Is a Tragic, Heartbreaking Moment in the History of Humanity”: Butch Ware on the Gaza Genocide
• Peter Bloom on the Unmasking of the “Democratic Charade”
• When Democrats Undermine Democracy
• “Americans Deserve Choices”: Jill Stein on Breaking Points – 4/30/24
• Progressive Perspectives on the Presidential Nomination of Kamala Harris
• Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
• Demolishing the False Narrative About Jill Stein and the 2016 Election

The Guidance of Higher Forces

– Art: Riccardo Martinelli

Here’s another excerpt from Julia Cameron’s book Transitions: Prayers and Declarations for a Changing Life. Like the first excerpt I recently shared, I find this one to be both meaningful and timely.

Life is often turbulent. The rapids and eddies of the day’s events may pull at our consciousness like tiny hands. Beneath the turbulence of daily living, there is a longer, slower pulse of perfect timing. It is to that rhythm that I give my soul. I listen beneath the turbulence of daily life. I open myself to the guidance of higher forces. I ask for and receive adjustments in my priorities. I allow myself to find the tempo most attuned to my personal unfolding.

Today, I act and respond with a sense of the larger view, the truer goals. I give myself assurance that God’s timing is my own and serves my own best interests.

– Julia Cameron
From Transitions: Prayers & Declarations
for a Changing Life
Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1999
p. 117

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Seeking Higher Perceptions
• Your True Source
• The Dance of Life
• Love’s the Only Dance
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• The Soul of a Dancer
• The Art of Dancing as the Supreme Symbol of the Spiritual Life
• A Prayer for Dancers
• We All Dance
• Not Whether We Dance, But How
• And As We Dance . . .
• Aristotle Papanikolaou on How Being Religious is Like Being a Dancer
• A Kind of Dancing Divinity
• Divine Connection
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• The Source Is Within You
• A Season of Listening – Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI
• Move Us, Loving God
• “Then I Shall Leap Into Love”

Image: “Dancer” (detail) by Riccardo Martinelli.