My exploration of – and walking on – the mystical path known as the Sufi Way continues this evening with my sharing of Living from the Heart: Universalist Sufism in America (2020), a 46-minute documentary film by Chuck Davis and Netanel Miles-Yépez.
In introducing this film on its YouTube page, the Inayati-Maimuni Order notes the following.
Living from the Heart offers an introduction to the mystical path of Sufism as expressed in the universalist Sufi teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan by contemporary Sufi teachers in America. [Note: “Hazrat” is an Arabic and Turkish honorific title used to show respect to a righteous person, prophet, and/or teacher. It is commonly used in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. The word literally translates to “presence, appearance.”]
The film contextualizes Sufism as a spiritual path of the heart, addressing the distinction between Islamic Sufism and Universalist Sufism, and introduces viewers to Sufi teachings on Love, Beauty, Music, God, and the Sufi practices of Zikr (remembrance) and Pilgrimage.
[Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives] Mike Johnson made a scary graphic so let me translate it for you, because fear only works when you don’t know what you’re looking at.
❌ ABOLISH THE SENATE – What people are actually talking about is reforming a body where a senator from Wyoming represents about 295,000 people with the same vote as one from California representing 19.5 million. Equal state representation was a compromise between large and small states at the founding. It made sense when the biggest state was 12 times the smallest. Today California is 68 times the size of Wyoming and they still get the same number of senators.
❌ REPLACE THE PRESIDENCY AND SUPREME COURT – Johnson’s graphic says “replace” but most of the actual proposals on the table are term limits and court expansion. Germany’s constitutional court judges serve 12-year terms. France’s serve 9. In the U.S. a president who wins by slim margins appoints judges who shape law for 40+ years with zero accountability. Clarence Thomas has been on the bench since 1991. The country has changed entirely. His seat hasn’t. Most functioning democracies put limits on this kind of power. The U.S. doesn’t.
❌ DEFUND THE POLICE – One of the most deliberately misrepresented phrases in modern politics. For most people using it, it means redirect some funding to mental health response and crisis intervention. Some activists did push for more sweeping cuts – but the mainstream policy conversation is about why armed police respond to mental health crises, homeless calls, and noise complaints. Finland requires police to train for three years and pairs them with social workers. Norway does the same. The U.S. had over 1,200 fatal police shootings in 2023. There’s room to ask whether the current model is the only option.
❌ OPEN BORDERS – There is no bill proposing this. There is no candidate running on this. The E.U. has open internal borders between 27 countries – a French citizen can drive to Germany without a passport and civilization holds. What people are actually proposing is a functional immigration system instead of one that costs billions, separates families, and still doesn’t work.
❌ AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS – Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Gave legal status to roughly three million undocumented immigrants. Republican president. Republican policy. The word “amnesty” only became a political weapon when it stopped being useful to the party that created it.
❌ DEFUND THE PENTAGON – The U.S. military budget for 2024 was $886 billion. More than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined. The Pentagon has failed to pass a full audit every single year since audits became mandatory in 2018. That doesn’t mean the money disappeared – it means the largest military in the world cannot fully account for how it spends almost a trillion dollars a year. Asking questions about that isn’t anti-military. It’s basic oversight.
❌ ABOLISH ICE – ICE was created in 2003 under the Homeland Security Act after 9/11. Before that, immigration enforcement existed under the INS since 1933. America handled immigration for 227 years without ICE. Since its creation the agency has been at the center of family separations, child detention controversies, and documented abuses in detention facilities – sometimes in coordination with other agencies. Questioning a 23-year-old agency is not the same as wanting to eliminate borders.
❌ MEDICARE FOR ALL – Canada has universal healthcare. So do the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Taiwan. The U.S. spends roughly $12,500 per person per year on healthcare – the highest in the world – and consistently ranks behind peer nations on outcomes like life expectancy and infant mortality. Americans die rationing insulin. They set up GoFundMes for chemo. They avoid ambulances because a ride costs over a thousand dollars. Every other developed nation figured this out.
❌ GREEN NEW DEAL – Climate infrastructure and jobs. The E.U. launched its Green Deal in 2019 targeting climate neutrality by 2050 with hundreds of billions in investment. China produces more solar panels than the rest of the world combined and leads in EV manufacturing. Germany gets roughly half its electricity from renewables. The U.S. is still debating whether climate change is real while its own cities flood, burn, and run out of water.
❌ GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP OF CORPORATIONS – We bailed out the banks in 2008 with $700 billion in taxpayer money. Bailed out GM and Chrysler. Bailed out the airlines during COVID. Government picks up the tab every time a corporation fails but when anyone suggests the public should see a return on that investment, suddenly it’s communism. Meanwhile countries like Norway built a $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund from their natural resources and their citizens get world-class public services. Different model, same question: who benefits when public money is on the table?
Mike Johnson is counting on you not knowing any of this. Now you do.
One of my all-time favorite female vocalists has been in the news recently due to the 50th anniversary of her most well-known recording. The following explains what I mean.
On July 24, 1976, Elton John finally scored his first overseas No. 1 single with “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” alongside Kiki Dee. It was his sixth chart-topping hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and the first to reach No. 1 in the United Kingdom.
Although John had already cemented himself as an international rock legend by this point in his career, for some reason, his singles struggled to find as much success in his home country as they did in the United States. Records such as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Caribou had managed to top the albums chart, but his singles always suffered from a lack of momentum.
John’s best-performing single in the U.K. before “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was “Rocket Man”, which shot to No. 2 and helped push its corresponding album, Honky Chateau, to No. 2 as well.
Ultimately, the combined star power of Elton John and Kiki Dee was too much for the charts to ignore, and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” overcame whatever hurdles had previously held the artist back from commercial domination. The song was a massive radio hit in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
And the song’s success couldn’t have come a moment too soon. John co-wrote the track alongside his long-time writing partner Bernie Taupin with the intention of getting a huge international star to perform the female part, hoping it would speak to fans of classic Motown duets between artists like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.
Although the single wasn’t originally released on an album (where John had typically found most success), it quickly became his most popular song and broke records for physical sales in the United States. Even today, it’s still fondly remembered as one of John’s greatest early hits, and among the most iconic duets ever recorded.
For all the massive fame he had achieved by 1976, Elton John had yet to place a song at the top of the charts in his native Great Britain. That changed when he teamed up with Kiki Dee for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”
Although Dee, born Pauline Matthews in 1947, had broken through a few years earlier, she already had more than a decade of recording experience under her belt. She’d began working with Fontana Records in 1963 when she was in her mid-teens, signing with the same label that gave John’s early band Bluesology a shot. Her five-year tenure resulted in a handful of singles and a 1968 album, I’m Kiki Dee, none of which charted. But she gained a name for herself as a backup singer (appearing on Dusty Springfield’s “Some of Your Lovin’” and “Little by Little”) and a featured performer on radio and television.
That led to Dee becoming the first white British artist signed to Motown and while 1970’s Great Expectations didn’t match that lofty title, it proved fortuitous in another way.
The music manager for Motown in the U.K. was John Reid, who was also managing Elton John. He convinced Dee to sign with the label they were forming, Rocket Records, and Loving and Free arrived in 1973 with her first U.K. Top 20, “Amoureuse.” A year later, Dee had a hit on both sides of the Atlantic with “I’ve Got the Music in Me.”
. . . Released as a stand-alone single in June 1976, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” went to No. 1 in both the U.S. (four weeks) and the U.K. (six weeks). That ranked as his sixth song to top the Billboard Hot 100 in four years, it was also Elton John’s last until 1986, when he sang on Dionne Warwick’s charity single “That’s What Friends Are For.” One of John’s own compositions wouldn’t reach No. 1 until another duet, George Michael’s live remake of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” did so in February 1992.
In honor of their success on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” John gave Dee a gold heart necklace with the song’s title engraved on it; as of 2011, she said she still had it. And even though he’s revisited “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” on several occasions, including singing it in high-profile situations with Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show, the Spice Girls, Minnie Mouse, RuPaul and actor/comedian Steve Coogan, John has never forgotten his original duet partner. They recorded a cover of the Four Tops’ “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” for her 1981 album Perfect Timing, she joined him onstage at Live Aid for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and they interpreted Cole Porter’s “True Love” for his 1993 Duets album.
“I love working with him because as well as being hugely talented he’s such a hoot,” Dee said in 2013. “He’s a fascinating person, incredibly loyal and one of the funniest, most quick-witted people I’ve ever met. As we were born just three weeks apart; we always do birthdays. He sends me an orchid and two bottles of champagne every year.”
A rare concert performance of Elton John and Kiki Dee singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart" [see below] has been released online. The archival footage captures the pair performing the hit at London’s Empire Pool, Wembley, in November 1977.
The release marks the song’s 50th anniversary as a major chart success. In July 1976, the upbeat duet became John’s first number-one single in the United Kingdom and remained at the top for six weeks. It also reached number one in the United States, becoming one of the most recognizable pop collaborations of the decade.
Written by John and Bernie Taupin under the names Ann Orson and Carte Blanche, the song drew inspiration from classic Motown duets. Its playful exchange between the two singers helped it stand apart from John’s solo recordings.
Over the years, John has performed the track with several guest vocalists, but his original recording and live appearances with Dee remain closely associated with the song. The newly shared footage offers fans another look at the chemistry that helped turn the duet into a lasting favorite.
It’s a compilation, says Figueredo, that “showcases the [Blue-Brown] class solidarity between wealthy liberals [the ‘vote (corporatist) Blue no matter who’ crowd] and wealthy fascists [the ‘Brown’ in the Blue-Brown coalition, a reference to the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany] who both feel threatened by the rise of socialism.”
Contines Figueredo:
If it feels like they’re more hysterical than ever before, that’s because they are. They’re trying to whip people into a frenzy before Tuesday’s primaries where multiple socialists and socialist adjacent candidates are going to face-off against their establishment opponents.
. . . Our country right now is at a crossroads. Our political establishment has thoroughly failed us. And they’ve failed so badly that the only viable form of politics right now is populism. . . . The question is: Given the choice between psuedo populism in the form of fascist demagoguery and left-wing economic populism in the form of class warfare and socialism, which side are we going to choose?
Figueredo’s timely and insightful 25-minute video commentary can be viewed in its entirety below.
The real question is Why did turnout decline? The real question is Why did so many lifelong Democratic voters became disillusioned with the party in the first place?
For months before the election, voters warned Democratic leaders that U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza had become a moral issue. Thousands of Black clergy, students, human rights advocates, and millions of ordinary people repeatedly called for an end to U.S. military support. Those warnings weren’t whispered behind closed doors. They were public. They were persistent. They were impossible to ignore.
Yet when Clyburn explains the election in a recent interview, he doesn’t acknowledge what I believe became the defining moral issue dividing the Democratic coalition and now the Republican MAGA coalition. The American Israeli genocide still being perpetrated against Gaza residents.
Instead, James blames Black voters.
As a student of Black history, I find that remarkable. Black political thought has a long tradition of standing with oppressed people, not simply because they are Black, but because oppression anywhere demands moral scrutiny everywhere. Malcolm X condemned Zionism as a form of colonialism. James Baldwin challenged the dispossession of Palestinians. The Black Panther Party expressed solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. That tradition didn’t end in the 1970s.
It resurfaced during the Democratic primaries.
In Michigan, one of the clearest dividing lines between establishment Democrats and progressive challengers wasn’t just healthcare, wages, or affordability. It was Gaza. Voters – including Black voters – said so themselves. Video after video showed Democratic voters explaining that they could no longer support candidates who continued backing U.S. military assistance to Israel. That wasn’t Republican messaging. That came from Democratic voters. Today there is a growing bipartisan coalition in Congress to end economic and military support of Israel.
James Clyburn’s analysis ignores that reality because he stands with those who stand on the wrong side of the moral line of this time.
Instead of asking why many voters felt morally betrayed, he ignorantly asks why they didn’t vote.
In my Proxy Racism framework, every elected official serves as a proxy. The only question is: a proxy for whom? Some serve primarily as proxies for their communities. Others become proxies for party leadership, wealthy donors, corporate interests, or foreign governments.
When I hear James Clyburn blame Black voters while refusing to seriously confront the moral concerns many of them expressed over Gaza, I don’t hear the activist who emerged from the civil rights movement. I hear a defender of the political establishment and its policies of oppression revealing extreme moral depravity.
The Democratic Party cannot rebuild trust by blaming the very people who warned it, months in advance, that it was losing them on this issue alone.
If anything, Black voters deserve credit for doing what Black voters have often done throughout history: refusing to sacrifice their moral convictions for political expediency.
If Democrats truly want to understand what happened, they should spend less time blaming Black voters and more time listening to what a significant number of Black voters have been saying all along. Stop supporting genocide.
Every pilgrimage the seeker undertakes eventually leads back to the same starting point: the chest cavity they never left.
This is the central provocation of Sufi teaching, and it undermines almost every conventional approach to spiritual seeking. Pilgrims travel to distant shrines. Seekers search for masters in far countries. People spend decades looking for meaning in achievement, relationship, or recognition, external locations where they hope the sacred is waiting to be discovered. The Sufi masters insisted, repeatedly and without exception, that this entire structure of searching outward was built on a fundamental misunderstanding. What is sought was never elsewhere. The heart – the qalb – was always the location.
This is not a comforting platitude. It is a precise metaphysical claim. The qalb, in Sufi cosmology, is not the emotional heart of Western sentiment. It is the organ of spiritual perception, the seat where divine reality can be directly known, if it has been sufficiently polished of the veils that ordinary living accumulates over it: fear, ego, distraction, attachment to the temporary. The heart that has not been polished sees nothing when it looks inward, and so the seeker, mistaking their own unpolished condition for absence, keeps looking elsewhere.
This is why the entire discipline of the Sufi path – dhikr, remembrance, the systematic clearing of what obscures the heart – exists. Not to travel toward the divine, but to remove what prevents the divine already present from being recognized. The pilgrimage was never geographic. It was always a movement inward, toward what had never actually left.
What you have been seeking in the world was waiting in your chest before you ever started the search.
My exploration of – and walking on – the mystical path known as the Sufi Way continues with my sharing this evening of an excerpt from the foreword of The Inner Life (1997), a collection of three essential writings by the great Sufi musician and teacher Inayat Khan (1882-1927). This foreword is attributed simply to “H.J.W.”
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What is the character of the Sufi message? The core of it, of course, is mysticism. As a realized mystic, looking at Western culture, what Inayat Khan was destined to do was to open a path to inner realization that so many in the West could not find anymore. He was inspired to invoke the mysteries and the beauty of that path in many ways. He described the successive steps the seeker for truth has to go through. And he created the inner school of the Sufi Movement, the Sufi Order, to give personal guidance to sincere seekers. To initiates in this inner school he offered the possibility to develop the discipleship that has always been so important on the mystical path, and a range of spiritual practices that can help to open the heart and the inner senses but are also suitable for Westerners who remain active in worldly life.
For an essential aspect of Inayat Khan’s teaching was balance. He did not advocate withdrawing from the world in order to focus only on the inner life: on prayer, contemplation, and meditation. He shows us a human way, living in the world, meeting our obligations to our fellow human beings with sympathy and understanding – and at the same time learning to turn within and to come in touch with the peace and inspiration of the divine light. Then we discover the fullness of life. We can reach a balance between the inner life, where we open our hearts in surrender to the divine spirit, and the outer life, where we have to work actively to achieve our ideals and meet our obligations. Then our actions can be guided by the inspiration and wisdom we receive in our inner attunement, which will more and more shine through our outer work.
This mystical vision illuminates the whole of life: religion, philosophy, and psychology. The mystical path is also the essence of religion. For the purpose of the inner life – as Inayat Khan puts it – is to make God a reality. Not a theory, a dogma, or an abstraction, but the deepest experience we can have. This vision then leads to understanding the fundamental unity of all the great religions. For these religions have all been brought to humanity by successive messengers in different ages to awaken the feeling and realization of the divine. Inayat Khan shows that the God ideal is a great help for this, but that we have to realize that it can only be a help, a stepping-stone: that the divine Reality is beyond our limited intelligence and can only be experienced in the depths of our being, our soul, which itself is a spark of the divine light. Then we can see all religions as converging ways to the same goal. To express this idea, Inayat Khan created the Universal Worship, in which all religions are brought together in a ritual that shows how they are all kindled from the same divine light.
The philosophical aspect of the Sufi message is also important. The tremendous development of science and technology in the present time has made it difficult for many people to find their way to religion and to the inner life. For traditional religious dogmas and representations are at odds with modern scientific insight. But Inayat Khan’s mystical philosophy is completely in line with the deepening understanding of modern science.
The human way that the Sufi message shows means that through the experience and difficulties of the outer life we can make progress toward the inner goal. This is the psychological aspect of Inayat Kan’s teachings. Here he gives a remarkable insight into the workings of our mind. He shows the importance of the impressions which we receive constantly through the outer world, which will be registered in our memory and become living, influencing our feelings, thoughts, words, and actions. And he explains how we can learn to control our mind, allowing only the positive and desirable impressions to live and work within us. By controlling our mind we can then control our life. But as important as the impressions are in our life, they are still only reflections on the mirror of our soul, our inner consciousness. The soul itself remains always pure. Its nature is divine; and it is that divine nature that we have to discover in life.
In their moral aspect Inayay Khan’s teachings also describe a way of gradual progress, of evolution. He speaks about “moral culture” and “civilization of the heart.” We must learn to understand other people and their points of view, to develop consideration and sympathy for them. That widens our consciousness and helps to overcome the identification with our limited being, the great illusion which blocks our way to the knowledge of God.
– H.J.W. From the Foreword to The Inner Life
Shambhala, 1997
pp. xi-xiv
In the following video Filip Holm of the Let’s Talk Religion podcast explores the life of Inayat Khan and the universal expression of Sufism he promulgated.
I appreciate the July 18 op-ed in The Advocate by Chase T. M. Anderson (right). Entitled “I’m Queer, Not Gay. It Matters,” Anderson’s piece is a direct response to Matthew Vines’ June 30 New York Times op-ed, “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.”
Vines’ piece elicited strong responses from many within the LGBTQI+ communities, especially from those who identify as “queer.” (See the previous Wild Reed post, “Queer Perspectives on an Anti-Queer Op-Ed.”)
Following are excerpts from Anderson’s op-ed.
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The terms “gay” and “queer” are not synonymous. When someone says “gay” to me these days, I think of cisgender. What comes to mind are people who say they’re “woke” but are silent as transgender people across the country are attacked. I think of being locked into acting how the heterosexual society wants our community to act.
I think of palatable.
Queer is often associated with describing the LGBTQ+ spectrum, an umbrella term of sorts. The word “queer” for many has been reclaimed – from a derogatory slur to a word of empowerment. This reclamation began after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, where our community fought against police raiding the Stonewall Inn, a place of gathering for queer people. Over time, the word has come to be a term of inclusion for many. It is a term that describes how many people live outside of the binary of male and female, and how sexual orientation and identity can be fluid over time. The word has transformed into a statement of empowerment, of “potential and a future, not something that is stagnant.”
Queerness is also an emphatic no to the cisgender, male-centric, ableist, White, inflexible way we've been taught that we “must” live from a young age.
. . . “Queer” has become one of the most elegant and powerful words I use to describe myself.
It has been a word I have reclaimed for myself.
Telling people I’m queer comes with a certain gravitas. A certain “do not come for me unless I send for you.” The word is a rose with thorns – one that combines a gentleness with the passion of someone who has had to fight to survive. When I say I am queer, it means I am here to battle for our community’s rights while wearing gold eye glitter as armor. To be queer in America means that I will also bring the softness of someone who years ago envisioned a world where we all were frolicking and got along.
To be queer, to me, is to hold onto that hope while dealing with the realities of now. At its core, being queer means being free to express myself however aligns most with my internal sense of self – and that is a power that many people fear and try to control.
By calling myself queer, I no longer let anyone dictate how I should label myself or try to have me “fit in” to a society not built for me.
After all, I’m queer, and not gay. It matters.
To read Chase T. M. Anderson’s op-ed in its entirety,click here.
Chase T. M. Anderson, MD (he/she/they), is an assistant professor in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Medical Director of The Muses Program for Minoritized Youth. You can follow them on Instagram, X, and BlueSky.
The higher you rise, the deeper you must have gone first. There is no exception to this law.
Jung did not mean hell as a place of punishment. He meant it as the underworld of the psyche, everything rejected, buried, and denied. Every fear you have refused to name. Every wound you have covered instead of healing. Every part of yourself you decided was too ugly, too dangerous, or too shameful to claim as your own.
Most people try to grow upward while ignoring what lies beneath them. They chase enlightenment, success, or peace without ever descending into the parts of themselves they have spent a lifetime avoiding. And so they stay small, reaching toward the light with roots too shallow to hold real height.
The alchemists called this the nigredo, the blackening, the necessary descent into darkness before any true transformation can occur. You cannot skip this stage. You cannot bypass it with positivity or spiritual bypassing dressed as growth. The tree that reaches heaven does so precisely because its roots have gone where it is uncomfortable to look.
This is not a metaphor for the weak-hearted. It is a law of the psyche, as real as gravity. What you refuse to face controls you from below. What you finally face becomes the foundation that lets you rise.
The serpent wrapped around this tree is not the enemy of ascension. It is the guardian of it, the very thing that must be integrated, not defeated, before the branches can reach the sun.
Your shadow is not what is wrong with you. It is the root system waiting to hold your growth.
Stephen Miller stood in front of representatives from more than 60 countries this week and called left-wing politics a “fatal cancer of civilization.” He said left-wing terrorism, “left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag.” Elsewhere, he’s vowed to “uproot and dismantle” what he calls left-wing terrorist networks, and says Trump’s NSPM-7 directive will mean debanking and defunding left-wing “political terrorists.”
Worth noting that the Trump regime has been sending people to gulags in El Salvador.
Now let’s check the data regarding terrorism: CSIS tracked 750 domestic terror attacks and plots from 1994–2020: right-wing extremists committed 57% of them. Left-wing extremists committed 25%. Since 2016, the far right has carried out 152 attacks to the left’s 41 – and right-wing violence has killed 112 people in the last decade. Left-wing violence killed 13.
(Yes, 2025 saw a brief anomaly where left-wing incidents edged ahead – but that’s because right-wing attacks cratered, not because the left surged. Researchers stress the numbers on both sides remain historically low.)
So the actual data says the right is the dominant terror threat in America. Miller’s solution: call the left “cancer” and “terrorists” who must be uprooted.
This playbook isn’t new. After the 1933 Reichstag fire, Hitler blamed Communists and declared: “we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”
Cancer. Pest. Terrorists. Root them out. We’ve read this script before, and we know how it ends.
What makes this even more preposterous: The Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly deleted a federal study – “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism” – that found right-wing extremism outpaces the left. It just vanished from the DOJ site. No announcement. Lawmakers demanded answers in November; DOJ still hasn’t republished it.
The seven members of Russia’s last Imperial Family were shot and bayoneted to death by their Bolshevik captors in the cellar of the “House of Special Purpose” in Ekaterinburg in the early hours of July 17, 1918.
As I’ve noted previously, I’ve long been fascinated by the Romanovs and their tragic story. In marking this year’s anniversary of their deaths, I share an excerpt from Nicholas II, The Last Tsar by Michael Paterson.
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Accounts describe the executioners’ astonishment when bullets ricocheted off some of the women. Only afterward did the reason become clear – they had jewels sewn into their bodices that had deflected the shots. [Thus] not all were killed outright, despite the careful targeting. Anastasia seems to have fainted. She regained consciousness seconds after the fusillade and had to be finished off with a bayonet. The maid, Demidova, was unharmed enough by the first shots to run back and forth to defend herself with a cushion that had been in her hands. Otherwise it was mercifully swift.
Arguably this sudden end, horrific as it was, was preferable to further months – or years – of captivity and degradation. Time and again over that interminable, fourteen-month wait, they must have asked themselves: “How much longer can this go on? How can we endure?” The youngest member of the Family, during their last days in Tobolsk, told Alexandra: “I would like to die, Mama; I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid of what they may do to us here.”
It is unlikely that the Romanovs would have been released, and they could have lived on, prisoners in some Gulag, for decades. Alexandra and Alexis would not have survived. The girls could in theory have lived until the end of the twentieth century – and thus might have seen the demise of the Soviet state in 1991. Had the Bolsheviks put Nicholas on trial he would have been made a national scapegoat and condemned to death. There would have been the same type of tragic parting from his family that was seen with Charles I. Alexandra too might have been tried, for treason – the fact that no evidence existed would not have mattered – and could have suffered her own Calvary in the manner of Marie Antionette. How much better that this close-knit family was together and that it happened without warning. One wonders why the executioners did not simply shoot them in their beds as they slept. Perhaps Yakov Yurovsky was one of those who wanted to see the Tsar stand trail, hence his brief delivery of sentence [before being the first of the executioners to open fire in the cellar].
As the world knows, the bodies were taken to a clearing outside the town and rendered down by a crude process of dismemberment, acid and burning. They were then buried and the site of their grave was disguised. They would remain undisturbed for more than sixty years while, from the moment they disappeared, rumour and speculation and wishful thinking would keep them alive.
Had the Family been able to flee and find sanctuary abroad, they would never have known peace. The secret police of the new state were to prove extremely adept at carrying out executions of dissidents and other enemies no matter where in the world they settled, as witness the killing of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Though a great many Russian aristocrats, and a number of Romanovs, were to live unmolested in the West for the remainder of their lives, the immediate family might not have been so lucky. They could have been – and they would have felt – hunted for the rest of their lives.
Above: Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra pictured under house arrest in the garden of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo in May of 1917. The Alexander Palace was the preferred residence of the last Tsar and his family, and it became the family’s initial place of imprisonment after the first of two Russian Revolutions in 1917 overthrew the House of Romanov in February. In August, the Provisional Government evacuated Nicholas and his family to the Siberian town of Tobolsk. After the October Revolution, the Bolshevik regime moved the family in the spring of 1918 to the Urals city of Ekaterinburg where they were executed in July of that year, together with several of their retainers.
After undergoing years of renovation, the Alexander Palace opened in the summer of 2021 as a state museum housing relics of the former Imperial dynasty.
The Governor’s Mansion in Tobolsk (right) in which the Romanovs were imprisoned, is now also known as Kuklin House. Located on 10 Mira Street, the mansion is protected by the Russian Federal government as a historical monument. Following the Revolution the house was renamed the “House of Freedom.” In 1937 a carpet from the Governor’s Mansion was sent to and preserved by a museum in San Francisco. Following a complete restoration of the building, which included demolition of an art deco portico and its replacement by one in the original design, it was reopened in 2018 to house The Museum of the Family of Emperor Nicholas II.
The Ipatiev House (the “House of Special Purpose”) in Ekaterinburg was demolished in 1977 by order of the Politburo to the local Soviet government, almost 59 years after the Romanov family’s murder and 14 years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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In closing, here is the “Nicholas and Alexandra Suite” from the soundtrack of the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra. Composed by Richard Rodney Bennett, this work is one of the truly great film soundtracks – epic, haunting and, like the film itself, often underrated; so much so that it remains to this day unavailable on CD. The film's “Love Theme” (the second movement in the suite) is much beloved by my Mum, who can play it beautifully on the keyboard. It was turned into a rather torchy song, “Too Beautiful to Last,” and recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck in 1972.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
