The Task at Hand

– Artwork: “Snow Starlings” by Niki Bowers

The Wild Reed’s 2023 Advent series concludes with a third excerpt from Awakening: A Sufi Experience, a collection of writings by the late Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. (To start at the beginning of this series, click here.

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The ongoing tension between the force of the past and the pull of the future can be seen in our time more clearly than ever. Evidence of a positive, forward-moving impulse toward the good, for example, is all around. Technologically, developments in communications are helping to bring the citizens of the planet into a more interdependent unity. Socially, new models of conflict resolution are being devised to help prevent violence, highlighting the importance of conscience in solving emotionally-charged personal disputes. In the field of psychology, therapists are increasingly taking into account the spiritual concerns of their patients – the need for the sacred as a basis of self-esteem, as well as the recognition of an “immaculate child” at the core of the psyche undefiled by the surrounding environment. And in politics, forgiveness and reconciliation have introduced a new note into the fractiousness of rancorous debate, pouring a healing balm once centuries-old wounds and offering the hope of peace.

Yet these advances are shadowed by a corresponding deterioration in moral values, as well as a stunted capacity for wisdom. These shortcomings are reflected in mounting social ills: an unprecedented population explosion amid the dwindling of the earth’s precious natural resources, the frightening specter of vanishing landscapes and plant and animal species, ongoing religious and ethnic strife, and widespread poverty and violence. Thus even as part of humanity strives to dispel the darkness of human suffering through visionary paradigms and healing solutions, it is constantly being pulled back into the past by forces inimical to global spiritual ethics. The task at hand, it seems, is to find a way to bring those perceptions that are mired in petty narrowness and shortsightedness into alignment with the broader, more inclusive vision struggling to be born in our time.

– Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Excerpted from Awakening: A Sufi Experience
Tarcher/Putnam, 2000
pp. 7-10

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Awakening
• An Extraordinary, Precious Opportunity
• In Search of a “Global Ethic”
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism: An Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• The Sufi Way
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• The Winged Heart
• Jesus: Mystic and Prophet
• Called to the Field of Compassion
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Hazrat Inayat Khan
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• A Threshold Season
• Advent Thoughts
• Bismillah
• A New Beginning
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: “Snow Starlings” by Niki Bowers.