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
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• A New Beginning
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: Niki Bowers.