Susie Hayward on What’s Happening in Minneapolis

Despite the terror and awfulness of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, “there is beauty in how the community is responding to care for each other,” writes Minneapolis resident Susie Hayward. This response “is the immanent presence of God, Emmanuel, also known as Love.” It’s a fitting observation, given this season of Advent.

Hey, Beloveds . . . I want to offer a glimpse what we’re experiencing in Minneapolis for those outside, because I honestly have no idea how much is being reported.

What the federal government is calling “Operation Metro Surge” began about a week ago, inaugurated with multiple racist, dehumanizing remarks by President Trump about Minnesotans (calling Somali Minnesotans “garbage,” for example). We then saw a big influx of out-of-state ICE agents arrive on our streets. They drive in unmarked cars throughout the city and into the suburbs beginning at about 6:30am every day until well after dark, detaining our neighbors.

Some of those detained include citizens, targeted because they appear to be Somali or Latinx. One man was detained from his minivan, his two small children left behind alone, crying. One student was detained at Augsburg, and the staff and fellow students demanding to see a judicial warrant had guns pulled on them. The ICE agents did not produce a judicial warrant but took the student anyway. One white woman serving as a legal observer was detained for five hours by ICE, her wedding ring cut off.

I see video footage throughout the day of ICE agents violating traffic laws (especially dangerous on our current snowy streets where coming to a quick stop is hard), berating legal observers or those seeking to protect their neighbors (including derogatory remarks to women about their bodies or obnoxious promises to “dedicate my next arrest to you”), tackling Minnesotans in the snow, using tear gas on observers.

Two days ago, an ICE agent pointed a high-powered green laser pointer toward the cars of observers. There are multiple laws regulating the use of these laser pointers in the U.S. because they can cause retina damage. It’s clear these ICE agents are poorly trained.

Yesterday, Blackhawk helicopters joined the operation. Many of those disappeared by ICE here are not listed on their website of detainees. The majority of those arrested do not have criminal backgrounds. Minnesotans are feeling terrorized by our federal government.

Last night was the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Catholic churches with a high number of Latine members held celebrations throughout the night. Faith trumped fear. Non-Catholic Minnesotans patrolled outside the churches to protect those inside. Today, Friday, mosques will hold jummah prayers and non-Muslim Minneapolitans (some of whom aren’t themselves religious, but are sure displaying faithful action) have signed up to be a protective presence outside every mosque in the city. This too is religious freedom activism.

Local democracy is coming alive here. Neighborhoods have organized school patrols, meal deliveries, rides for immigrant neighbors. Local elected leaders are coordinating closely with residents. The city government is strengthening ordinances to ensure federal agents cannot use city parking lots to stage their operations. Workers at the airport where deportation flights operate and U.S. postal service workers are rallying in opposition to the use of their facilities to enable Operation Metro Surge. City police officers have shown up to protect community members from federal agents. Faith leaders are organizing spiritual support and care for the hundreds of people out on the streets all day long who are protecting neighbors and documenting illegal ICE actions, those who are making sure we know about every person taken to ensure nothing happens in the dark.

And then on Sundays, those of us who are practicing Christians go to church and we hear the Advent message about a holy light shining in darkness, the promise of God’s arrival even – especially – in a world full of suffering and chaos. This Sunday, the scripture will be Mary’s Magnificat, in which she sings praises for God’s ability to “cast down the mighty from their thrones.” May it be so.

So to put it simply: It is awful here, what is happening. We are tired, afraid, anxious, angry. And, there is beauty in how the community is responding to care for each other. This is the immanent presence of God, Emmanuel, also known as Love.

– Susie Hayward
via social media
December 12, 2025

Writes Mahad Gedi about the above image:

Picture of the Year: there are good human beings whose humanity isn’t shaped by race. Our Minnesota neighbors came out to show support and solidarity with the Somali American community, standing firmly against the racism and prejudice being pushed by President Trump and his MAGA supporters. We are truly grateful for everyone who chose unity over division and love over hate. God bless America.

Related Off-site Links:
How Is the ICE Surge Affecting Somali Minnesotans? – Hannah Ihekoronye (Sahan Journal, December 12, 2025).
Activists Turn to Noise Demonstrations at Local Hotels to Get “ICE Out of Minnesota” – Chris Juhn (Sahan Journal, December 12, 2025).
What to Do and Not to Do When Monitoring ICE Agents and Immigration Actions in Minnesota – Cathy Wurzer, Gracie Stockton and Lukas Levin (MPR News, December 11, 2025).
ICE Agents in Cedar-Riverside Acting “Without Regard for Civil Rights,” Minnesota Rep. Mohamud Noor Says – Clay Masters and Gretchen Brown (MPR News, December 11, 2025).
Minneapolis City Council Bolsters Ordinance That Prevent Police From Helping ICE – Howard Thompson (FOX 9 News, December 11, 2025).
ICE Agents Tackle and Arrest American Citizen in Minneapolis – Matt Sepic (MPR News, December 10, 2025).
Minnesota Arrest Highlights Concerns of Racial Profiling in Immigration Enforcement – Abdirizak Diis (Somali Media MN, December 10, 2025).
He Called Us “Garbage.” Here Is the Somali Community I Know – Faisa Ahmed (Minnesota Reformer, December 10, 2025).
Augsburg University President Decries 'Illegal' Arrest of Student by ICE Agents – Brianna Kelly (Bring Me the News, December 9, 2025).
Minneapolis Woman Recounts Being Detained by ICE – Felicity Dachel (KARE 11 News, December 9, 2025).
ICE in Minnesota: Agents Pepper Spray Crowd in Cedar-Riverside – Kyle Brown and Richard Reeve (KSTP News, December 9, 2025).
ICE Arrests Observer, Maces Press and Detains People as Agents Are Confronted Across Minneapolis – Unicorn Riot (December 9, 2025).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Photo of the Day – December 5, 2025
• Omar Fateh: Quote of the Day – December 4, 2025
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 20, 2025
• An Incident That Feels “Ripped from a Dystopian Novel”
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like”
• Jason Stanley on How Fascism Works
• James Greenberg on Trumpism: “The Tactics Are Unmistakable”
• The Choice Before Us
• James Greenberg: “The Choices We Make Matter”
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Donald Trump’s Militarization of Law Enforcement
• Jason Duchin: “It’s Here, and We Are Sleepwalking Through It”
• Marianne Williamson: “We’re Moving Into Totalitarianism”
• Garrett Graff: “America Tips Into Fascism”
• James Greenberg on the Identity Politics of MAGA
• Jason Duchin: Quote of the Day – September 24, 2025
• Derek Johnson on the “Courage to Call Fascism by Its Name”
• James Greenberg: “I Am in Mourning for America”
• “If a Praying Minister Isn’t Safe, None of Us Are”
• James Greenberg on Trump’s “Larger Design” – the Construction of a Military Dictatorship
• Historian John Lestrange on the Meaning and Manifestations of Fascism, Past and Present
• Protesting Trump’s “Dystopian” Immigration Policies
• The Declaration of Resistance


Image: Artist unknown.

Advent’s Timeless Invitation to Imagine the Impossible

Today we are invited to imagine the impossible. We are invited to abandon our normal way of perceiving and look through grace-filled eyes. We are asked to imagine feeble hands strong, blind eyes filled with vision, and arid desert in bloom. We are asked to imagine fear withered away.

But God’s vision for creation will not emerge without our participation. Ramakrishna once said: “The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.” This is what the friends of the paralyzed man do in the gospel story of Luke 5:18-25. They raise the sail and are swept along in a movement of grace that changes everything about who they are in God and who God is in them. Surprisingly, they learn that every moment of grace is a movement of reconciliation. To forgive and be forgiven is to be reconciled, to return to the unity that is God’s vision and our hope.

– Judy Cannato

The Wild Reed’s 2024 Advent series:
• Held in the Presence of God
• The Act of Surrender
• The Journey Home

The Wild Reed’s 2023 Advent series:
• Awakening
• An Extraordinary, Precious Opportunity
• The Task at Hand

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Advent Questions for These Times of Challenge and Change
• A Threshold Season
• A New Beginning
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• 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
• The Centered Life as an Advent Life
• Rejoice? (Advent 2012)
• Advent 2011: Thoughts and Reflections – Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
• Thoughts on Waiting . . . and a Resolution
• My Advent Prayer for the Church
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Judy Cannato
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Joyce Rupp

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

The Journey Home

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

The Wild Reed’s 2024 Advent series concludes with a third excerpt from Sufism: Transformation of the Heart by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. (To start at the beginning of this series and to learn why I chose this book, click here.)

________________

Sufism is the ancient wisdom of the heart. Like a stream which goes underground and then reappears, this wisdom is always present in the world, sometimes visible and sometimes hidden. Some great Sufis have been public figures; many have worked in the disguise of ordinary men and women. They belong to God and respond to the need of the time. At the present time in the West there is a need for this path of the heart to be made known, for this ancient tradition to be made accessible.

In our Western world there is a hunger for the wisdom and nourishment that come from the inner world. In dreams, visions, and the silence of longing, the inner journey awakens within us and we are called back “to the root of the root of our own self.” Yet our culture has forgotten the way of the mystic, which is so at variance with the rational and material values that surround us. There appear to be few signposts to guide the traveller, who is so often left stranded, confusing longing with depression, or believing that the desire for God is just an inability to adjust to the “real” world.

In [the twentieth-century], psychology and the many different forms of therapy [arose and] helped us to understand the dynamics of the unconscious. We are beginning to learn about the healing and transformation that can come from within. Psychology is a valuable contemporary science, but the mystic has different intentions from those who seek psychological healing or the resolution of problems. The heart’s desire for union with God activates a process of psychological ego-destruction that is both terrifying and intoxicating, The mystic does not seek ego-fulfillment, but to be lost in the abyss of nothingness. At the same time we need to live a balanced life and not allow the contents of the unconscious to overwhelm us. The Sufi path has explored and documented the psychological and spiritual unfolding that belongs to the journey Home. This wisdom is valuable not only to those who follow the Sufi path, but to others who need to understand the processes of transformation that belong to the mystical journey.

The wayfarer follows love’s call, like the moth drawn to the flame of annihilation. At the same time the Sufi lives an everyday life in the world. We have to learn to live in two worlds, to have both feet firmly on the ground and yet with our head to support the sky. Living in two worlds is an integral part of the Sufi tradition. The subtle balance of inner and outer states, the integration of the spiritual and everyday life, belongs to the wisdom of this path.

. . . Living in both realms – working in the world, having a family, while at the same time realizing the Truth – is a cornerstone of the Sufi path. The inner and outer world, the heart’s secrets and the most ordinary things, combine to create the necessary conditions for the path. The friction between the two worlds wears away the ego, which is unable to contain the seeming contradiction of the endless inner expansion and the limitations of everyday life. The prison of our temporal home contains the key of the heart's freedom. Here lies the secret alchemy of the Sufi path.

The combination of the inner and outer worlds produces a powerful dynamic that helps the wayfarer to realize her true nature. Remembering God in our daily life, we bring the imprint of the soul into the world of time and space. Only within the heart can we contain the most primal pair of opposites, that we are at the same time divine, immortal spirits and temporal creatures. The tension between our divine and human natures produces the longing that burns [and transforms us] us and takes us Home.

Inwardly looking towards God, we learn to live our devotion not as some idealized state, but as a center of stillness and love within the limitations and difficulties of the world. We do not reject God’s creation but rather come to know its deeper purpose, as a reflection of God’s Oneness. When we love God in the midst of the world, amidst our mundane, everyday life, we realize this hidden secret of creation – “in everything there is a sign, a clue to 'God is One.’”*

The way of the Sufi is to contain duality within the oneness of love. We are both separate and united with the Beloved whom we love.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart
The Golden Sufi Center, 1995
pp. 144-145

* Fakhruddīn Irāqī, Divine Flashes, translated by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson, p. 126.

____________________

Something special now to mark the conclusion of this series: a 40-minute talk by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee that serves as a very accessible and eloquent introduction to Sufism, the “path of love” that reveals the “secrets of mystical Oneness.” This talk was recorded on October 18, 2009 in Tiburon, California.





See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Held in the Presence of God
• The Act of Surrrender
• 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
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Birthday Musings
• The Onward Call
• A Sacred Journey, a Pilgrim Path
• In the Footsteps of Spring: Introduction | Part I | II | III | IV | V
• New Horizons
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• Advent Questions for These Times of Challenge and Change
• Advent Thoughts
• A Threshold Season
• A New Beginning
• 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
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: “Serpentine Starlings” by Niki Bowers.

The Act of Surrender

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

The Wild Reed’s 2024 Advent series continues with a second excerpt from Sufism: Transformation of the Heart by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. (For the first installment of this series and an explanation for why I chose this book, click here.)

________________

We have to make every effort [to renouce the ego], but without [the Beloved’s] grace all our efforts would be useless because we would still be caught in the ego. There comes the time when we have to give up even the desire to progress, even the desire to get closer to Him whom we love. We have to surrender every effort in order to be taken by God to God. In the words of Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqāni: “He who says he has attained God, has not; while he who says he has been taken to God has indeed attained union with God.”

What we most want we cannot find, but we have to seek with every effort until we surrender. Then in the act of surrender we create an inner space for the Beloved to reveal Himself. We die to our own desire, even the desire for Truth, and then Truth reveals Itself. The eye of the heart opens and we see that there is nothing other than God.

The process of dying is a slow and gradual work. Slowly the ego dies as attachments and conditioning fall away. With each little death a veil falls away and the horizon of the Self expands. After these moments of expansion there is usually a period of contraction as we integrate our new-found awareness, learn to live with a wider perspective. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the focus of our awareness shifts from the ego to the Self. As this happens the rate of expansion, the speed of the journey, intensifies. Faster and faster we flow with the currents of love which carry us Home.

The dissolution of the ego unites us with the Self. What was always present but hidden comes to the surface. The all-knowing and all-seeing Substance within the heart permeates consciousness with its presence. We continue to live our ordinary, everyday life, but we begin to feel that it is included within something greater, something which does not belong to the mind or the personality. When He wills we can have access to this other dimension within us. The ego cannot reach the Self, but once we learn to surrender, the Self can reach us. The ego and the mind instinctively step aside and we are in the presence of what is eternal.

. . . To be surrendered to God is to give oneself into unknowingness, into a space beyond thought or form. His presence then comes into our life in many forms – as a companion, as inner guidance, as a sweetness suddenly felt. And underneath all His manifestations is a deepening communion with what can never be manifest, with an emptiness, a nothingness, “the dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves.”* This silence is the real Home of the mystic, where we inwardly abide with God.

In this inner silence, love reveals its secret potency, an unending expansion of the heart.

– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Excerpted from Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart
The Golden Sufi Center, 1995
pp. 144-145

NEXT:
The Journey Home

* The Blessed John Ruysbroeck, quoted by F. C. Happold in Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology, p. 293.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Held in the Presence of God
• I Surrender to You
• 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 Soul’s Beloved
• The Gorgeous One
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• A Sacred Journey, a Pilgrim Path
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• Be In My Mind, Beloved One
• Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
• Beloved and Antlered
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• 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 Questions for These Times of Challenge and Change
• Advent Thoughts
• A Threshold Season
• A New Beginning
• 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
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: “Short Days, Long Shadows” by Niki Bowers.

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

Recommended Off-site Link:
Inayat Khan and Universal Sufism – Filip Holm (Let’s Talk Religion, December 8, 2024).

Opening image: Niki Bowers.

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.

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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 make 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?

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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.

Light and Dark: “Both Holy, Both Life-Giving”

I have come to appreciate Advent so much more without the light/dark binary. Rather, I see darkness as the generative space in which light is conceived and from which it is born. Both holy, both life-giving.

– Rev. Wil Gafney

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Honoring the Darkness While Remembering the Light
• The Christmas Tree as Icon, Inviting Us to Contemplate the “One Holy Circle” of Both Dark and Light
• Dark Matter: “An Intriguing Aspect of the Universe”
• Photo of the Day, 5/3/2015: “Black Is Sacred”
• “And Still We Rise!” – Mayday 2015 (Part I)
• “And Still We Rise!” – Mayday 2015 (Part II)
• Something to Cherish
• Sweet Darkness
• God’s Good Gift

Related Off-site Links:
Holy Blackness: The Matrix of Creation – Wil Gafney (AllSaintsChurch.org, December 1, 2019).
Holy Darkness – The Inner Journey (December 17, 2018).

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

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.

An Extraordinary, Precious Opportunity

– Artwork: Niki Bowers

The Wild Reed’s 2023 Advent series continues with a second excerpt from Awakening: A Sufi Experience, a collection of writings by the late Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. (For the first installment of this series, click here.)

___________________

What exactly do we mean by the concept of the “moment” or “now”? If you are listening to music, the note you have just heard continues to resound in your ears, even as you begin to take in the next note. In this “moment” there are no boundaries between the past or the future. Thus Sufis [and all you walk the path of mysticism] do not see individuals as victims of an inexorably preordained fate, nor as autocratic masters of their individual destiny. Rather, they take into account the existence of a higher intelligence that, through an innovative, trial-and-error, evolutionary process, is embedded within humanity to creatively shape and reshape life in an endless array of new images, patterns, and paradigms.

This transcendent force is what some call God and what I call the “Universe.” Like a cosmic pull that exerts a force of its own over humanity, the Universe is constantly compelling us to break free of the conditioning of the past in order to transform and evolve. Just like the constant changes and adaptations in nature that have been occurring for aeons of time – resulting in emerald rainforests, exotic animals, and complex, intelligent creatures called people – this evolutionary force functions like a spiritual magnet to draw humanity beyond its limitations into further dimensions of consciousness and levels of perception. Indeed, the impetus to span the cleft from the past to the future is part of an on-going, billions-of-years-old process by which the Universe has been fashioning its stardust into human beings. The planning of the Universe is affected by humankind’s free, creative participation; thus the goal for humans is to become conscious of their profound impact upon the unfolding of creation.

Should such a quantum shift in consciousness actually occur, it would represent an heroic victory over determinism – not over nature, but over the limitations of our own minds that prevent us from working in harmony with the Universe. Conscious evolution is humankind’s final frontier, the ultimate freedom sought by humanity since the dawn of time. Thus the challenge seems to be one of overcoming the fear of the unexplored territory that lies ahead, and finding the courage and optimism to illuminate the spiritual dimension hidden within our nature. For it is the intuitive, rader-like quality of this transcendent faculty that will help to guide us through the darkness of the unknown – illuminating our minds and awakening our hearts to the splendor of a new consciousness.

“Participators in the evolution of the Universe”: it is a phrase that resonates with possibility and potential. For this means to realize that the future is not just waiting to happen; instead, it is taking shape right here and now in the attitudes we hold, the choices we make, and the values we cherish. It means to become fully aware of the fact that humanity holds in its hands an extraordinary, precious opportunity to shape the future tomorrows of this planet. One way of doing this is through our Divinely inspired creativity – imagining and envisioning a world that is different from the one that has gone before. This does not mean abandoning all that humanity has attained thus far. Rather, it means carefully sifting through the past – preserving the legacy bequeathed by the great civilizations of antiquity, while at the same time improving our social structures to eschew the sad trail of suffering wreaked by the cruel against the victims of oppression.

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

NEXT:
Part III – The Task at Hand


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Awakening
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Stepping Out of Time
• 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
• In the Dance of Light, Eyes of Fiery Passion
• The Winged Heart
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Jesus: Mystic and Prophet
• Called to the Field of Compassion
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• 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
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Advent: Renewing Our Connection to the Sacred
• A Threshold Season
• Advent Thoughts
• Bismillah
• Cultivating Stillness
• A New Beginning
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

Opening image: Niki Bowers.