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.

Hope and Beauty in the Midst of the Global Coronavirus Pandemic

I went shopping today with my friend Deandre and saw for the first time what I'd only heard about or seen pictures of on social media: large areas of empty shelving in grocery stores and signage from store owners announcing to customers limitations of quantity of certain goods – namely toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

It was all very surreal.

And I couldn't help but think of Doris Lessing's novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor, about a woman's experience of a society crumbling as the result of an unspecified disaster, referred to as “The Crisis.”

In film director David Gladwell's 1981 adaptation of Lessing's novel (described by critic Albert Johnson as “a cinema journey full of discovery”), the main (and nameless) character/narrator is luminously portrayed by Julie Christie. (For my reflections on this film, click here.)

Of course, the event that is causing growing unease and panic around the world is not, as in Lessing's novel, "unspecified." No, for us in 2020 the event is the coronavirus pandemic, one which, globally, is unprecedented, and which here in the U.S. is about to get much worse because of the incompetence of the Trump administration and the lack of any real public health system.

Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor is generally considered a dystopian novel, a story of end times.

Yet it can also be read as an allegorical tale of new beginnings. This is most resolutely symbolized in the salvific appearance of the mythic “Cosmic Egg” toward the end of both the novel and its film adaptation.

Writes Sharon R. Wilson about the significance of this symbol:

In Lessing’s revisioned creation myth, the Cosmic Egg requires human co-construction: the narrator mirrors her creator. Without the narrator’s journey through the wall and without her work to clean and order the chaos – work that matches that of the painter and gardener – presumably this egg could not open. As well as being a witness to the death and rebirth of the world, Lessing’s unnamed narrator is an active participant in its recreation.

I find this analysis of Lessing's novel, one that reflects the mystic path, to be both beautiful and hopeful.

And in recent days I've come across a number of writings by people who, in responding to the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, also offer beauty and hope.

Some of these writings are by people I know – friends and/or colleagues. Others are by well-known thinkers and authors. All reflect the beauty and wisdom of the heart, the seedbed of hope.

__________________________

[N]othing feels stable. One month ago rumors rumbled, this week everything is shutting down. Within these last few days it has felt as if we were dropped into the plot of a sci-fi movie, where the viewer can see more broadly the entire scope of the problem and knows it is going to be bad. On screen characters are only beginning to sense the severity and react in fear. I hear the word, “surreal” quite a lot these days.

This morning I walked out of a bakery and into the familiar sound of honking just above my head. I looked up to see two geese preparing to land on a nearby pond. As I hopped into my car and headed down the highway, I was immediately gifted by a spectacular sunrise. It evolved from velvet purple, to azure blue to a popping bright yellow. As quickly as it arrived, it morphed to a calming lavender and ducked behind a bank of clouds.

When it seems as if nothing is the same, that everything is changing, as if there is no solid ground beneath you, take a deeper look. The birds are coming back to their summer homes, the lake ice is melting, the sun continues to rise and set in a predicable rhythm of grace. Regular life is still happening. Look beyond your (very normal) fear into the depths of your own heart. There you find stability. In that place, find peace. See grace.

And out of THAT heart space of stability, peace and grace . . . live.

Over this season you will find more posts than is normal for this space. I invite you to come, check in and breath. Take good care of yourself and those whom you love. And, be kind to each other.

– Andrea Wichhart-Tatley
“Within”
AndreaTatley.com
March 13, 2020

If we imagine we live on some isolated little island, we are living in a fool's paradise. What happens over there affects me here.

My own well-being depends on whether I let you fall to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, telling myself that your life is none of my responsibility. If I let you be sick and without medical treatment, I myself will end up paying a price – as I will if I let you go without education, without food, without a job.

The butterfly beats its wings on the other side of the globe and the weather on my side of the planet feels the effects.

A global pandemic shows us that we are all connected to each other, all related, all kin, all in it together. And that we will not have lives worth living on this planet until we begin to recognize our interconnectedness.

– William D. Lindsey
via Facebook
March 14, 2020

If we view ourselves as besieged victims who need to go into hiding, then we will cultivate fear and hoarding. If we view ourselves as a community working hard to protect the most vulnerable among us, then we will cultivate courage and helping. Mindset matters.

– Len Niehoff
via Facebook
March 13, 2020

I was thinking this morning about how rapidly things can change. A week ago, I bought a new mattress at Macy’s. The sales person stood to shake my hand at the end of the transaction and I said, “Ah, no. We are supposed to be training ourselves not to shake hands now that the coronavirus has arrived in the U.S.” At that time, there had been five confirmed cases. We sort of laughed as we awkwardly attempted the elbow bump and he said, “Well, you are my first elbow bump of these new times.”

I left the furniture store and went to Trader Joe’s, where I leisurely shopped, overhearing the few other folks also shopping casually discussing things like what to purchase for dinner or what cheese to serve to guests gathering later that night. It was calm, the shelves were well stocked. I even bought a few hyacinth bulbs. And I probably touched my face 14 times without giving it another thought. It almost seems inconceivable that that was only a week ago in light of how much has changed in our world since then. That salesman might not even have a job this weekend as the stock market tanks, businesses voluntarily close for a few weeks in an attempt to “flatten the curve,” and people’s priorities shift from purchasing furniture to stockpiling toilet paper and disinfecting wipes.

By week’s end, my Facebook feed was full of photos of completely empty shelves at Trader Joe’s as the urge to hoard food and essentials became harder and harder to resist as the numbers of confirmed cases rose exponentially and the inevitability of self imposed isolation came into sharper and sharper focus.

As I was preparing the bedroom for the delivery of the new mattress later this afternoon, I was actually thinking how risky it feels to have strangers come into my “clean space” and what I would do if they arrive coughing and appearing unwell. I was pondering all this, and marveling at how long 24 hours can feel in a time of such uncertainty, when I flipped on the light in the dining room and discovered my hyacinth bulbs had bloomed. It sort of felt like the Universe was challenging my conclusion that everything that changed so quickly this week was in the negative column.

Alright Universe, you win. Sometimes rapidly changing things can surprise us with amazingly beautiful results. I hope you are surprised by beauty sometime this weekend as well.

– Amy Gabriel
via Facebook
March 14, 2020

As the world has slowed down in almost every experience of what the marvelous Sister Jenna calls “a global pause,” I’m having my most precious experience: a couple of days with my daughter India. . . . The coronavirus is reminding all of us to savor what we have, to go deep at a moment when we’re not as free to go wide. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said that “Every problem in the world stems from [humanity’s] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

We are being forced to be quieter than usual, and hopefully even in our sadness we will discover deeper wisdom. God knows there’s a lot of it to discover, about ourselves, about our country, and about our world.

What are we doing with our lives? Not how long will they be, but how meaningful will they be?

And who that we love can we love a little better, a little deeper?

These are the questions which emerge in the quiet, that remind me of this line from Rilke: “Let me not squander the hour of my pain.”

– Marianne Williamson
via Facebook
March 13, 2020

Italians are beating the social isolation imposed by the country's coronavirus lockdown by taking to their windows and singing in unison, with videos of the phenomenon racking up thousands of views online.

Since Monday, a series of decrees from the Italian government have drastically limited citizens' movements, with vast swathes of the economy shut down and people instructed to leave the house only when strictly necessary.

All cultural events have also been suspended, prompting some celebrities to start organising online performances and museums to put virtual tours online.

Another attempt to boost morale has now come in the form of impromptu music at people's windows. One recording in the Tuscan city of Siena has been viewed over 600,000 times on Twitter.

. . . Another social media initiative has seen Italians put up signs outside their homes saying "andra tutto bene" or "everything will be OK". The slogan is accompanied by a picture of a rainbow – often drawn by children at home as school is cancelled.

Italy has been struck by the worst European outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic, with more than 17,000 cases and 1,266 deaths.

– AFP News Agency
March 13, 2020

Video of quarantined Italians singing to each other across deserted streets from their windows, balconies and doorways during the coronavirus lockdown is as beautiful as it is haunting.

David Allegranti, a writer for Il Foglio newspaper, shared footage of residents’ stirring rendition of a local folk song in the northern city of Siena on Twitter Thursday night.

“This video is touching,” Rome-based Allegranti told HuffPost via email on Friday. “The first time I saw it I started to cry.”

Allegranti said a friend sent him the footage, although it wasn’t clear who actually took the video that has now spread across social media. Twitter users were equally moved by what appeared to be an impromptu communal singsong.

. . . There were reportedly similar scenes of neighbors spontaneously singing together in Wuhan, China, in the initial days of the outbreak there.

– Lee Moran
Excerpted from “Quarantined Italians Sing Together
Across Empty Streets In Hauntingly Beautiful Video”
The Huffington Post
March 13, 2020

Surviving this crisis will take a shift in mindset, and that’s tougher than we think – especially when we’re afraid.

Fear and anxiety can drive us to become very self-focused. This global pandemic is a real case of “getting sick together” or “staying well together.”

Our choices affect everyone around us. There is no such thing as “individual risk” or “individual wellness.”

This is the ultimate reminder that we are inextricably connected to each other. Turning away from collective action right now – as tempting as it is – will only generate more pain.

Owning and embracing our global interconnectedness (from a safe distance) and thinking about others as we make choices is, ironically, our only path to safety for ourselves and the people we love.

We can all get really shitty really fast when we’re afraid. I get it. I’m using deep breaths along with my personal mantra: ” Try to be scared without being scary.” Feel free to borrow both – they can help.

It’s also really normal for everyone to be on our nerves: The people who aren’t following the rules, the 10-second hand washers, etc. I get that too. TRUST ME.

But, like it or not, we just can’t give up on people. We’re all we have.

Stay awkward, brave, and kind. Love each other. Spread calm.

– Brené Brown
via Facebook
March 13, 2020

– Ricardo Levins Morales
“What to Do in a Pandemic”
March 2020

For the vast majority of people nationwide and worldwide, this virus is not about you. This is one of those times in life, in history, when your actions are about something bigger. They are about someone else. They are about something greater, a greater good that you may not ever witness. A person you will save who you will never meet.

You may be healthy, and your kids may be healthy. Your parents may be healthy. Everyone around you seems fine. And all the things you planned and the 2020 spring you thought you were going to have has been completely undone. You have to work from home. Your conference is cancelled. Your semester is over. Your work is cancelled. It all seems fast, and out-of-proportion and disorienting. You look at each action and think – but it would be okay if I did that. It’s not so big. We worked so hard. They would be so disappointed.

Your losses are real. Your disappointments are real. Your hardships are real. I don’t mean to make light or to minimize the difficulty ahead for you, your family or community.

But this isn’t like other illnesses and we don’t get to act like it is. It’s more contagious, it’s more fatal – and most importantly, even if it can be managed. It can’t be managed at a massive scale – anywhere. We need this thing to move slowly enough for our collective national and worldwide medical systems to hold the very ill so that all of the very ill can get taken care of.

Because at this time of severe virus there are also all of the other things that require care. There is still cancer, there are still heart attacks, there are still car accidents, there are still complicated births. And we need our medical systems to be able to hold us. And we need to be responsible because our medical systems are made up of people and these amazing healthcare workers are a precious and limited resource. They will rise to this occasion. They will work to help you heal. They will work to save your mother or father or sister or baby. But in order for that to happen we have very important work to do. ALL OF US.

So what is our work? Yes, you need to wash your hands and stay home if you are sick. But the biggest work you can do is expand your heart and your mind to see yourself and see your family as part of a much bigger community that can have a massive – hugely massive – impact on the lives of other people.

I remember the feeling of helplessness after 9/11 and after Hurricane Sandy. I remember how much people wanted to help. I remember how much generosity of spirit there was about wanting to give, wanting to be helpful, wanting to save lives. And many of you have had experiences since then – whether it was a mass shooting, or the wildfires, or floods. There have been times you have looked on and wondered how you could help. And now we ALL have that chance.

You can help by canceling anything that requires a group gathering. You can help by not using the medical system unless it is urgent. You can help by staying home if you are sick. You can help by cooking or shopping or doing errands for a friend who needs to stay home. You can help by watching someone’s kid if they need to cover for someone else at work. You can help by ordering take-out from your local restaurants. Eat the food yourself or find someone who needs it. You can help by offering to help bring someone’s college student home or house out-of-town students if you have extra rooms. You can help by asking yourself, “What can I and my family do to help?” “What can we offer?” You can help by seeing yourself as part of something bigger than yourself.

When the Apollo 13 oxygen tank failed and the lunar module was in danger of not returning to earth, Gene Kranz, the lead flight director overheard people saying that this could be the worst disaster NASA had ever experienced – to which he is rumored to have responded, “With all due respect, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.”

Imagine if we could make our response to this crisis our finest hour. Imagine if a year or two from now we looked back on this and told the stories of how we came together as a team in our community, in our state, in our nation and across the world.

Your contribution to the finest hour may seem small, invisible, inconsequential – but every small act of ‘not doing’ what you were going to do, and ‘doing’ an act of kindness or support will add up exponentially. These acts can and will save lives. The Apollo 13 crew made it their finest hour by letting go of the word “I” and embracing the word “we.” And that’s the task required of us. It can only be our finest hour if we work together. You are all on the team. And we need all of you to shine in whatever way you can.

– Gretchen Schmelzer
“This Can Be Our Finest Hour – But We Need All of You”
GretchenSchmelzer.com
March 10, 2020

Conversations will not be cancelled.
Relationships will not be cancelled.
Love will not be cancelled.
Songs will not be cancelled.
Self-care will not be cancelled.
Hope will not be cancelled.

May we lean into the good things that remain.

– Jamie Tworkowski
via Facebook
March 13, 2020

And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently. And the people healed.

And in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.

– Kitty O'Meara
via Facebook
March 16, 2020

UPDATES . . .

It is shocking to think how much the world has changed in such a brief time. Each of us has had our lives and communities disrupted. Of course, I am here in this with you. I feel that I’m in no position to tell you how to feel or how to think, but there are a few things that come to mind I will share.

A few days ago I was encouraged by the Franciscans and by the leadership team here at the Center for Action and Contemplation to self-quarantine, so I’ve been in my little hermitage now for three or four days. I’ve had years of practice, literally, how to do what we are calling “social distancing.” I have a nice, large yard behind me where there are four huge, beautiful cottonwood trees, and so I walk my dog Opie every few hours.

Right now I’m trying to take in psychologically, spiritually, and personally, what is God trying to say? When I use that phrase, I’m not saying that God causes suffering to teach us good things. But God does use everything, and if God wanted us to experience global solidarity, I can’t think of a better way. We all have access to this suffering, and it bypasses race, gender, religion, and nation.

We are in the midst of a highly teachable moment. There’s no doubt that this period will be referred to for the rest of our lifetimes. We have a chance to go deep, and to go broad. Globally, we’re in this together. Depth is being forced on us by great suffering, which as I like to say, always leads to great love.

But for God to reach us, we have to allow suffering to wound us. Now is no time for an academic solidarity with the world. Real solidarity needs to be felt and suffered. That’s the real meaning of the word “suffer” – to allow someone else’s pain to influence us in a real way. We need to move beyond our own personal feelings and take in the whole. This, I must say, is one of the gifts of television: we can turn it on and see how people in countries other than our own are hurting. What is going to happen to those living in isolated places or for those who don’t have health care? Imagine the fragility of the most marginalized, of people in prisons, the homeless, or even the people performing necessary services, such as ambulance drivers, nurses, and doctors, risking their lives to keep society together? Our feelings of urgency and devastation are not exaggeration: they are responding to the real human situation. We’re not pushing the panic button; we are the panic button. And we have to allow these feelings, and invite God’s presence to hold and sustain us in a time of collective prayer and lament.

I hope this experience will force our attention outwards to the suffering of the most vulnerable. Love always means going beyond yourself to otherness. It takes two. There has to be the lover and the beloved. We must be stretched to an encounter with otherness, and only then do we know it’s love. This is what we call the subject-subject relationship. Love alone overcomes fear and is the true foundation that lasts (1 Corinthians 13:13).

– Richard Rohr, OFM
“Love Alone Overcomes Fear”
Center for Action and Contemplation
March 19, 2020

[T]his will change us. It must. All plagues change society and culture, reversing some trends while accelerating others, shifting consciousness far and wide, with consequences we won’t discover for years or decades. The one thing we know about epidemics is that at some point they will end. The one thing we don’t know is who we will be then.

I know that I was a different man at the end of the plague of AIDS than I was at the beginning, just as so many gay men and many others were. You come face-to-face with mortality and the randomness of fate, and you are changed. You have a choice: to submit to fear and go under, or to live with the virus and do what you can. And the living with it, while fighting it, is what changes you over time; it requires more than a little nerve and more than a little steel. Plague living dispenses with the unnecessary, lays bare whom you can trust and whom you can’t, and also reveals what matters.

. . . Plagues destroy so much – but through the devastation, they can also rebuild and renew.

– Andrew Sullivan
“How to Survive a Plague”
New York Magazine
March 20, 2020

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

– Arundhati Roy
“This Pandemic Is a Portal”
Dnyuz
April 4, 2020

NEXT: The Calm Before the Storm:
Reflections of a Hospital Chaplain
Awaiting the Coronavirus “Surge”

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Prayer in Times of a Pandemic
• An Infectious Disease Specialist Weighs-in on Covid-19
• A Prayer for the Present Moment
• Move Us, Loving God
• You, O Comforter, Are Ever Near
• The End of the World as We Know It . . . . . . the Beginning As We Live It
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible

Related Off-site Links:
The Shape of Love in a Time of Contagion – David R. Weiss (Full Frontal Theology, March 12, 2020).
Psychologist Offers Tips to Calm COVID-19 Anxiety – KARE 11 News via Allina Health (March 11, 2020).
Managing Stress During Coronavirus Outbreak – Shai Plonski (via YouTube, March 13, 2020).
Lizzo Leads a Mass Meditation Amidst Growing Coronavirus Concerns – Sandra Song (Paper Magazine, March 13, 2020).
Coronavirus Offers a “Blank Page for a New Beginning” Says Li Edelkoort – Courtney Mares (De Zeen, March 9, 2020).
We Can Waste Another Crisis, or We Can Transform the Economy – Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos (Jacobin, March 13, 2020).
Late-stage Capitalism Primed Us for This Pandemic – Bob Hennelly (Salon, March 15, 2020).
Bernie Sanders Can Lead the Fight Against Coronavirus. Joe Biden Can’t – Branko Marcetic and Meagan Day (Jacobin, March 13, 2020).
People Are Fighting the Coronavirus With Mutual Aid Efforts to Help Each Other – Lucy Diavolo (Teen Vogue, March 16, 2020).
Facing COVID-19 With Community Instead of Fear – Lornet Turnbull (Yes! Magazine, March 10, 2020).
Coping With the Coronavirus With Mindfulness and Compassion – Beverly Engel (Psychology Today, March 17, 2020).
A Pandemic of Love: Deeply Adapting to Corona – Jem Bendell (JemBendell.com, March 18, 2020).
Why Coronavirus Is Humanity’s Wake-Up Call – David Korten (Yes! Magazine, March 18, 2020).
Albert Camus Helps Us Understand Our Responses During This Crisis – Dave Hage (Star Tribune, April 3, 2020).

BREAKING: God Tests Positive – David R. Weiss (Full Frontal Theology, March 16, 2020).

First and last image: Amy Gabriel.
Image 2: Julie Christie in Memoirs of a Survivor (1981).
Image 3: Deandre Dwyer.
Images 4-6: Michael J. Bayly.
Images 7-8: Screen caps from Memoirs of a Survivor.

Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism

In reviewing Idries Shah's The Sufis, recently republished in both the West and the Middle East, Jason Webster offers a helpful definition of Sufism. Before sharing this definition I'd first like to share a little about my own interest in the mystic path known as the Sufi Way.

Let me start by acknowledging that for many people Sufism is viewed as the "mystical branch of Islam." Yet although 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.

From my perspective, Sufism isn't so much a mystic path as it is the mystic path. 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) (For a scholarly exploration of the idea of Christianity beginning as a form of what later is called Sufism, click here.) Kabir Helminski also writes of how Sufism is about "realizing the current of love that runs throughout all life, the unity behind forms." (2)

Accordingly, Sufism is not a doctrine or a belief system. Rather, it is a tradition of enlightenment, a way of life that emphasizes love as the way to an ever-expanding realization of ourselves and our relationship with the Divine Presence. 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." (3)

For Lessing, dogma, doctrine and liturgy distort the inner aspect of religion into a "sociological straightjacket." Mysticism, she notes, "is given a bad name [by the guardians of doctrinal orthodoxy] because 'mystics' in all societies usually oppose, ignore, evade the narrow dogmas. And they do this because they are engaged in reclaiming the life beneath the straitjacket." (4)

With this in mind, it's not surprising that gay people and others who find themselves stymied and/or condemned by the edicts and teachings of organized religion are drawn to the mystic path and to the "soul work" that this path compels us to undertake in order to reclaim for ourselves and the world the "life beneath the straitjacket." For Kabir Helminski, such work is the Work (5), understood as an approach to Spirit involving a total commitment and way of life. Helminski helpfully distinguishes between the Work, on the one hand, and religion or philosophy, on the other.

The religiously inclined person may ask, "What should I believe?"; the philosophical person might ask, "What is truth?"; but the one who asks, "How shall I find God, how shall I experience Spirit, how shall I become the Truth?" is asking the questions of the Work. What is sought is sought through experience, through a process of maturing, through using more and more of our faculties, through a gradual change of perception. (6)

As a tradition of enlightenment, Sufism understands "tradition" in a vital and dynamic sense. "Its expression must not remain limited to the religious and cultural forms of the past," writes Helminski. "The truth of Sufism requires reformulation and fresh expression in every age." (7)

What I find especially appealing about Sufism is, first and foremost, its emphasis on the primacy of love. I also appreciate its call to awaken and its emphasis on transformation. Its openness to the Divine within all aspects of creation, and thus its universality (or catholicity, in the truest sense of the word), means that it has a celebratory perspective on loving sexual relationships that's tragically lacking in many institutional religions. I also appreciate the music and architecture of the Arabic world in which Sufism has long flourished, and, of course, Sufism's emphasis on dance as a potentially sacred expression greatly resonates with me. About this last characteristic, Helminski writes:

[S]acred dances of all kinds, especially the whirling of the Mevlevi Sufis and the movements taught by Gurdjieff . . . all consciously respect, integrate, and develop the body. All of these sacred means use the body as a medium for the expression of the creative powers of the soul. Furthermore, they produce an integration of all the faculties; not only the physical, but the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual. [These disciplines] teach a presence of mind through balance and alertness. . . . [They] train the consciousness as much as the body. (8)

About Sufi dancing, Helminski notes the following.

The whirling of the Mevlevis requires physical precision and groundedness. The left foot never leaves the ground; the right foot repeats an exacting movement that allows the turner to move with extraordinary grace, neither wobbling nor bobbing up and down. While seeing the physical world turn around his [or her] own still axis, the semazen [worshiping dancer] is inwardly repeating the name of God with each revolution. The arms are extended, an expression of longing and submission – the right palm up receiving spiritual energy, the left palm down bestowing that energy to the world. The semazen becomes a transformer of cosmic energies through conscious intention, love, and the electrodynamic effect of the human nervous system revolving in relation to the earth's magnetic field. (9)

I also appreciate what Mary Blye Howe writes about Sufi dancing in her beautiful and insightful book, Sitting with Sufis: A Christian Experience of Learning Sufism.

These sacred movements don't bring God into our presence. God is always present. But creating an atmosphere in a room and in our hearts through symbolic and meaningful movements of our bodies helps bring God into our awareness. We close our eyes and search for God within. We dance with another, looking into their eyes, and we see God in another human being. Lifting our hands toward the heavens, then bringing them back to our hearts, we sense God's spirit within and without. As we turn in place, we feel the eternal movement of God through the mysterious yet perfect movement of the universe. (10)

Speaking of awareness, I've come to the realization that for any "enlightenment tradition" to be authentic, it must be what theologian Albert Nolan calls a "mystico-prophetic tradition." I agree wholeheartedly with Nolan when he writes:

Any idea that one [can] be a prophet calling for justice and social change without some experience of union with God [is] unthinkable. Equally unthinkable [is] any idea that one [can] be a perfectly good mystic without becoming critically outspoken about the injustices of one's time. (11)

Above: Mystic and prophet: the Taksim Square whirling dervish, photographed during last summer's anti-government protests in Istanbul.

For Nolan, Jesus was "par excellence a representative of the mystico-prophetic tradition." In his book Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, Nolan writes:

Anyone who wishes to take Jesus seriously would have to be prepared to become a prophet and a mystic. . . . [W]e can all become courageous enough to speak out like prophets. . . We can also become mystics. In fact . . . prophesy and mysticism go together. Mystical union with God is not an experience reserved for some very special and privileged people. It is true that everybody does not have the same opportunities for exploring such a possibility. But Jesus did not think that he alone could experience intimacy with God as his abba. God was the abba and Father of all: "My Father and your Father" (Jn 20:17); "Our Father" (Mt 6:9). We can all experience some measure of intimacy with God. . . . According to the frequently quoted prediction of the great twentieth-century theologian, Karl Rahner, "the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all." (12)

And mystics are not "fanatics," which is a perfect segue into (finally) sharing what I set out to share with this post: an excerpt from Jason Webster's Guardian review of The Sufis by Idries Shah.

What is Sufism? Though dictionaries usually define it as the mystical current in Islam, Sufis themselves will tell you that it is an ancient organisation that has embraced free thinkers and people concerned with human development from many cultures throughout history. People from all walks of life – including poets, scientists and politicians – have been Sufis.

Classical Sufis in the Islamic world include Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Fariduddin Attar – whose stories were later used by Chaucer – and the Spaniard Avërroes, the “great commentator” on Aristotle. And many of their ideas passed to Europe through contacts between the Islamic and Christian worlds in the crusader states, Norman Sicily and the Iberian peninsula. From the outset, Sufism has been concerned with building bridges, not least between communities whose contact can be of mutual benefit.

. . . There could not be a more important time for Sufi ideas to be reintroduced. With its concentration, among other things, on awareness and psychological balance – “mindfulness”, if you like – Sufism is a natural antidote to fanaticism. . . . Sufism does not claim to present the panaceas or comforting worldviews that so many ideologies, religious or political, peddle. Yet the complex and moderate thinking it does provide may be precisely what is needed right now. (13)

Above: A Sufi dancer. (Photographer unknown)

NOTES:
1. Barks, C. Rumi: The Book of Love – Poems of Ecstasy and Longing. Harper San Francisco, 2003.
2. Helminski, Kabir Edmund. Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self. Tarcher Putnam Books, 1992, p. 174.
3-4. Lessing, Doris. From the preface of Seeker After Truth: A Handbook by Indris Shah.
5. Helminski, Kabir Edmund. Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self. Tarcher Putnam Books, 1992, p. 8.
6. Ibid., p. 9.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Ibid., pp. 94-95
9. Ibid., p. 95
10. Blye Howe, Mary. Sitting with Sufis: A Christian Experience of Learning Sufism. Paraclete Press, 2005, p. 62.
11. Nolan, Albert. Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom. Orbis, 2006, p. 72.
12. Ibid., pp. 75-76.
13. Webster, Jason. "Sufism: "A Natural Antidote to Fanaticism," The Guardian, October 23, 2014.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Sufi Way
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Doris Lessing on the Challenge to Go Beyond Ideological Slogans
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Hazrat Inayat Khan
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• "Joined at the Heart": Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism

Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way

A year ago today acclaimed author Doris Lessing died at the age of 94.

I remember and celebrate Doris Lessing today by sharing excerpts from "In the World, Not of It," one of her many writings on the Sufi Way. It's an essay I find particularly helpful, and one that was first published in the 1974 book A Small Personal Voice.

That East must ever be East and West must be West is not a belief which is subscribed to by Sufis, who claim that Sufism, in its reality, not necessarily under the name, is continuously in operation in every culture. Sometimes invisible, it is at times offered as openly as goods in a supermarket. When this happens, it is is expected by them that there will be hostility from . . . authoritarian bodies.

During well over 1,000 years of connected literary and psychological tradition, embracing Spain, North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, Sufis have almost invariably clashed with narrow thinkers. . . . Some past patterns are unfamiliar to us; others can still be instructive, for in one form or another they repeat themselves.

Hallaj was dismembered in Baghdad [in 922 CE] for blasphemy. . . . Suhrawardi was killed in 1191, the charge including "atheism, heresy, and believing in ancient philosophers." Ibn El Arabi of Spain was hauled before an inquisition of scholars in the twelfth century, for immodesty in pretending that love poetry could be spiritual, when it was pornographic. Sarmad was executed in India in 1563 for exposing his body; he was alleged to be a Jew or of Jewish origin. Jalaluddin Rumi was accused of publishing trivial folktales in the guise of spiritual writings.

. . . The charges are always the same. The academic scholars persecute, claim apostasy, ignorance, dubious parentage, desire for power over the people, danger to public order, self-advertisement and the circulation of spurious, superficial, or irresponsible literature. But in spite of these accusations, in spite of persecution often followed by judicial murder, the Sufi teachers subsequently became major spiritual authorities to the Islamic world. Most of these Sufis were literary men, and all were marked by their inability to accept the dogmas of their current "establishments." Once safely dead, they could be unofficially canonised, but during their lifetimes many suffered grievously.

But perhaps this treatment was not surprising: people persecute or ignore what they do not understand. And there was something particularly provoking about the Sufis. What, for instance, could a medieval theologian make of a man who called himself a mystic, was interested in [humanity's] evolution to a higher level, was associated with scientific work?

it is against this sort of historical background that it can be useful to view Sufi literature, which exists on many levels, from simple entertainment to truths that "lie under the poet's tongue." Codes and the cryptic had their practical, as well as their spiritual uses.

. . . Sufism believes itself to be the substance of that current which can develop [a person] to a higher state in [his/her] evolution. It is not contemptuous of the world. "Be in the world, but not of it," is the aim.

But the inability to believe in the combination of the mystic and the practical is not only of our time.

Roger Bacon, the Franciscan monk, lectured at Oxford from Sufi books in the thirteenth century: it was for his recommendation of Sufi practices that he got into trouble with his religious authorities. Lully of Majorca praised Sufi methodologies, was "a devotee of Arabian mysticism" (Professor E, W. F. Tomlin). Today he finds a place in scientific literature as the inventor of a digital computer. Rumi, poet and mystic, stressed a theory of evolution eight hundred years before Darwin. Shabistari, a thirteenth-century Persian Sufi, writes of the mystic way while emphasising the unbelievable power which could be released from the atom. Al Ghazali wrote of the collective unconscious in relation to medical and psychological techniques. Hujwiri of India, at the time of the Norman Conquest of England, was writing (in a book about Sufi saints) that time and space are identical. Jar Sadiq and Jabir (Geber), the fathers of Western chemistry, were Sufis. Baba Farid had commercial interests and Rumi had to defend him for it – as probably would have to be done today.

For claiming that human enlightenment must be achieved by working with the material world, innumerable Sufis were isolated from potential well-wishers, because of the inculcated thought that they must be superficial if they lived ordinary lives and were concerned with the practical welfare of [humanity]. It is to be hoped that this ancient bias will not be strong enough to keep people's minds closed against what Sufism is offering now.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• My Travels with Doris
• The Sufi Way
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• Sufism: The Call to Awaken
• Doris Lessing Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature
• Doris Lessing and the Challenge to Go Beyond Ideological Slogans
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• Remembering Doris Lessing, 1919-2013

Remembering Doris Lessing, 1919-2013

It might be said of Doris Lessing, as Walt Whitman boasted of himself: I am vast, I contain multitudes. For many, Lessing was a revolutionary feminist voice in 20th-century literature – though she resisted such categorization, quite vehemently. For many others, Lessing was a 'space fiction' prophet, using the devices and idioms of the fantastic to address human issues of evolution and the environment. And for other readers, Lessing was a writer willing to explore 'interior worlds,' the mysterious life of the spiritual self.

– Joyce Carol Oates

Quoted in Maev Kennedy's article "Doris Lessing Dies Aged 94"
The Guardian
November 17, 2013

Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational.

– Nicholas Pearson
Quoted in Danica Kirka's article "Legendary Author Doris Lessing Dead at 94"
Associated Press via Huffington Post
November 17, 2013

If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges.

She was political in the most basic sense, recognizing the manifestations of power in its many forms. She was spiritual as well, exploring the limits and pitfalls that came with being human, especially after she became an adherent of Sufism. As a writer she was inventive and brave, branching out into science fiction in her Canopus In Argos series at a time when it was a dodgy thing for a "mainline" novelist to do. She was also very down-to-earth, having famously remarked "Oh Christ!" when informed in 2007 that she had won the Nobel prize. She was only the eleventh woman to do so, and never expected it; a lack of expectation that was in itself a kind of artistic freedom, for if you don't think of yourself as an august personage, you don't have to behave yourself. You can still kick up your heels and push the limits, and that was what interested Doris Lessing, always.

– Margaret Atwood

Excerpted from "Doris Lessing was a Model
for Every Writer Coming from the Back of Beyond"
The Guardian
November 17, 2013

Bids for popularity were not Doris Lessing’s thing. Of course, in many ways that made her more appealing. You might call her misunderstood, or reappropriated, or simply taken to heart — in any case she was popular in ways she never meant to be. Take her best known work, The Golden Notebook, which Margaret Drabble described as “a novel of shocking power and blistering honesty”. Its most striking formal aspect — the several notebooks of its make-up — and attendant suggestion that writers (or all human beings) are divided selves, was largely ignored in favour of its much more controversially intimate aspect. In a later preface to the book, Lessing wrote that it had been “instantly belittled as being about the sex war, or was claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war”.

Well, yes – though it wasn’t belittling. Lessing wrote about women’s ambivalence about motherhood and sex and work in a way that was simultaneously shocking and influential. If she rejected the feminist label it was perhaps because she had no need for it. If others gave it to her it was perhaps because they needed her. It’s often said that what we think of as the Fifties and Sixties are more cultural concepts than chronological ones, and that the Sixties as we now think of them didn’t begin until well into that decade.

The Golden Notebook, which was published in 1962 — in other words, the Fifties — was not only ahead of its time but a blueprint for women in times to come. As Lessing herself put it, it was written “as though the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movements already existed”.

Lessing was able to do a great deal for women without subscribing to feminism; she did it with her life, and with (not just within) her writing.

– Gaby Wood
Excerpted from "Doris Lessing: A Woman Ahead of Her Time"
The Telegraph
November 17, 2013

Doris Lessing was an intellectual giant. Of this I am sure because what I really admired about her was her no-holds-barred honesty. She didn’t care about glamor or recognition. She seemed to care about articulating the hidden realities of our lives, the intuited but unspoken truths.

– Ellen Rocco
Excerpted from "Doris Lessing and Me"
Readers and Writers Book Club
November 18, 2013

I will remember Doris Lessing as a great person and a great writer. . . . She wrote about everything [and] this was the great thing about her. . . . She was very curious about everything that happened . . . [and] was not afraid about what people would say. She was not that interested in the reception of her novels; she didn't write them to please or to make a lot of money. She wrote with a great integrity and also with a great kind of morality. [Her novels] were almost parables. [Her greatest achievement] was writing so many books for so long and maintaining her interest and her concern for humanity, her sense of the sweep of history, and her ability to place human beings in it. She was just the most remarkable writer and we won't see her like again.

– Fay Weldon
Quoted in the BBC News story "Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning Author,
Dies Aged 94"
November 17, 2013

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
My Travels with Doris
In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature
Doris Lessing Among The Guardian's "Top 100 Women".
The Sufi Way
Doris Lessing on the Challenge to Go Beyond Ideological Slogans
As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible

Related Off-site Links:
Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning Author, Dies Aged 94 – Nick Higham (BBC News, November 17, 2013).
Doris Lessing, Author Who Swept Aside Convention, is Dead at 94 – Helen T. Verongos (New York Times, November 17, 2013).
Doris Lessing Reveled in Her Status As a Contrarian – David L. Ulin (Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2013).
"Doris Lessing Helped Change the Way Women are Perceived, and Perceive Themselves" – Lisa Allardice (The Guardian, November 17, 2013).
How Writer Doris Lessing Didn't Want to Be Remembered – Vicki Barker (National Public Radio, November 17, 2013).
Doris Lessing: Her Last Telegraph Interview – April 2008 – Nigil Farndale (The Telegraph, November 17, 2013).
Doris Lessing: The Sufi Connection – Müge Galin (Open Democracy, October 12 2007 and reprinted November 17, 2013).
Doris Lessing: In Her Own Words – Sameer Rahim (The Telegraph, November 17, 2013).
Doris Lessing: A Retrospective

Image: John Downing.