MY LIFE AMONG THE SUFIS
A Sermon by James Ishmael Ford

24 February 2002

Come, come whoever you are,
wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, come.
Come, though you have broken your vow
a thousand times.
Ours is not a caravan of despair,
come,
yet again, come.

Jelaluddin Rumi

So there I was. It was the mid seventies. I had left the monastery and felt I was well and duly done with Zen. But I wasn’t sure what the next step would be. Not by a long shot. I thought about my childhood Christianity, and feeling less burned from that than from my Zen experiences, I visited a number of churches. However, ultimately I couldn’t convince myself that I believed what they believed. And so I continued my quest.

Working in a large used bookstore, as I was at the time, somewhere along the line I met just about every interesting person who lived in the city. As a result often I would be invited to visit one spiritual organization or another to attend a talk or a workshop. I heard theosophists and Gnostics and spiritual types representing nearly all the world’s religious traditions. Thinking back about it I probably liked the pagans the best. They were kind of like the Episcopalians I’d visited, but looser. However, again, I couldn’t convince myself that I believed what they believed, and so continued my quest.

Then someone invited me to a Sufi Dance. I knew what that was. I’d actually met Sufi Sam years before. He was a crazed universalist mystic who lived in San Francisco during my childhood and youth. He was wildly eclectic. For instance, he had been acknowledged as a Zen master by a Korean teacher who had passed through town some years before. And, at the same time he taught classes for the seminary of the Holy Order of Mans, an occult mystical society that would eventually become Eastern Orthodox. Mostly, however, Sam was a disciple of an Indian teacher named Hazrat Inayat Khan, with whom he studied in his youth, and was the touchstone for all his various spiritual adventures.

I thought to myself, what the heck. And my girl friend of the time and I went to the dance. It was a powerful experience. For someone like me, raised a good Baptist, and who had a healthy distrust of the body, dancing was an amazing experience. For me it was astonishing that the body, that my body could move in comfortable rhythms, and that I could feel the sway of deeper connections through those rhythms.

In this practice called Sufi Dancing, or more properly and formerly, the Dances of Universal Peace, one used very simple folk dance patterns that even I could learn. Then attached to them were simple mantras with even more simple melodies. So, for instance, one might take up a simple mantra like "Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free" and the body would almost naturally follow along, being carried toward rather interesting states of mind.

I really took to it. Now, you may notice that mantra I just cited wasn’t particularly Muslim. And indeed Sufi dancing was gloriously indiscriminant in its sources, drawing from Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, you name it, any sources which had a sacred phrase or two that could be put to a tune and danced with. I learned there are a lot of such possible candidates for the Dances.

At the time I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was being packaged as Sufism. They said it was the ancient mystical path associated with Islam in a similar way to Zen’s association with Buddhism. All I knew was going to the dances left me feeling exhilarated and possibly it even opened a door or two for me to look into a wider world of possibility than otherwise would have seemed an option at the time.

It wasn’t until I actually moved up to San Francisco to study in a more formal sense with one of the now late Sufi Sam’s senior disciples, another crazed universalist mystic, a shaikh or spiritual master of the order called Wali Ali Meyer, that I began to sort out what I’d fallen into.

It all turned on Hazrat Inayat Khan. Near as I can tell he was the first Sufi to teach in the west. He arrived in California in 1910 at the invitation of the University of California at Berkeley. However he wasn’t there as a spiritual teacher but rather as a musician. A master of the Vina he shocked and dismayed many of the university’s scholars who had trouble discerning the difference between Indian music and simply having a flat instrument.

But it is as a spiritual teacher that he is primarily remembered today. An initiate of the Chisti school, one of the great Sufi orders, Inayat Khan simply followed the custom of some Indian Sufis who accepted as students pious non-Muslims. So when people came to him and asked to study he initiated them without first requiring they become Muslims. By 1920 this western Sufism, perhaps best called a Universalist or New Age Sufism was organized as the Sufi Order in the West.

Then in 1927 he died unexpectedly of influenza in New Delhi. And without his dynamic personality at the helm the order Inayat Khan established quickly fragmented. While in parts it still exists. Today there are three major branches, although none are orthodox Muslim. One of these was the order established by his San Francisco student Samuel Lewis. It was that community I joined for several important years.

And it was with them I touched, if only lightly, the ways of Islam. As I began to realize this was a heterodox branch of Sufism, I decided to inform myself of what was actually what. The Sufis are in fact the mystical branch of Islam. The poetry of Rumi and the magical tales of the Mulla Nasrudin are each aspects of the Sufi tradition.

In my studies I came to believe Sufism ultimately cannot be separated from its source in Islam, any more than Zen can be separated from Buddhism, or anymore than a tree can live without its roots. Even though I loved the Universalist Sufism of Inayat Khan and Samuel Lewis, and truthfully, learned much within its community, I believe without Islam it is rootless.

And for me the great difficulty was that while I came to respect Islam, I couldn’t believe all they believed. So ultimately I found I needed to continue my quest. But not before I acquired some sense of Islam, the faith of submission to the will of God. And, I want to add; I acquired a genuine respect for this path. This is what I want to address today. But where shall we begin?

When Mohammed, the great prophet and founder of Islam died his followers were dismayed. One of his chief lieutenants, Abu Bakr declared to the weeping crowd, "Why are you crying? Do you worship Mohammed, who is dead? Or God, who lives? I will not spend a great deal of time as many who introduce Islam do by speaking of the prophet, but rather in our few minutes here, I want to address something of the nature of those roots that do indeed nourish a great and powerful spiritual path.

Let’s consider the still living faith of Mohammed, which is Islam. For me the first hint of what it could be like came when I read the Koran, the essential scripture of Islam. The message of the Koran is a call to submission to the love and power of God. Islam means to submit, muslim one who submits.

The path of Islam, the way of submission to God, is predicated submitting to the call of God and embracing what are called the five pillars. They are faith, prayer, charity, fasting and pilgrimage. Faith is faith in the one God, beside whom there is no other.

Salat is prayer, performed five times a day. Here we see the essential nature of the Muslim way, where there is no mediator, but rather each individual through the way of prayer touches God directly. Here the echo of the call can be heard five times a day, reverberating in many hearts across the globe.

"God is most great. God is most great. God is most great. God is most great. I testify that there is no god except God. I testify that there is no god except God. I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God. I testify that Mohammed is the messenger of God. Come to prayer! Come to prayer! Come to success (in this life and the Hereafter)! Come to success! God is most great. God is most great. There is no god except God."

It is a path of practical life. So, at the core is zakat, charity, which also means purification and growth. Generally this means setting aside two and a half percept of one’s capital each year. The pious in fact give as much as they can; preferably this is done in secret. Connected with this intimately is the fast, Ramadan. Ramadan is a lunar month long practice of abstaining from food, drink and sexual relations from first light to sundown. And finally, the fifth pillar is pilgrimage, the hajj, which season we’re currently in, by the bye. It is an obligation for those who are both physically and financially able to go to Mecca.

Islam is a path that does not call one to an orthodoxy but rather to an orthopraxy. That is traditionally, what one thinks is between one’s self and God. What counts in and for community is how one behaves. So the physical practices of prayer and generosity, of fasting and pilgrimage become the expressions of one’s deep interior faith in God.

Now Muslims, at least those of a scholarly turn, have long been interested in Unitarianism. The word alone catches the Muslim imagination. They often look at our historic rejection of the Trinity, and see there the possibility of connections. Of course we’re too wildly liberal, and the very doubt that is central a part of our dynamic faith, is too alien for most Muslims who eventually meet us up close.

Still, they wonder about us, and occasionally have a few comments about us, positive and negative. Of these the most interesting critique I’ve heard came from an Iranian Muslim who wrote that the problem with Unitarians is that we don’t believe in the Virgin Mary.

For those among us who haven’t read the Koran, Mary has a special place of honor in that sacred text. But, devotion to the mother of Jesus isn’t, I think, the point. Rather the heart of the critique seems more that we perhaps do not pay enough attention to the possibility of miracle in our religion.

And that might be one of the first lessons we, you and I, rational Unitarians, might learn from our Muslim sisters and brothers. We, perhaps, do need to open ourselves a little more to the possibilities of miracle, to the chance the world is rather more mysterious than we tend to imagine. Here the hints within that poem of the wondrous Jelaluddin Rumi can pull at us. "Come, come whoever you are, wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, come."

Now Islam had a period of great cultural and scientific flowering. But in the last several centuries it has been in decline and often has been lost in the shadow of secular western culture. Today we see and many suffer from the fractures of a clash between western secularism and Islam. But this sermon is not intended to be a study of that, or of the difficulties in the Middle East. Rather it is about that dream of possibility, it is about that call of the mysterious into our hearts, and what we, you and I, rational liberal westerners might find in that. If we attend to that, we might find one way into healing, for ourselves, and the world.

"Come, come," Rumi sings to us. Where is that place beyond the caravans of despair upon which we so easily find ourselves? It is found, I think, as we remember that we are not the center of the universe, none of us. This is the mysterious pull of our bodies, as we know them, as we really know them. We all die, just as Mohammed did, and we cannot find our root in our individual isolated existence. We need something more to complete ourselves. So, where do we look for that substance?

Islam tells us the good, the eternal; that which some among us choose to call God is where we need to look for harmony and balance and truth. I think about that. Of course what God is is a difficult thing. And Forrest Church warns us God really isn’t God’s name. But if we allow it to stand for the source of our being, perhaps we can find something of genuine value. I use that ancient and terrible word to hint at the moment before the first thought rises in our heads, the mysterious source.

Of course few among us are going to accept a common definition for God. But, I suggest, we can learn much from that particular book, the Koran and to its vision of a loving and powerful God. And we can learn much from the followers of Islam and how they can turn every moment of the day into spiritual practice as one beautiful and true path into the mystery.

I believe if we are willing to engage Islam critically, with eyes and heart all open, we can find something of our own root, of that deepest source which will nourish us, even us. "Come, come," sings the poet and sage. The mystery is great. The mystery is good. This certainly is something we can learn from our Muslim sisters and brothers.

As we surrender our certainties, as we allow ourselves the options of miracle, who knows what hope may birth into the world? Come, come, even if you have broken your vows those thousand times. There is still time. A loving heart is always ready to break, and from that space, is able to become new. This is the ancient wisdom echoed in the Koran, and which eternally calls to us. It still is.

So, there is still possibility. So, here in this moment, there is still miracle. And that God of mystery and miracle is good. That God which births all our hopes and dreams is great. May we all find it, know it, and let it become the root of our lives. For the sake of many, may this be so.

Amen.