Tarikat (17min video)
This is another video that I find touching — I have no idea how accurate/authentic it is, but it feels real. It’s a sufi ritual, apparently filmed in a small gathering in Turkey, and I think it will look a little strange if approached without empathy.
Increasingly I think the Sufi longing, the goal of mystical union with God, while literally impossible, is still at the heart of all religion, as opposed to the “follow the rulebook and your ledger will be positive” approach. Kind of like trying to write down the number π — it can’t be done, but you can get closer and closer.
The website Sifter of Dust is named after a story retold by Baha’u’llah in the Seven Valleys:
One must judge of search by the standard of the Majnún of love. It is related that one day they came upon Majnún sifting the dust, his tears flowing down. They asked, “What doest thou?” He said, “I seek for Laylí.” “Alas for thee!” they cried, “Laylí is of pure spirit, yet thou seekest her in the dust!” He said, “I seek her everywhere; haply somewhere I shall find her.”
Yea, though to the wise it be shameful to seek the Lord of Lords in the dust, yet this betokeneth intense ardour in searching. “Whoso seeketh out a thing and persisteth with zeal shall find it.”
It feels like there’s a progression in religious history (I’m way oversimplifying here) of our approach to God — In the Old Testament, the Israelites as children in need of repeated discipline by Moses; in the New Testament, The idea that God doesn’t just discipline & punish, it’s love and protect, and sacrifice; and in the mystical writings of Bahá’u’lláh such as the Seven Valleys, the metaphor of God as lover. (this was actually the source of the rule that Priests and Nuns can’t marry, they are married to God or to the Church).
It’s not that older Revelations aren’t as mystical, there have been hermits and seekers in every one (I plan to write a short note on a vision of Julian of Norwich), but maybe as our civilization progresses, that mystical strain will be a little more mainstream, diffused in individual consciousness a bit more.