Spirituality ...
The Conference of the Birds, and other journeys through Hell: I’m still plowing my way thru Reza Aslan’s “No God But God”, and I just finished the chapter on the Sufis. Ah yes, the Sufis, that interesting little offshoot of Islam that we “enlightened yet spiritual” westerners can sympathize and be comfortable with (unlike the rest of the Quranic tradition). There are plenty of books on the Sufis to be found in the “spiritual” aisles of Barnes and Noble, Borders and Waldenbooks; liberal Catholics love to quote Sufi wisdom when needing to prove their goodwill for the sons of Mohammed.
And yet, I’ve heard that the Sufi image amidst Euro-American spiritual seekers has been sanitized a bit; despite their many divergences from mainstream Islam, much of Sufi reality in the Moslem world is in fact politically oriented. Also, some of their actual devotional practices and artifacts would not be edifying to an open-minded liberal Protestant or Unitarian, e.g. drawings of bloody men with knives in their throats and eyes. And yet, many of their prayers and sayings have found an audience amidst the Birkenstock crowd.
One of those Sufi popular works is “The Conference of the Birds”. Being a former (albeit not entirely ‘former’) spiritual seeker, I have read a few books and articles about the Sufis. However, I only became aware of “Conference” recently while reading Aslan; oh well, perhaps it’s to be expected that a Moslem author (although not a Sufi himself) would best point out the significant works of an Islamic tradition, however peripatetic.
For those not already familiar with “Conference”, it’s basically the story of a journey, sort of a spiritualized version of “The Wizard of Oz”. In sum, a bunch of birds get together and are led by a leader bird (the “hoopoe”) in search of the great “Simurgh”, the fabled lord of the bird universe. The journey is a long and arduous one; many birds turn back after getting their tailfeathers singed, literally and figuratively. In the end, only 30 birds from the flock that started the trip make it to the land of the Simurgh.
Finally comes the moment for the great Simurgh to appear before the tired, beaten-up group of avian travelers. And to their surprise, the thirty birds see only themselves. The Simurgh turns out to be a mirror (or a reflective lake). The pilgrim birds were disappointed at first, but soon the lightbulb goes on in their little heads; because of all the pain and struggle that they’ve experienced and steadfastly endured in their search, they have been converted into something more. Their desire to find the Simurgh was obviously strong enough to get them through the terrible tests, like what we face in this world; they have found that their desire in itself was the equivalent of what they sought. It’s kind of like in the Oz story, where the lion, scarecrow, tin man and Dorothy finally got what they wanted not because of anything the Wiz himself could do for them, but because of their own steadfast seeking.
There’s an interesting theological metaphor here, i.e. God as a mirror — a mirror of wisdom that we find and behold only as a result of a long, arduous journey of seeking. I’m sure that the mainstream Christian, Jewish and Islamic leaders and teachers would condemn this idea as heresy. It hints that in the end, the steadfast seeker actually becomes God, losing the boundaries of him or herself, and finding all in unification with God. It’s quite a bit different from what we were promised in Sunday School as the reward for a good Christian life. We were told that we would go to Heaven pretty much as we now are, so long as we followed the rules while here on earth. In that Heaven, we would be given the same sort of stuff that makes us happy here in this life, such as soft-serve chocolate ice cream; and we’d be spared from the stuff that makes us miserable. That was the deal. Now and then we might have some sort of interchange with “the boss” (obviously our case would be reviewed in full soon after our souls departed our body), but for the most part we’d plan our days as if we were the guests at an exclusive resort.
The Sufis and their bird friends see something different. Interestingly, they are rejecting the similarly puerile notion of popular Islam, that the good man is rewarded with a bevy of black-eyed virgins on entering Paradise. The Sufis just leave you with you. But also with a “you” that is now so much more, so vastly expanded as to be one with everything. Thus, you still have access to soft-serve ice cream and black-eyed virgins, but the relationship between you and them is now so much different that it would be on earth. They will not matter to you, not in the way they now would.
I myself would like to take the ‘birds’ paradigm one step further. The base-level Christian and Moslem concepts describe a Paradise that is an eternal vacation, with no more work responsibilities. I think it’s exactly the opposite. Once you become part of God, there’s plenty of work to do. There will still be a world in process, a world “not-fully-one-with-God”, the world that we presently know. And I myself think that God is active in it, in ways that we don’t often see, in ways that we can’t usually fathom. (Obviously many of us suspect that God is a slacker or an illusion, because if God were truly active in the universe, there wouldn’t be so much pain and suffering and ugliness and meaninglessness. E.g. astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson and his atheist arguments based on the seeming craziness of conscious life occupying only tiny crevices of a vast, hostile Universe.)
So if we are part of God, we will also be active in this realm somehow. I’ve written before on how impressed I was with George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan In Hell” sequence (within “Man and Superman”). In a nutshell, Don Juan goes to Hell, and discovers that Hell is really what most Christians were taught about Heaven; i.e., a big, never-ending vacation resort. No fires, no pitchforks, no worms, no unpleasantness whatsoever; the devil is indeed a gentleman and a gracious host. Everything and everyone is bright and beautiful there. Just what the Don was seeking during his days on earth.
But something happens to Don Juan while in Hell. Even though everyone else is having a great time, with not a trace of misery or doubt in the joint, the Don starts wondering if this is really it. He takes more and more walks to the netherworld beyond Hell, and finally decides that he wants to leave all the sophisticated beauty and intelligent pleasantries behind, as to get to work in a Heavenly cause. Shaw doesn’t exactly spell out the details of what this Heavenly cause would entail, but he hints that it does involve spreading ultimate good (the “life force”) in the universe.
I’d like to think that Don Juan somehow found the same mirror that the Sufi birds found, despite all the lovely, non-stop distractions of Hell. Once a seeker finds it, they go off to an active involvement in the cause of ultimate goodness — whatever that is (we ‘see it darkly through a glass’ in our present lives, although we know somehow that it exists). Shaw’s “Life Force”: ultimate goodness, ultimate wisdom, ultimate Godness. I think that’s the ultimate goal of the great journey that the Sufis, in their deep spiritual contemplations, would envision as our best option in life. As to those birds who fall aside from the journey, well — as Shaw implies with Don Juan, perhaps it’s never too late, no matter what may happen to us in the awaiting realms beyond the horizons of our current being. The mirror is everywhere, even in the depths of Hell!