I have lived in Texas all my life, all over the state, though primarily in rural or suburban areas. I was raised a charismatic Baptist; there weren’t any holy rollers but, short of that, it was awfully close sometimes. I was always pretty faithful, a good kid; helped out at church a lot, was in the choir. I got baptized when I was about 13, and while I can’t honestly say for sure that was when it began, I can say that I don’t recall it occurring before then either, but I would find myself in the presence of God. You know, just out doing things. Maybe two or three times a month. The primary problem that I had at the time was that His presence really didn’t resemble what I had been taught to expect, nor were the implications that seemed to arise by the “character” of what I perceived as God.
It was like fire, really, not hot but like some sort of unseeable and relentless brilliancy, and my reaction to it, on a physical and spiritual level, was an overwhelming and almost maddening desire, and that desire seemed to be reflected back— though in an even more overpowering essential form; it was nearly unbearable— from the Presence: a Love as opposed to the treacly “love of God” one finds espoused to on crochet in kitchens all across the US. I had grown up under the impression that God loved us basically like a father loves his autistic son or a master loves his dog; this was nothing like that. It wasn’t like anything I was familiar with. It put me, also, at a loss as to what to do about it.
It, I’m sure, begs (at least) a couple of questions. How did I know it was God? I mean, it could have been a delusion, right? The mental institutions are full of people who “see” God. I could say that—and trust me, this is something I have myself looked into— in the cases of “divine” delusions, more often than not, that delusion is telling them to do something. This wasn’t telling me to do anything. It was just… manifesting… itself. The alternate (and honest) answer to that question, though, is easy: I did not and do not know save for my faith that it is so. What other possible answer could I have? Don’t think that simply because I know this is God now that there were not times in my life where I didn’t think it could have been something else, anything else. Quite the contrary, and no more reason did I need than the next question this raises: what did I do to deserve this? Honestly, I cannot for the life of me think of anything that I might (or could) have done to have brought this upon me. It’s so difficult to express just how— astoundingly powerful (the fact that I sat here for three minutes trying to come up with something and that is the best I could do certainly points to the problem of expression)— this was; I cannot really imagine what I could have possibly done to justify it. I cannot imagine how I could have ever deserved this. But. There we are.
But because this was so much in variance with the depictions of God in, well, just nearly any religion you can name, I didn’t know what to do. It alienated me from the religions around me and so I went looking around to see if maybe I could come to some sort of grips with how I needed to address this. I read what I could find about nearly every religion or spiritual group I could find. This was, for me, not really such a trial— I have always wanted to know. Not just what something is, but down in the root of everything what those things mean. I was getting a world class tour of the landscape. But, except maybe a little piece of something here or there, I wasn’t making much progress as far addressing the particular nature of this Presence.
It was somewhere around 1993, I think: I was living in Tyler, and I had heard there was going to be an exhibit of Jain religious sculpture at the Kimball Art Museum in Ft. Worth. At the time, I didn’t have a car, since I was living and working in the city. I decided I’d take an extra day off from work and take the bus to Ft. Worth.
I remember on the ride to Dallas, feeling sort of rarified. I don’t really know what to call it other than that. It was like being high on something except my mind and my eyes were astoundingly sharp, like my self would have drifted away if it wasn’t for the iron talon of the mind. That was all, though, that I seem to recall unusual before I got to the main terminal in downtown Dallas where I was going to have to wait a couple of hours before connecting to Ft. Worth.
Now I have been laid over there on more than one occasion and I have also been in that part of town on other business. I knew that the best way to kill an hour or two in that part of downtown (for me) was to go to the little park behind the Federal Building, said park situated right across the street from the beautiful old Adolphus Hotel (one of the few old buildings left in downtown Dallas.) It was usually virtually empty except at noon. I knew every step up Commerce Street to the park: the big vents on the side of Federal Building that made the seams in the black marble weep in the summertime, the vending shops small and sepulchral beneath the lee of the east wall of the building; greencopper gargoyle heads leering from above the balconies of the Adolphus across the street. I left the bus station and stepped across the street to the big parking lot there and what I saw simply left me awestruck. I kept walking as I went along, crossed the lot and into the rising buildings there on Commerce. Like I said, I had been here before.
We don’t simply process sensory information. We take that information and we induce substance into the perceptual world that is not real. How much we bend that information by simple association: you like this building; you don’t like that one; this one reminds you of another building from a long time ago. Figures and objects stand out from one another or fade back into near oblivion by our association alone. We cannot trust the veracity of anything we perceive because it is laden with association that makes us blind to some things and see too well the others. This was something that was made very, very apparent to me because I found myself walking in a world without association, even though I knew the way. I kept walking to where I was walking to, but every building, every past association, every abstract association was stripped utterly bare from me.
I think it was about then that I noticed the shadows thrown from the buildings. It was about two in the afternoon, long enough past noon in the summer for those shadows to have deepened and lengthened at angles beside the structures that cast them. What I saw was them pale and almost nonexistent, nothing more than a vague frame where the solid shadow would be. What I also saw was something else, something like a shadow that emerged cast from another angle and from building after building, and longer, more intense than the other framed shadows were. I wandered out at some point, out to the parking lot again, following the shadows and the “shadows” both cast at oblique angles of each other from parking meter after parking meter, and then I turned around and I saw the buildings again and I realized they were somehow without substance.
It’s hard to explain. They almost looked like figures come and gone in a multiple exposure photograph, layered upon one another translucent. Some of those buildings appeared more solid than the others, the older those buildings were, but the translucency was a matter of degree only. Only the Trinity River valley the city sits in seemed solid, and I had some strange idea that if I looked hard enough, even its substance could be called into question. It was then that I recognized that what rendered the strange shadows and the buildings (the world?) translucent and without substance was an intense white cast of light that I could see, come from some source I could not, and I remember hearing in my mind something (as if I had known this all along) that I could not look at the source of that light or it would destroy me: everything that was or is or will be was existent, at this very moment, in that light. Creation was constant and instantaneous, generative and caustic at the same time, and it existed solely in that light.
Since I had gotten off the bus, really, that rarefied sensation and that glittering mental clarity had just intensified every second this was going on. Everything that had happened was so… astounding… and yet it never seemed alien to me; it seemed entirely natural. Like seeing the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls: it is breathtaking, maybe even awe-inspiring, but it never seems unnatural. This was the same thing. At the time, I suppose the thing that most struck me about the light was how utterly… mechanical… it seemed to be. It existed in and of itself. Its form was its function. That was all that it was.
Now about this time, I felt the presence of God again. I remember that, unlike most of the times I have experienced this, this time the character had changed somewhat. He appeared to be rather bemused at my reaction to what I had seen.
A friend of mine and I were discussing something peculiar that happened to him during his devotional, and I told him this story to make a point. I think God is more than willing to give us what we want, what we think we want. I mean, like I said: I’ve always wanted to know, always wanted to understand what things meant at the root of everything. Here God was showing me what I wanted to know: this was, after you had reduced everything that could possibly be reduced, the root of everything: an appliance. I could almost hear His voice in my head: “Is this not what you wanted? You can go on now. You can go away satisfied…” I think that would have been exactly what I could have done, right then, gone away satisfied, and yet the very nature of Him, manifest as He was to me and in such a direct relation to this awesome… thing…. made it impossible for me to ever be satisfied with anything save Himself. That was the entire point. You can have whatever you want, or God can have what He wants, which is everything, and if you find that a difficult decision to make, then He already has His answer.
______
I don’t remember getting on the bus. A vague recollection of the airconditioned cabin and the smear of cars passed in the streets, one seamless line of them. Being stuck in traffic. It was later than usual when I got to Ft. Worth and I wandered out of the station filled with this sort of amiable idiocy, like someone had hit me on the head with a hammer. No doubt, Someone had. Downtown Ft. Worth was virtually empty in those days after people got off work and I recall seeing cars parked up the street from the Flatiron Building all of them with quarter-sized rustspots covering the hoods, the doors. I thought, with an agreeable confusion: “Where am I now? Beirut?” The spots did look like holes from machinegun fire. Somewhere in my head I could hear—very distant— “Hail storm” and I did recall that there had been a bad hail storm some days before but this seemed so unconnected to me at that moment that if I had suddenly found myself in Beirut or on the moon for that matter, it would have been the same to me as the reality of walking through the streets of Ft. Worth at dusk.
I walked for hours. I remember I was supposed to be looking for a motel to stay at, but I didn’t seem to be making much progress in that area. I was just walking. The world looked improbable. And all the while in my head over and over again like a nursery rhyme, some other, just as shocked (if not unmanned) voice was singing:
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone…
At some point I remember thinking to myself that I really should sit down. I had walked for miles before this came to me and, once I did, I could see the point. It had been in the high nineties that day, and still humid enough the bricks on the street rippled and steamed when the dusk came on. I was carrying a heavy backpack for my stay, and I had traveled in this long and aimless path uphill from the River. When I stopped, I was sopping wet with sweat. I sat down on the low stone wall next to the Kimball Art Museum and looked down Camp Bowie in the dark, sloped gradual to downtown around the Trinity and it glowed from within like holothurians in the deep. I thought I was going to start weeping.
God knows what I looked like to my friend when he came and got me after I finally remembered to call him. He never said, but I don’t think he looked at me the same way after that.
I don’t think I ever quite understood the word “sanctified” until that moment. I had been sanctified. I passed the weekend in a state of quiet, like a monk in a cloister. No matter where I was. In the crowd looking at the redundant, repetitious ascension of man carved in the Jain sculpture or at a movie theater or absolutely by myself in the room my friend let me stay in that weekend, I was utterly silent inside. My mind hung above my self completely still, like a curious animal trying to discern just what it was looking at. I had been sanctified. But I also knew that there was, as there always is, a price that would have to be paid for this. Up to that point, though, I can’t really say I might have been willing to pay it. Now I was left looking for what it was.
______
I imagine this sounds sort of strange that, after all of this, I still was not any closer to knowing what I needed to do. I suppose that was the most maddening part of the whole affair, that no matter how much changed— and I had, most assuredly, changed after that encounter— there is was still no way made known to me.
I guess it was not more than a year after this that I went to the book store. I had been reading about the ancient Greeks and I kept running across references to the Persians. It occurred to me that I didn’t know a thing in the world about them. I decided that the next time I was at the book store, I would see if I couldn’t find something. I didn’t find anything in the history section, but I did find a book of poems by Jelaluddin Rumi, who was referred to on the dust jacket as “Persia’s most revered poet;” even though Rumi himself was not from Persia, as I later found out, and there was absolutely nothing about the Persians nor their culture to be found anywhere in it, I thought I’d take it on home anyway, for some reason, and give it a shot.
My first thought I had after reading a poem or two was: “Oh! These are the guys.” The Sufis at some point had taken a liking to Arabic ghazals (love poetry) and had (as is their wont) turned them into poetry that reflected instead their deep (and overwhelming) spiritual love for God (and, inadvertently— or maybe advertently— prompted the Romantic movement in Middle Ages Europe when troubadours from Andalusia spread out into Christian lands singing that very poetry . Chivalry, apparently, also stems from Sufi influence, coming from the adab, a code of manners the Sufis practiced at the time); the Sufis are the Lovers of God. What Rumi was describing was the same burning Love, the same grasping desire, the same intoxication that I felt from and towards God.
I don’t think I could have been more surprised. I had nearly given up on the idea of ever finding anyone else who experienced the same manifestation of the Divine that I did, and here is this group of obscure Islamic (more often than not) heretics who perceived God the same way. I didn’t know how to take this: was it a slam-dunk or a big foul out? I mean, to my largely still rational and no doubt deeply Scottish nature, this was a cult. It really didn’t matter that they had been in business since before Islam began, nor that being considered heretics to Islam was, to me, a meaningless measurement: this still stank of a cult. Still, the more I read of Rumi’s poetry and parables from the Mathnawi (including one utterly hilarious and utterly filthy story about a woman who catches her servant having sex with a donkey,) the more I saw that I found myself more in agreement with him than I did anyone else I had run across. I decided to take the middle road: let’s see what I can learn from these guys and integrate it into my beliefs if they fit.
Thus began my education in the distinction between those who study Sufism (as I was now doing) and those who practice it. There is a wealth of Sufi literature, covering centuries. Most of it has not been translated, but there is still enough to start an expedition into What It All Means. Throughout my study of it, I kept coming upon seriously important things, but it was so often buried in traditional Islamic and in some cases, Zoroastriac (Mazdaism) terminology that I found myself both alarmed and perplexed. I wasn’t a Muslim. I certainly wasn’t a Zoroastrian. I found myself stepping away from what I was reading because this was going somewhere, it seemed to me, I did not want to go. I also knew that I understood so little of both of these traditions that even if I was to go any further, I would have to study both enough to get what it was they were talking about. And so often I came up wondering “Just what does this have to do with God?” I mean, I am more than willing to work off the assumption that I just don’t understand things well enough, but that was still dismaying how little this seemed to have to do with Him.
“You do realize that this is all metaphorical, don’t you?” Sheikh Kashani asked me when I happened to bring up some obscure question regarding some concept or another I had run across during my reading. The answer to his question, when he asked me, was Yes, but it took me some time to realize that. I’m not even sure when I did come to that conclusion. The problem that Sufis throughout history have come up on (and I think I have illustrated it as best I can in how poorly language is suited to the task) is that they were trying to describe the Indescribable. These experiences and presences they find themselves among are essential and so multifaceted that there is simply no way to describe them without resorting to metaphor (and the fact that the terminology, then as now, had become so degraded certainly didn’t help matters much. God, for them, would best be described as the Greek theós, the root of the Latin dios— Fr. dieu— and from whence comes “theology,” but theós has a predicative function and refers to something that happens “….is God.”) Because of this, they used the raw imagery of traditional Islam because they lived in a world of traditional Islam (and, no doubt, to keep from being considered heretics, which they ended being branded anyway.) There is a Zoroastrian current to the language because Persia at that time still used Zoroastrian imagery, and because it was so much more articulated a system of Presences that it was useful. Ultimately, they were heretics to everyone but God.
Sometime in 1998 I decided that, as far “integrating” things into my beliefs, I was still not addressing a fundamental question, which was: what should I do? I decided I would look into maybe finding an order to join (the closest comparison to a Sufi order in the West is a monastic order, though one of the central points in the practice of Sufism is that one must be “in the world,” since it is easy to be, as they say, “a holy man on a mountain” and because of this, while some of those orders offer some place that initiates can stay to recruit themselves, removing oneself from the world— monasticism— is frowned upon, to say the least.) Sufism is not monolithic, and one order can vary greatly on both their practices and their orthodoxy towards Islam. That, certainly, made the task difficult, but also I was aware that, while not having attained quite the cult-popularity of Buddhism, Sufism had gained enough recognition to attract goony Americans (hippies) and that there was good chance that virtually every order I could find that was “lax” on the orthodoxy question was a festering pit of New Ageism. So, I decided that I would just go down a list and use as a yardstick that any order I looked at would not a) practice the sema (most famously, the Dance of the Whirling Dervishes,) b) practice the vocal zikr (which is a word or phrase given to the initiate privately to repeat in their meditation, also privately. At gatherings, there is also the vocal zikr which is a phrase uttered aloud—usually la illaha il Allah— and, sometimes very elaborately, during public meditation,) c) advocate wearing anything to distinguish themselves from the rest of the populace in public nor at gatherings. I figured that weeding out those aspects of the practice would leave me with an order that had nothing in the world to offer the hippies.
The fact that I actually came across an order that fit that particular bill, having gone through a fair amount of orders and having looked at still more after the fact, is an act of God in itself. I found the Nimatullahi Order, which had split from the original Order over the question of the universality of Sufism as a practice (a point on which nearly all orders agree, “universality” still supposedly only applies so long as you are a Muslim.)
I won’t go into too much more detail in this, other than to say that eventually I called one of the meetinghouses (khaniqahi) and talked to someone there. I was awfully impressed with them. The entire time I was talking to them on the phone, I remember thinking there was something unusual about them, and then I realized that they were absolutely sincere. No doubt this says a great deal about the world we live in, hm? This was one of the base characteristics I found in Sufis, their complete sincerity, which could become a little maddening (to me and for themselves, I would imagine) when I would ask what I thought an innocent question simply out of curiosity, not understanding that there are things they are not supposed to talk about (not because it’s some sort of secret, but that they don’t want people doing something stupid) and the Sufi I asked would find themselves between the rock of their not wanting anyone to get hurt and the hard place of their sincerity and virtual inability to lie. It made for some interesting conversations.
The problem I had with the Nimatullahi Order was they only had meetinghouses here and there and nowhere near me, and that, if I was going to be initiated, I would either have to do so in Washington DC or happen to catch Sheikh Kashani at one of the closer khaniqahi. As luck (sure, luck) would have it, at some point my aunt— just out of the clear blue sky— asked me if I wanted to go to DC with her when she went to take her Appraisal Exam. I made arrangements to be initiated and then off I went.
Now, the funny thing about all this is that while I had talked (though never seen) three or four people from the Order, one of whom was Sheikh Kashani himself, I was still not convinced that when I got there I would not find the khaniqah was nothing but a Den of Slack, nothing but burned out freaks and New Agers. So it was with more than a little trepidation that I went to meet them before the day of my initiation. I could not have been more wrong. They were exactly who they said they were. I was deeply humbled and deeply honored to be among them. All of them were very intelligent, very well spoken, very committed to their path. I have never felt so at home anywhere, amongst these people I had never so much as met before. I went to get initiated, but I was not prepared at that point to do so, and now that is impossible— neither circumstance having anything the world to do with them and everything to do with me. I have no regrets about any of it.
The sheikh did teach me how to begin the path of purification, and since everything else in the practice of Sufism is built off of that very simple action, I was able for three years to come a very long way. The first task in Sufism is to clear a place for the manifested God; to purify yourself, because like a current of electricity run through a wire, if those electrons hit an impurity in the composition of the wire they can go out of control. Such is the problem with our impurity relative to unity with the manifested God. You are to become an empty place for Him to reside. The simply overwhelming encounters one has with Him in this process are unrelatable in words, and they are transformative in every encounter. I cannot believe how much I have lost in them: my fear, so many of my desires. I can only testify to what I know, and like I have said over and over again: I know my Lord.
