Voices of Islam (95 page)

The Muslim in the final stage of prayer with the
tasbih
repeats 99 times, ‘‘There is no god but God’’ (
la ilaha illa Allah
), thereby attesting to the

The Blessed State of Fear
141

absence of anything but God. Neither the vessel full of itself nor the empty vessel filled with True Man survives; both have returned to the One. A painting by Raphael found at the Vatican provides a similar image for the Christian. In this painting it is as if we are before an altar upon which stands a chalice, and above the chalice appears the dove of the Holy Spirit. At the top of the painting is a depiction of God in the company of heavenly person- ages including Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist, the Apostles, and angels. What we may understand from this scene is that after the worshipper has received the sacrament and kneels purified before the altar, his or her soul rises up through the medium of the Holy Spirit and back to God. This is a very powerful rite to experience. Also, it reminds the believer on a weekly or more frequent basis of the method of salvation and outcome that one desires for one’s human life. By performing these rites, one practices death, resurrection, and eternal life, hoping that during the human state one purifies one’s being and in the end will return directly to the Maker.

So just as fear is the blessed beginning, we must never forget its positive nature. Spiritual attainment has frequently been described in the terminology of the alchemical tradition whereby man’s leaden, dull nature is returned to its golden original state. When any substance or entity (even a relationship) undergoes dissolution, it must eventually be recrystallized in a new form. In other words, the new entity has the possibility of being reconstituted in a higher and nobler state. What this means for any of us is that when we experience fear, when things seem to be coming apart, we should instead be joyful and grateful for the possibility of moving upward from our present plateau where we perhaps are too comfortably established.

According to Titus Burckhardt, ‘‘Lead represents the chaotic, ‘heavy,’ and sick condition of metal or of the inward man, while gold—‘congealed light’ and ‘earthly sun’—expresses the perfection of both metallic and human existence.’’ He goes on to explain that the
re
-formation of the soul cannot take place until it is ‘‘freed from all the rigidities and inner contradictions (so that it may) become that plastic substance on which the Sprit or Intellect, coming from on high, can imprint a new ‘form’—a form which does not limit or bind, but on the contrary delivers, because it comes from the Divine Essence
...
. The soul cannot be transmuted without the cooperation of Spirit, and the Spirit illumines the soul only to the extent of its passive prepar- edness and in accordance with its manners.’’
4

Thus, as the purpose of the human state of being is the sanctifi ation of one’s soul, and as one would desire to achieve this before death, I would like to conclude with an extraordinary description of the Saint who no longer fears—although this was the blessed state by which his spiritual life com- menced: ‘‘The Saint hath no fear, because fear is the expectation either of some future calamity or of the eventual loss of some object of desire; whereas the Saint is the ‘son of his time’ (resides in the Eternal Present/Presence); he has no future from which he should fear anything and, as he hath no fear so

142
Voices of the Spirit

he hath no hope since hope is the expectation either of gaining an object of desire or of being relieved from a misfortune, and this belongs to the future; not does he grieve because grief arises from the rigor of time, and how should he feel grief who dwells in the Radiance of Satisfaction and the Garden of Concord.’’
5

NOTES

This chapter first appeared in
Parabola,
fall 1998, 54–57. It is reproduced with slight modifications in this volume with the permission of the editors of
Parabola.

1. Martin Lings,
   Symbol & Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence
   

   (Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1991), 114–115.
   

2. Frithjof Schuon,
   Stations of Wisdom
   (Bloomington, Indiana: Perennial Books, 1980), 147.
   

3. ‘‘Where reverence is, there too is fear.’’ See Plato,
   Euthypho,
   12b.
   

4. Titus Burkhardt,
   Alchemy, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul
   (Louisville, Kentucky: Fons Vitae, 1997), 24, 97, 111.
   

5. A statement attributed to the great Sufi Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910
   CE
   ).
   

14
‌

T
HOMAS
M
ERTON AND A
S
UFI
S
AINT

•

Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore

One of the volumes to be found in Merton’s personal library is titled
A Moslem Saint of the Twentieth Century
by Martin Lings.
1
It is heavily under- lined throughout. Often in the margins, Merton marked material with several bold vertical lines or with asterisks next to the text. As these highlighted passages must represent what Merton felt best elucidated Islamic mysticism, or were ideas he may have agreed with or found to be useful for his own spiritual growth or understanding, a small selection of these are presented here in order to illustrate some of the concepts and ideas to which Merton was attracted. At the same time, it is hoped that this selection will further inform the reader about the nature and depth of Sufism.

Martin Lings, formerly Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts in the British Museum and the British Library, and author of many important works on Islam and Sufi opens this wonderful volume with a chapter ‘‘Seen from Outside,’’ which presents the impressions of Dr. Marcel Carret, who tended the Algerian saint Ahmad al-‘Alawi (1869–1934) in his final years. Dr. Carret’s initial impression of Shaikh al-‘Alawi is as follows:

The fi t thing that struck me was his likeness to the usual representation of Christ. His clothes, so nearly if not exactly the same as those which Jesus must have worn, the fi lawn head-cloth which framed his face, his whole attitude—everything conspired to reinforce the likeness. It occurred to me that such must have been the appearance of Christ when he received his disciples at the time when he was staying with Martha and Mary.

Dr. Carret later recalled:

Fairly often while I was talking quietly with the Shaikh, the Name Allah had come to us from some remote corner of the
zaˆ wiyah,
uttered on one long drawn out vibrant note:

‘‘A
.. .
l
...
la
...
h!’’

144
Voices of the Spirit

It was like a cry of despair, a distraught supplication, and it came from some solitary cell-bound disciple, bent on meditation. The cry was usually repeated several times, and then all was silence once more.

‘‘Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord.’’

‘‘From the end of the earth will I cry unto Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I.’’

These verses from the Psalms came to my mind. The supplication was really just the same, the supreme cry to God of a soul in distress.

I was not wrong, for later, when I asked the Shaikh what was the meaning of the cry which we had just heard, he answered:

‘‘It is a disciple asking God to help him in his meditation.’’ ‘‘May I ask what is the purpose of his meditation?’’

‘‘To achieve self-realization in God.’’

‘‘Do all the disciples succeed in doing this?’’

‘‘No, it is seldom that anyone does. It is only possible for a very few.’’ ‘‘Then what happens to those who do not? Are they not desperate?’’ ‘‘No: they always rise high enough to have at least inward Peace.’’

Inward Peace. That was the point he came back to most often, and there lay, no doubt, the reason for his great influence. For what man does not aspire, in some way or other, to inward Peace?

In the chapter ‘‘The Reality of Sufism,’’ found in ‘‘Part One: The Path and the Order,’’ Merton marked lines to do with spiritual aspiration. For the most part, the passages he noted (indented below) are the exact words of the saint himself. Often Shaikh al-‘Alawi cites passages from the Qur’an, hadith—or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad—and from the writings of many of Islam’s great saints and mystics of previous centuries. Dr. Lings, for the most part ‘‘allows the Sufi
...
to speak for themselves in a series of texts mainly translated from the Arabic.’’

The aspiration ‘‘to let one’s Spirit (that is, as here meant, one’s centre of consciousness) rise above oneself’’ presupposes at the very least some remote awareness of the existence of the Heart, which is the point where the human self ends and the Transcendent Self begins. If the clouds in the night of the soul are so thick as to prevent the moon of the Heart from showing the slightest sign of its presence, there can be no such aspiration. (40)

In a hadith (saying of the Prophet), God states:

‘‘My slave ceaseth not to draw nigh unto Me with devotions of his free will until I love him; and when I love him, I am the Hearing wherewith he heareth, and the Sight wherewith he seeth, and the Hand wherewith he smiteth, and the Foot wherewith on he walketh.’’ (Bukhari) (37)

The Qur’an insists without respite on remembrance of God,
dhikr Allah,
and this insistence holds the place in Islam that is held in Christianity by the first of Christ’s two commandments. It is the Quranic use of the cognitive term

Thomas Merton and a Sufi Saint
145

‘‘remembrance’’ rather than ‘‘love’’ which has, perhaps more than anything else, imposed on Islamic mysticism its special characteristics. (45)

Many passages which interested Merton seemed to validate the aims and nature of monastic life. The fi of many such passages marked by Merton are lines from the early eighth-century saint Hasan al-Basri:

‘‘He that knoweth God loveth Him, and he that knoweth the world abstaineth from it,’’ and the saying of another early Sufi: ‘‘Intimacy (
uns
) with God is finer and sweeter than longing.’’ (46)

From ‘‘The Spiritual Master,’’ there is more on what would have appealed to a monk who made a hermitage in the forest, as did Merton, in the follow- ing paragraphs, which Merton marked, some written by Dr. Lings and some directly quoting Shaikh al-‘Alawi.

One of his motives for taking this step [for adding his own name ‘Alawˆı to distinguish his particular branch of the Darqaˆwˆı tarˆıqah] was that he felt the need to introduce, as part of his method, the practice of
khalwah,
that is, spiritual retreat in the solitude of an isolated cell or small hermitage. There was nothing very drastic in this, for if remembrance of God be the positive or heavenly aspect of all mysticism, its negative or earthly aspect is retreat or drawing away from other than God. The Tradition ‘‘Be in this world as a stranger, or as a passer-by’’ has already been quoted, and one of the most powerful aids to achieving this permanent inward spiritual retreat is bodily withdrawal which, in some form or another, perpetual or temporary, is a feature of almost all contemplative orders. In some Sufi brotherhoods—the Khalwatˆı Tarˆıqah, for example—it was tradition to make retreat in a special hermitage. But in the Shaˆdhilˆı Tarˆıqah and its branches, the spiritual retreat had usually taken the form of withdrawal to the solitudes of nature, after the pattern of the Prophet’s retreats in the cave on Mount Hira, and though inevitably the
khalwah
must have been used on some occasion, to introduce it as a regular methodic practice was something of an innovation for the descendants of Abuˆ ’l-Hasan ash-Shaˆdhilˆı. However, the Shaikh no doubt found this form of retreat more practicable than any other in view of the conditions in which most of his disciples lived. We have already seen that he himself had suffered for want of a defi