​Interspiritual Meditations

The first in a series of interspiritual meditation experiences. Enjoy!

Day 1/7

We recently returned from a beautiful experience at the Spiritual Directors International Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.  The final plenary session involved interspiritual readings from seven religious/spiritual traditions.  

A bell was rung, a practitioner of the tradition read the excerpt, and the bell was rung again.  

We want to share the experience with you during the next week – daily we will post one of the sacred readings. You may want to practice passage meditation, lectio divina, or slow readings of the texts. You may want to have a bell or chime beside you as you read.

(As much as possible, we have tried to stay true to the translations read, and we may have taken liberties when the exact source was unknown.)

Sufi Meditation
1. O doves that haunt the arák and bán trees, have pity! Do not double my woes by your lamentation!
2. Have pity! Do not reveal, by wailing and weeping, my hidden desires and my secret sorrows!
3. I respond to her, at eve and morn, with the plaintive cry of a longing man and the moan of an impassioned lover.
4. The spirits faced one another in the thicket of ghaḍá trees and bent their branches towards me, and it (the bending) annihilated me;
5. And they brought me divers sorts of tormenting desire and passion and untried affliction.
6. Who will give me sure promise of Jam‘ and al-Muḥaṣṣab of Miná? Who of Dhát al-Athl? Who of Na‘mán?
7. They encompass my heart moment after moment, for the sake of love and anguish, and kiss my pillars,
8. Even as the best of humankind encompassed the Ka‘ba, which the evidence of Reason proclaims to be imperfect,
9. And kissed stones therein, although he was a Náṭiq (prophet). And what is the rank of the Temple in comparison with the dignity of Humanity?
10. How often did they vow and swear that they would not change, but one dyed with henna does not keep oaths.
11. And one of the most wonderful things is a veiled gazelle, who points with red finger-tip and winks with eyelids,
12. A gazelle whose pasture is between the breast-bones and the bowels. O marvel! a garden amidst fires!
13. My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
14. And a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka‘ba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran.
15. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith.

-The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, by Ibn al-Arabi, tr. Reynold A. Nicholson