10 June 2020
Today is the day that my first spiritual master, Sufi Murshid James S.B. MacKie, finished his work on earth in 2001. It is for me a Mahāsamādhi day, in the vocabulary of our Hindu brothers and sisters. I knew him in the body for only seven months, but a whole year before that, he came to me in dreams that were more than common dreams to reveal our past connection and my destiny this life to join him and his Sufi companions who are trying with all their hearts to support Meher Baba’s work in America. Like the rest of these sufi members, Murshid Jim’s influence in my life is unspeakable. I don’t know how to describe what he was to me and what he did for me. This love bond motivates me still as I try to express myself, my True Self, failing mostly, coming an errant mostly, implicitly biased mostly by my privileged place on this blessed plot of God’s New Creation. He is my St. George, my True Self who revealed what it is to be a real self in this world, who slew all the dragons in his way (including me) with the indescribable timbre of his voice, in the thunder and lightning of his embrace, in the warmth of his sweet, rolling laugh. His love-work was like this for every creature he met, no matter its form. To him, all creatures were never things, but living, breathing, pulsating, and vulnerable flowers of divine consciousness, calling out for their Mama, the Sun behind the sun. And he answered this call. He was a Real Mother who breathed with them; really breathed. This was true in his experience of a sidewalk and a ballet slipper, of a pearl and a cigarette butt, of a kitty cat and galloping horse, of those he loved and called “children of adversity,” the children who had to make a way out of no way, of the wealthy and pretty who suffocate in ways not seen, and the list just goes on into planes of consciousness that I have no business.
His presence guided my sculpture work and today guides my scholarship. It guides my heart as we move together through this moment of––PLEASE GOD!––waking up to racial injustice that Black Lives Matter, waking up to all of us helping all of us. I may have a PhD, an MFA, an MA, a BFA, and BA, but I have no illusions that such surfeit of letters means a Goddamn thing. I am a student of a real Sufi, so I know the value of the heart compared to the head, of empathy compared to logic, no matter how much it quotes Martin and Malcolm, Gandhi and Vivekananda to avoid the truth and the love required of Truth. We whites tend to bring out the quotations about universal love, about seeing the content of people’s character and not the color of people’s skin when we don’t want to face our attachment to the very whiteness system that keeps our black sisters and brothers from sharing in the love. I am the student of a real Sufi, so I would not dishonor what Martin and Malcolm, Gandhi and Vivekananda worked so hard to achieve and what they worked so hard to destroy: this very logic, which is no logic at all. It is the logic of guilty bystanders who refuse to conjecture like Thomas Merton, turning away from a knee on a neck.
As a student, part of my own homework has been to spend time watching the videos of worship and heartbreak and praise and celebration during the memorial and funeral services for George Floyd, whose life was a real sacrifice for humanity, as are all the deaths of black bodies under the knee of white privilege. I have been drawn to do this because I recently buried my father and so the blunt honesty of death still rings in my ears, still stings in my heart and I want to stay with what Sri Aurobindo called “a dark intruding god, /The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain.” To make pain my meditation, and while crying and being amazed at how grief is done and worship of God is expressed by this exceptional culture of human beings, to ask the hard questions about how the history of racism in America relates to my work in America for Meher Baba as a perceived white, cisgendered, heterosexual male. How might I express myself in my art, in my scholarship, in my walking through space on this land mass, destined to be what it is not yet, definitely not yet? Murshid Jim was born here and grew up here, and raised a family here, had a career as a psychologist and professor here, and became a spiritual teacher here, so I have some limited perspective about this. That here in DC, when we, who swim in the waters of white privilege are outraged by the looting of Georgetown while George Floyd can’t breathe, there was a St. George that hears the cry of “Mama!” and pleads with his students to do the same. Out of the darkness that wants to pull me backwards, I follow his pure light that still burns in my heart.
Murshid knew that growth on this planet was and is a privilege. The process is so hard, requiring the kind of courage and resilience that only a diamond can know, once a piece of carbon under pressure and heat for millions of years. He would speak about it, and often he could not complete the thought for the tears. He knew that what was unpopular for the privileged was balm for those struggling with adversity. He said in all his dealings with people of all walks of life, he learned that “adversity is the the mother of courage, the giver of strength and the crucible of understanding. God’s voice can be heard in the utterance of the tortured; His strong hand is felt in life’s cruelest experiences; His imagination designs and holds situations so cleverly worked out that there is no escaping them. If any human being prays for growth, all of his qualities will be strengthened and continuously tested by adversity until he, himself, recognizes these events as divinely inspired, as designed by God, and as a gift of special grace.” When I watch the funeral of George Floyd, I watch and I listen to these beautiful people under the tuition of “a dark intruding god, /The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain,” and I hear them praising God, thanking God, invoking God, loving God, crying “GOD!” and my heart breaks into a million pieces! They are Murshid’s real students and why their lives matter now more than ever. They are our gurus and we their students. They are the one’s who are placing their feet on the soil of this land and walking a New Being into existence. And I genuinely bow down to their love for God. I worship them. I truly do. They are God’s diamonds without which, there is no reason to hope that we will ever have a United States of America.