To love God in the most practical way is to love our fellow beings. If we feel for others in the same way as we feel for our own dear ones, we love God.
––Meher Baba
“Our Lady of Ferguson” by Mark Doox. See his website here.
I have some preliminary thoughts related to racial justice and my own spiritual community of Sufism Reoriented. It seems appropriate to make this attempt on the upcoming celebration of August 2nd which commemorates the special Franciscan Feast of Universal Pardon. The Perfect Master Francis of Assisi created this feast because he wanted all people to experience the uncompromising inclusion of the Divine at his “spiritual seat” of the Portiuncula chapel. This small sacred place was important for him personally, since there he was finally able to let go of feeling deeply worthless and embrace true humility in union with Christ in all creatures. It is the experience that the jivanmukta (God-realized soul) Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981) described when he said, “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.” Beloved Francis was concerned that since everyone in his world believed that only going to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome would confer such a blessing, he wanted to provide a tangible way for his fellow “minores,” who could not afford the trip to Rome, to feel this pardon and this freedom for love right where they live and in their bodies as he did.
There is a wonderful replica of the Porziuncula chapel here in Washington, DC, which is on the garden-grounds of the Franciscan Monastery. My studio-office is on the grounds as well, right behind the chapel. I feel that it was no accident that I have been creating art and writing scholarship under the aegis of this unique tradition since 2006, as my mission at “Reunion Studios” is to create a new world culture that celebrates a reconciliation and reunion with our true Self, with others, and with the natural world. There is an even more fabulous replica of the Porziuncula in San Francisco, CA that I recommend seeing after this travail of pandemics allows travel. It is called the Nuova Porziuncola located in the North Beach part of town that Pope Benedict XVI named a Holy Site in 2008. In the inlay of the front steps are written in Italian Francis’s saying, “Oh Brothers and Sisters, I want you all to go to heaven!”
Exterior of Porziuncola chapel at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC
Interior of the Nuova Porziuncula in San Francisco, CA
Francis never emphasized hell, only heaven. Dante Alighieri, who later wrote about hell or l’inferno in his epic poem La Commedia never said that people were there because God put them there. They chose it rather than face the Truth of their existence in Paradise, which is the genius of Dante. Some Christians today are finally waking up to the idea that there is no eternal place of conscious torment for any soul after death; that such an idea is incompatible with Jesus’ most important teaching that one love God with one’s entire being and love one’s neighbor as one’s very self. The key is making sure to understand that one’s neighbor is one’s very self and that there is no creature that is not one’s neighbor. The teaching resonates with the memorable response by Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) in the tradition of Advaita Vedānta. When asked how one should treat others, the great jivanmukti replied, “There are no others.” The most recent book by Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart argues for abandoning hell in Christian belief, entitled That All Shall Be Saved. He writes,
“Really, all our language of Christian love is rendered vacuous to the precise degree that we truly believe in eternal perdition. Love my neighbor all I may, if I believe hell is real, I cannot love him as myself. My conviction that there is a hell to which one of us might go while the other enters into the Kingdom of God means that I must be willing to abandon him — indeed, abandon everyone — to a fate of total misery while yet continuing to assume that, having done so, I shall be able to enjoy perfect eternal bliss (155)”.
One writer in the US Evangelical tradition, Rick Pidock, argues that Evangelicals’ attachment to this teaching is related to love of Bible and love of going to church services over love of neighbor. The (il)logic is that going to church is one’s ticket to heaven. Not going to a Christian church is unfaithfulness to God’s scripture and reason enough for damnation. In the context of a global pandemic when going to church services is quite literally placing one’s neighbor in peril, such teaching about hell ignore’s Jesus’ own word and has real world effects. See Pidock’s insightful critique here. He writes,
“once you have allowed in your mind for someone to be set on fire forever as something they deserve, the thought of them suffering temporarily from COVID-19 in a hospital bed doesn’t quite seem to be that big a deal anymore. The theology of eternal conscious torment deadens the humanity of both the person being seen and the seer.”
The same dynamic plays out in the white Christian ability to ignore the suffering of Black people or any other subaltern group in American society, while maintaining its long traditions of white supremacy, conscious or unconscious.
There is a similar problem related to understandings of the afterlife in my own spiritual path of Sufism Reoriented and the wider world of Meher Baba-lovers. The issue twists our thoughts, feelings, and treatment of others in this life. As a group of about 450, Sufism Reoriented boasts only a handful of Blacks, Indigenous, and people of color. In terms of the wider Baba world, it is more difficult to quantify, but people of European descent make up the majority of participants in any Meher Baba gathering in the US that I have attended. When in India for these gatherings that I have been to, those representing the US and other western countries are also by far a majority of white people. Simply said, in the United States of America, we who love Meher Baba comprise a white community. I am not embarrassed by European culture and its iteration in the New World, for I know the important divine assignment to master matter that it accomplished as preparation for a new spiritual age of joy and harmony. (See Murshida Carol Weyland Conner’s article about this issue here). I am only taking note that we as a group are a by-product of the racism that accompanied this material mastery and the racist nation in which we as a Sufi school was formed. I am proud to say that in some important ways, to the extent that we, who are Sufis follow the guidance of our Murshids, we use our power and influence to confront racism within and without. In the current parlance, we seek to take responsibility for the lifelong work of admitting when we are being racist (because we are) and make every effort to be antiracist each day, protecting Black bodies from white supremacy. We received incredible training to be of service in the pattern of Meher Baba for years following our Murshids, and now we are using that training in more public ways in award-winning service projects that Murshida Conner designed and manages. These projects seek nothing less than completely alleviating the scourge of poverty. See the page dedicated to Murshida on our website and scroll down to “White Pony Express” to learn more about the beautiful work being done in Contra Costa County in Northern California, here in Washington, DC, and in Myrtle Beach, SC. Her projects attack the issues of racism head on, which is to dissolve the economic roots of its existence. Hopefully, more people will catch this breeze of service and create similar programs that give from the surplus of privilege to the want of those on the margins, all with an eye to place the marginalized within the mainstream of American life and culture.
We as Baba Lovers need to recognize that we are not capable of knowing how to be anti-racist in a vacuum or in theory. We need to recognize that only those who suffer bodily harm at the hands of white supremacy are the only ones capable of being a sincere and honest mirror. Some of us are trying, but I see enough evidence in our Sufi membership and in the wider Baba world that we still don’t care. We don’t recognize the supreme authority of Blacks, the Indigenous, and Peoples of Color in this area. Instead we “whitesplain” and use our teaching about karma and rebirth to place an insidious comfortable distance between us and racial justice.
Sufism Reoriented is so far a white group. I think it means that we are not yet worthy of the maturity that Blacks, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color have had to learn carrying the traumatic burden of racism in their bodies. I look forward to the day when Sufism grows up enough be a truly mixed community.
What do I mean that as Baba lovers our brand of belief in karma and rebirth distorts how we think of racial justice? I will share these thoughts in my next blog post.
Happy early Feast of Universal Pardon. May we know the mercy of God’s Love so deeply within that we may live it more fully without. There is no supremacy but Love’s.