Rev. Stan Barrett

CHOOSING THE BEAUTIFUL: AN ISLAMIC VISION OF LIFE WELL LIVED

The first time I knew I’d found a home in an Islamic spiritual practice was about 25 years ago, one September Thursday evening in Brattleboro, VT, with a group of Mevlevi Sufis.  The Mevlevis are the proverbial “whirling dervishes,” and I had recently attended my first “Sema,” the traditional ceremony of “turning” – as it is called – accompanied by music composed over the centuries to support this spiritual practice.  The night I’m speaking of was different, though: no music, not at first anyway, and no turning.  Just silence.  I was a bit late, and the group was already sitting in a meditation circle.  I came in as quietly as I could, sat down, and fell into a pool of silence deeper than anything I’d ever known.  It was profound, it was inviting, and it was beautiful:  a beautiful experience, an experience of deep community, and of soul.  I was home.

Prior to that, my first experience of Islam beyond the superficial was a seminar on Sufism my senior year of college, in 1974.  I was exposed then to the beauty of poetry like this morning’s reading: the beautiful work of a master poet, and the beautiful image of a divine Lover/Beloved or Friend who calls us back to the beautiful self we once knew ourselves to be, but have forgotten.  Trying to become and remain attuned to that deepest self – and to God – is the real core of Sufi practice, often referred to as Islamic mysticism.  What an unfortunate term, “mysticism”:  it sounds like smoke and mirrors!  I sometimes say that the so-called mystics are those who want God to become for them more than a rumor, or who want to taste God rather than just talk about Her.  What I also learned in this seminar was that Sufism was integral to classic Islamic civilization, not an add-on or an element borrowed from outside Islam.

Since that initiatory moment of deep silence in 1993, I have come to know and experience many forms of Islamic beauty.  For me it was the music first:  group singing of songs like those we heard while gathering this morning; the music supporting the turning in Sema; the improvizations on the ney reed flute and other instruments.  All of these are forms of what Dr. Sayyed Hussein Nasr calls “interiorizing music”: music that calls us into the spiritual landscapes of the heart.  The visual arts are not traditionally so prominent in Islam, due to the general prohibition against depicting the human form, but there is the glorious flowering of calligraphy, Qur’anic and otherwise.  And then there are those amazing mosques, such as the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, buildings of which it has been said that, unlike the spectacular Christian cathedrals which pull the gaze heavenward, instead enclose the worshipper in the glorious cosmos of God’s creation.

Clearly in literature, in music, in calligraphy, in architecture, not to mention in following the Qur’anic example of marveling at the beauty of nature, Islamic civilization has taken to heart the Prophet Muhammad’s words:  God is beautiful, and…loves beauty.

In addition to what we might call aesthetic beauty, there is behavioral or ethical beauty.  In addition to observing and appreciating and creating the beautiful, there is doing the beautiful.  There’s a case to be made – I think a strong one – that “doing the beautiful” is the core intention of Muslim life.

In 1994, two scholars at SUNY Stony Brook, Sachiko Murata and William Chittick, published a book, The Vision of Islam, based on an introductory course on Islam they’d taught yearly for a decade.  The book is structured around the Hadith of Gabriel.  A hadith is a report of a saying or action of the Prophet Muhammad.  A “sound” hadith, of which this is one, has been determined by the tradition to have been reliably transmitted, and so is one the community can trust really comes from the Prophet.  The Hadith of Gabriel has often been used for teaching purposes over the centuries.  It lays out 3 dimensions of Islam, dimensions we can think of as moving from the external to the more internal levels of human life.  The first dimension deals with action, the second with understanding, and the third with intention.

That the realm of action comes first seems intuitively right.  After all, we show our children love before we try to explain it to them, and we teach “please” and “thank you” and sharing with others before we try to explain politeness or the worth and dignity of every human being.  The core of this dimension for Muslims is what is often called The Five Pillars of Islam, which might well be the bulk of what most of us learned about Islam in an Intro. to Religions class.  Muslims are to testify that there is no God but God, and that Muhammad is God’s messenger. They are to participate in the 5-times-a-day ritual prayers, which they can do in the mosque, at home, on the sidewalk, or in the desert.  They are to engage in charitable giving, which traditionally is based on a percentage of one’s net worth, by the way.  They are to fast from sunup to sundown for the lunar month of Ramadan each year.  Finally, they are to go on Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca once in their lifetime if they are able. 

The Unitarian Universalist tradition, by contrast, is characterized by freedom of practice as well as belief.  And much about Islam’s 5 pillars seems so distant from anything commonly practiced among us.  Yet, in the interest of building bridges of understanding and seeking commonalities of experience, we might ask:  “What, if anything, feels familiar to us in these Muslim practices?”  You will have your own answers.  What strikes me, at least to start with, is the following.  We, too, gather to celebrate and reinforce our faith, at least once a week, in a service that certainly has ritual elements: think of the overall structure, and the individual items we can count on week after week.  Furthermore, at least in the context of this weekly service, we profess our faith in spoken word – think of our Affirmation of Faith – and in song.  Beyond that, we support broader community needs through our taxes, through financial support of this church and other organizations, and sometimes by volunteering, e.g. at a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, or a Habitat for Humanity project.

Beyond these similarities of communal practice, perhaps thinking about this dimension of Islam can serve as an invitation to us as individual UU’s to spend some time thinking about our own spiritual practices, our own unique ways of living and practicing our faith.

The second dimension of Islam, according to the Hadith of Gabriel, is the dimension of faith or belief, of thinking and understanding.  Following on the realm of actions, you could say it offers the context for understanding Muslims’ spiritual practices.  It explains the thinking, the beliefs, behind the life they live in light of their faith.  

The hadith says in part that Muslims believe in God, God’s angels, God’s books, and God’s messengers.  The angels include Gabriel, who, in the incident recorded in this hadith, appeared to Muhammad and a group of Muslims gathered with him one day, to “teach you your religion.”  Gabriel is also understood to have been the divine bearer of the verses uttered over a number of years by Muhammad, and gathered and ordered after his death in what we know as the Qur’an.   God’s books have traditionally been understood to include at least the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospel, and the Qur’an.  God’s messengers are those who brought these books to their communities and the world, and so included Moses, David, Jesus, and Muhammad.  The messengers are a subset of a long line of prophets going back to Adam, all bringing essentially the same message, but in a form tailored to the particular needs of the community receiving it from a specific prophet. 

Now most of this seems very distant, very foreign to us.  Some of us are comfortable with the concept and naming of God, but the books and the messengers – not to mention the angels – seem to come to us from a conceptual world no longer our own.  The books we know, e.g. the Bible.  Perhaps we find them, or parts of them, inspiring, but that they are a revelation sent from God is – shall we say for most of us most of the time – to say the least, a stretch.

I would suggest, though, that this list – God, God’s angels, God’s books, God’s messengers – is for Muslims an answer to an essential human question:  whom or what do we trust?  In questions of life and death and eternity – if any – where do we repose our ultimate trust?  That’s what faith boils down to, I think.  Or, couched in terms of belief –  based on the etymology of the word “belief” – it’s a question of what we’ve given our hearts to, or what has captured our hearts at the deepest level.

In light of that, I think this Muslim list of trusted resources, this list of beloved authorities in matters of life and death, raises for us the question:  what are ours?  As part of Unitarian Universalism, we have not only our seven Principles, but also a statement of six Sources we draw from.  They’re worth study, and are printed at the back of your Order of Service.  I think, though, that the question remains for us as individuals.  Who, over the years, have been our guides:  divine or human, living or dead, the ones we’ve gone back to time and again because they’ve proven trustworthy, proven helpful in pointing us toward answers or helping us to ask the right questions?  What books or other writings have we returned to regularly, or now and then, because they inspire or enlighten us?  For that matter, what places or situations are worth returning to because when we’re there life seems to make sense, or we leave there feeling healed?

Our list may have more or less overlap with the Islamic one, but if we recognize that we, like they, are engaged in the endeavor to make sense of our life on this earth, and find the best context for how to live it well, surely Islam will seem less strange, more familiar to us.

The third dimension or level of Islamic life is that of intention, and the core intention according to the Hadith of Gabriel is to do the beautiful.  In a classic Islamic context, and until today in some places, expert help was available in helping a Muslim decide how to act, what choices to make – or not make – in a given situation.  It was and is – where it still exists – a highly sophisticated system, capable of great subtlety and sensitive to context.  To be acknowledged as competent to practice it took many years of preparation.  Beyond the rights and wrongs, no matter how subtly determined, was the criterion of beauty, perhaps the subtlest of all.  The intention was to act in each situation in the most beautiful way.  Even in this, there could be guidelines, but the goal or hope of classical Islamic life was to produce a person whose instincts had been so honed that beautiful behavior became second nature to him/her.

It’s important to say here that choosing the most beautiful behavior did not mean always saying “yes” or being nice.  Sometimes it would mean saying “no” or setting limits in another way. An example would be intervening, rather than standing by, when a person – or an animal – is being abused:  intervening to stop the abuse, that is beautiful behavior!  Deciding on a beautiful response clearly requires discernment about what’s needed and appropriate in a situation.

The specific way the hadith describes doing what is beautiful is to act “as if you see God, for even if you do not see God, God sees you.” This reminded me recently of St. Francis as Nikos Kazantzakis depicts him:  he has Francis kissing the outcasts of the earth, including lepers, and coming to see Christ in them.  Muslims – or we – could do worse, I think, than to see Jesus or Muhammad, God or some exemplary person from our present or past, in our spouse or children or parents, in a neighbor, a stranger we pass on the street, a homeless person asking for a handout, or a Honduran refugee headed for our southern border.  Imagining, as one goes through life determining how to receive or shape each moment, that one is seeing whatever or whoever inspires in one the most beautiful behavior, seems to be an important component of Muslim life.  Maybe it speaks to us as well.

On the other hand, the thought of God’s observing us as we make decisions about how to act, could instead of inspiring us, trigger an image of a scolding parent or teacher, or one ready to pounce if we make the “wrong” decision.  A friend pointed out to me not long ago that instead of seeing God in this hadith as looking on with an eye to evaluating a person’s behavior, God could be looking at the person with love, love and recognition of the beautiful soul the divine knows her/him to be.

You see, the Islamic understanding of the basic human problem is not, as in traditional Christianity, that humans have fallen from a blessed state due to eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a fallen state typically understood as being passed on to successive generations through the sexual act by which we are conceived.  No, the Islamic understanding is that our fundamental problem is that we have forgotten who we are.  We have forgotten, but God knows, and sees us for who we were and are at our Source.  To borrow an image from Zen Buddhism, God sees the face we had before we were born.

We know from infant development studies that the visual interaction between a mother and child when it is nursing is as important to its psyche as the milk is to its body.  If all is well, Mother’s eyes say something like, “You are loved, and oh, so beautiful; you are loved as the beauty that you are.”  Being seen, and being seen to be beautiful as one is, makes all the difference.

For a Muslim, imagining himself to be seen by a God who wishes from him the best behavior, helps him to follow through on his intention to do the beautiful.  However, this is also the God who knows her in her most essential, most beautiful self, and knows the beautiful life she is capable of.

For ourselves, perhaps it’s a useful thought experiment to imagine going through life, choosing in every moment how to respond to each person and situation, and doing so knowing we are loved and lovely.  The experiment doesn’t depend on whether God is part of your worldview.  The point is imagining that you know yourself to be loved and lovely, deep-down loved and lovely.  Then imagine, when faced with any situation, but especially a difficult one, being able to act out of feeling loved rather than                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           feeling afraid.  Would it make a difference?  If more of us could act out of an intention to do the beautiful, and undergirded by a sense of being loved and beautiful, would the world be a better place?  I think so.

Muslim life, then, can be seen as structured by actions embedded in a context of faith, with both grounded in an intention to do the beautiful.  Part of my hope for today has been educational: to help us as a congregation to be more informed about Islam.  Another part has been more about heart than head: to help us feel what we share with Muslims, as humans and as people engaged in an intentional spiritual journey.  We know, you and I, that the narrative I’ve offered today is not the only narrative abroad in the world  – or even in our heads! – about Islam.  But I assure you that in the long history of Islam – 1400+ years – this narrative, especially the structure provided by the Hadith of Gabriel, has not been peripheral.  It has stood right in the middle of the tradition.  It is a narrative which carries much of the best that Islam has to offer, which is the least, I think, that we owe any great religious tradition.  If we carry it in our hearts, and perhaps now and then in our conversations, it will at least help us to be good neighbors to nearby Muslims.  And – who knows? – maybe we can make a small contribution to peace on earth.

So may it be.

Amen

Rev. Stanton H. Barrett III

First Religious Society, Unitarian Universalist

Newburyport, Massachusetts

October 21, 2018