Consider the lilies of the fields

[Guest guest]

>Dear Amanda,

>

>I'm just glad lobsters have thick skins. LOL! Others seem to have

>rather vulnerable thin ones!

>

>Love, Hillary

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

People are sensitive and

many of us increase that sensitivity.

You can talk and be spiritual all you like

At the end of the day you will be asked

this question now and then

Did you know God?

Did you make friends with those who did?

Or did you pretend?

 

Lobster Pretence

 

============

FATHER FRANK'S RANTS

Rant Number Fifteen 28 January 2002

RUMINATING RUMI

 

 

There is a strange Sufi sect whose devotees make a point of behaving

in socially outrageous and abhorrent ways. They call themselves

Malamatiya, `the people of shame'. In Turkey I once met one of its

members ­ at least, he claimed to be one. He was an outwardly very

courteous, charming bookseller in Istanbul's Sahatflar Charscisi. I

will not disclose the precise manner in which he exercised his

peculiar creed but it was, well, let us say, pretty enormous.

 

Good, well-meaning religious people will always find such behaviour

by those who profess to be servants of God hard to take. Even

Christians, whose faith is symbolized by what was once an infamous

sign of shame ­ the Cross ­ would be scandalized by a priest who

chose to join a gang of thieves. When Father Borrelli, a Neapolitan

slum priest, did exactly that half a century ago (vide Morris West's

Children of the Sun), I doubt he had ever heard of the Malamatiya but

the reactions he experienced must have closely mirrored those

suffered by his Sufi counterparts.

 

This week-end I attended an international conference in London,

organized by the Islamic Centre of England, on the Muslim mystic

Celaluddin Rumi. A respected and respectable scholar in Konya,

capital of the Sultanate of Rum, a married man and father of

children, Rumi was a pillar of his community ­ until the day when a

mysterious shaggy dervish appeared from nowhere. That man ­ Shams

Tabrizi ­ changed Rumi's life forever. Everything was turned upside

down. Rumi's ecstatic, extravagant friendship with Shams, was the

equivalent of Father Borelli's joining the Neapolitan young hoodlums:

his own people began to look with deep embarrassment on the man who

had, in their myopic eyes, put himself beyond the pale. I wonder

though, whether Rumi, ecstasy or not, knew pretty well what he was

doing…

 

Thanks to a paper by Mr Ali Hussain ­ and an apt question raised by a

learned Bengali gentleman in the audience ­ I was put in mind of

another case in point in the life of the writer Soeren Kierkegaard.

Not only did Kierkegaard deliberately court social ostracism in

breaking his engagement with his fiance' Regina Olsen ­ he also

turned himself into a laughing stock by deliberately goading the

satirical magazine The Corsair ­ a sort of Private Eye of 19th

Century's Copenhagen ­ into attacking him and cruelling and regularly

sending him up. The lofty, shy and hypersensitive philosopher had

chosen to nail himself to the cross of universal mockery and vulgar

bourgeois ridicule.

 

Dear Father Frank, what are you trying to say? What trouble are you

stirring up now? Antinomianism ­ the deliberate flaunting of moral

rules - sheer madness, showing off, silly eccentricity per se or what?

 

Dear reader, I know what you mean and fear. Forgive these

ruminations. Perhaps they are self-indulgent. But perhaps, perhaps it

is true mainstream, institutional religion has always been beset by

the dead hand of compliance, convention and dreary conformity. The

result, all too often, has been boredom, boredom and more boredom. As

I examine the faces of the prospective candidates for the See of

Canterbury staring at me from the newspaper, I see solidity, safety

and respectability galore. I also detect buckets of deadly dullness,

acres of crashing tedium. No, thanks.

 

When Bishop Trevor Huddlestone flaunted the apartheid rule in the old

South Africa, he genuinely shocked many good churchgoers there. I

wonder what a modern Huddlestone would have to do to excoriate the

Church of England into drawing closer to her pain-wracked Lord

hanging on the Cross. Refusing to play chaplain to the Queen?

Condemning abortion outright? Joining the Mexican Zapatistas? Or

Islamic fighters? Or what?

 

Naturally, the Malamatya path is an uncomfortable, dangerous one. No

cushy jobs for the boys await those who, in their own, various ways,

embark on it. Mansoor Al-Hallaj, the most famous Sufi martyr of all,

ended up on a gibbet. St Benedict Joseph Labre' suffered lifelong

torment at the hands of the Roman riff-raff. Pious people were never

quite convinced that Father Borrelli's interest in his disreputable

charges was wholly beyond reproach and whispered so audibly. Even as

implausible a character as the late Pope Paul VI towards the end of

his life had to bear a heavier cross because of what St Paul might

have described as his `thorn in the flesh'. But, as St John

says, `the wind blows where it wills; you hear the sound thereof but

do not know whence it comes and whither it goes ­ so it is with

everyone who is driven by the Spirit.'

 

I shall conclude with a prayer ­ my own.

 

`Lord, give your Church ­ no, all humanity ­ saints. Saints to whom

you have given the grace to become people of shame. Amen.'

 

Revd Frank Julian Gelli