The Heart Donkey: A Sufi Story
This is a story about the favorite and beloved donkey friend of an old man in Turkey. Now this donkey had been a faithful companion for years. At the end of a hard day traveling with his donkey, the old man came to an inn and decided to rest there for the night. No sooner than he had taken off the saddle bags than a youth working for the inn came out to greet him.
“Salaam Aleikum, sir, welcome to our humble shelter! Please, come inside and get some warm soup and sit beside the fire.”
“Of course, I’d love to but first I must make sure my donkey is well cared for.” The man said. The youth smiled generously.
“Please, sir, allow me to attend to such details, you are an honored guest here.”
“But it’s just that he’s an old donkey and needs a nice bed of hay to lie in.”
“Sir, we guarantee you the best care possible.”
“But you will sweep the floor first to make sure there are no stones? He gets in a terrible mood if he doesn’t sleep well.”
“Please, sir, just trust me, we are professionals here.”
“But you will give him a little rubdown along the spine – he goes crazy for that!”
“Sir, please just leave everything to me.”
So finally the man gave in and entered the establishment to enjoy a fine dinner by the fire and a comfortable bed. Meanwhile the youth rolled his eyes and… then went out to play cards, leaving the donkey right where the old man left him.
Even on his silk sheets, the old man found he could not sleep. Despite the youth’s promises, he was worried about his friend the donkey. Finally he got up in his dressing gown, walked down the steps to the stable and there was his donkey -- cold, hungry and dying of thirst. He took care of his donkey and spent the rest of the night in the stable, comforting him.
And the old man realized that when it comes to looking after your heart donkey, it is entirely up to us. We are the only real keepers of our feelings. We should pay attention to our feelings and take care of our hearts as if they were an old and trusted companion.
[Source: http://www.tomthumb.org/heartdonkey.shtml]
Reading: “The Alchemy of Effort” by Kabir Helminski
In my early 20s I lived in a spiritual community for the first time. I lived with 20 or more residents in buildings of mud brick high in the mountains, with a vast view of the desert below. One morning when we were free of our usual work load, which began at dawn, I had just begun to enjoy reading a book when my friend John appeared. He had borrowed a flatbed truck and wanted to gather some large rocks for a stone walk that was to be built. I was relishing the leisure time I had in front of me and was in no mood to go off to dig and lift large rocks. But John needed me, and he belittled all my excuses to the pint where I had no choice but to join him.
I was not in a very positive state about these developments. Nevertheless, I went along and found myself digging – not stones, but major boulders. John’s idea was that most of the stone had to be buried in the ground with only a small flat end showing on the surface. Each time I thought that we had done the impossible and moved our last boulder, John would find another. It took several hours to find and load the necessary boulders. Then we returned to the community, the boulders secure on the flatbed just behind the cab with the wind blowing in my face, I felt some invisible shell crack, and I cried.
[Source: Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski]
Sermon: Embracing the Shadow
Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz
There’s something about that story about the guy digging boulders. I’ve carried that story with me since my first semester in seminary, and I’m still carrying it, still turning it this way and that, trying to figure out its hold on me. Why shouldn’t this young religious seeker have had his morning free to laze about and read? What was it he learned out there with his shovel and his boulders, his sweat and his tears?
Two weeks ago I told you about my friend Laila’s dream that Unitarian Universalism could become the next great world religion. It has some competition though; Kabir Helminski, whose story this is, thinks Sufism is the religion for these times. Helminski is a western teacher, raised Catholic, and he has devoted his life to explaining the religion of the poet, Rumi, to the West.
This is what Helminski says about the times we are living in: “The spiritual challenge of our time is to realize our sacred humanness, that there need not be a conflict between the natural and the supernatural, between the finite and the infinite, between time and eternity, between social justice and contemplation, between sexuality and spirituality, between our human fulfillment and our spiritual realization, between what is most human and what is most sacred.”
“Is it possible,” Helminski asks then, “that the realization of the Divine is the realization of complete humanness?”
Well, that sounds a lot like my understanding of Unitarian Universalism.
But of course it’s not simple. Sufism is the mystical, Universalist thread of Islam, rooted in the Koran; it’s a complex system of psychology and spirituality, and I wouldn’t presume that I understand too much about it, without years of study.
But I’d like to try to understand it a little bit. Because this boulder story seems so important to me. I think we have a tendency to get tripped up on this “yes” and “no” business. And, come to think of it, as a culture we tend pretty often to trip over time and eternity, social justice and contemplation, sexuality and spirituality … just about all the dualities on the list I read a moment ago.
The story about digging boulders asserts that it is the play of the “yes” and the “no” within that creates a sense of I AM, a sense of alive and awakened Presence. It’s the friction between “I want to help my friend dig boulders” and “dammit, I want to read my book!” – those two powerful impulses, the “yes” and the “no” rubbing up against each other -- that creates energy to act in the world.
Positive thinking, this is not. Law of Attraction, it is not. Choice, the chocolate or vanilla kind, the iPhone or Treo kind, it’s not. What it is, is giving full due to the play of all the forces within – the positive and the negative, the sunlight and the shadow.
I was brought up in a family that taught me not to see or speak of certain things. The first time I went out on the streets of the Tenderloin District with the Faithful Fools Street Ministry in San Francisco, I kept hearing my mother’s voice: “Why would you PUT yourself into a position where you’d see things like that?” And what she meant, of course, was people like that, the one who had nowhere to go to the bathroom but on the curb, the one whose hands shook as he lit the rocks in his crack pipe. The people who shouldn’t be seen. But little by little, as I let my heart take the lead and find a path through the streets, I discovered something of who I am. This work was tremendously healing for me. Learning to embrace people whom I was taught not to see has illuminated a path back toward shadow parts of myself as well.
That’s one story. Here’s another, written to me recently by UUCA’s Madagascar bureau chief. Oh, you didn’t know we had a bureau in Madagascar? That’s where Bob Blake is posted for the World Bank, and his partner, Claudia Blake, who chairs our pledge drive here at UUCA every year, is sending back reports.
Here’s Claudia’s story, which she gave me permission to share with you:
“Of course, I am my brother's keeper” – Claudia writes – “even though I am powerless to help when he falls into need.” (She was responding to a sermon I gave earlier this summer, talking about one of own actual brothers. She continues:) “As I am driven through the streets of Tana and the poor, perhaps homeless, destitute, sick people knock on my windows at each intersection, I know I am their keeper, too. But here I fail. I do not roll down my window to give away what money I have brought with me, the money that might make tonight more comfortable for someone. I make eye contact. I smile. I say no. What good is my smile, I can see in their eyes. One of the first things I do when I move to a poor country” -- (Claudia’s been through this before) – “One of the first things I do is find some organizations to support that are doing things with street children or micro-credit or women. As the song goes, "when you have enough to give away, it's the only way to live." And I do. But I still have to look at those desperate eyes and know that from where they stand, I am good for nothing. I am a white-skinned, walking wallet that does not fulfill its purpose -- to give until it is gone. I resent not being seen as a person, and as I feel that wash over me, I know that is also what this poor soul feels, too. So I smile. I wish him or her a good day. I call on god to bless them. And I know that it does no good at all. I was not raised to be such a disappointment to people.
“That’s how my soul is right now. Wrestling with the demons that are always under the bed at home, but here are all around me, all the time. After all these years, I still do not have the answer for myself; I am not at peace.”
After years of wrestling with demons, many choose to turn away. Claudia finds the organization that will address these problems systemically, and she supports it; even then she doesn’t say, that’s that, and turn away. She still looks. She bears witness. She lets the faces on the other side of the glass into her heart, even as it breaks. She lets them change her. In Claudia’s self-examination, the distinction between social justice and contemplation disappears. She allows full play to the “yes” and the “no” within. She pays attention to her own internal process; she reflects.
“There is nothing closer to you than yourself,” writes another Sufi teacher. “If you don’t know yourself, how will you know others? … You have to seek the reality within yourself … What are you? What is your role in the world? Why have you been created? Where does your happiness lie? … The reality of your existence is in your inwardness. Everything is a servant of your inward heart.”
If everything is a servant of the inward heart, we should be tending it carefully. We can’t leave the job to others, like the traveler in the story who was persuaded to leave his heart donkey cold and thirsty, or like the organizations we support that do good work in the world. We'd best not screen out the inward heart, even in a flurry of good works, a rush to "do something" about the problems the world keeps throwing in front of our faces.
You may have heard me say that when we do social justice as individuals and as a religious community, our reflection needs to be as strong as our action. I’ve been having deep and satisfying conversations about this with UUCA’s social justice coordinator, Lavona Grow. How does the reflective process inform our social justice action? How does it change us? How can we be sure that when we act for justice, we aren’t reinforcing the systems we seek to change -- systems like racism and other oppressions, that are built into the very DNA of this country? In the year I've been here, I've invited many of you to join me in the work of antiracism, by attending programs such as ADORE and Jubilee trainings offered in our religious movement to deepen our understanding of these forces. And I've heard a lot of "no's" from you. Some "yes's" too.
Given that racism is part of our history, given that our institutions were built from within a system that included race-based slavery, we have to expect that no matter how hard we individually work to clear racism from our minds and hearts, racism will still be expressed in our institutional life. If it’s expressed in our institutional life, it may be expressed in our social justice work, unless we keep polishing the mirror to see that it isn’t. Our movement's antiracism approach isn't perfect -- after all, it hasn't ended racism yet -- but these trainings are step we can take to get the tools to do our work together in a way that doesn't further the systems of oppression we are trying to dismantle.
Why am I saying this today? I am saying it because the Jubilee workshop that was scheduled here this weekend, sponsored jointly by us and All Souls Church, had to be canceled, for lack of signups. You who had registered were disappointed by that, and I’m disappointed too, but I won’t stop inviting you into this work. This fall, in October, there will be a districtwide antiracism conference at the Oakton church, and I hope UUCA will be well represented. You can see any member of the Journey Toward Wholeness team to get more information.
Another question Lavona and I have been kicking around in our conversations is this: when does reflection become a substitute for action? When does it turn into navel-gazing?
I don’t know. I do know that when we can look at ourselves and the world honestly, when we can allow our hearts to break, when we can bear witness to our own and others’ suffering and not look away, then the line between contemplation and justice making, between action and reflection, between yes and no, fades away, and the reflection moves seamlessly into action and action moves seamlessly to reflection.
I know that this community is in no danger of navel-gazing anytime soon; that we have a built-in, metro area, can-do bias toward action. And I know that a conversation is beginning, within the Social Action Council, about how we can become a Social Justice church; about how we can move most effectively into the world together. And that the church will be offering space for reflection for you who make justice and you who seek justice, for all who struggle with the “yes” and the “no” of how we live in this world. You can pick up information about it on the SAC table.
The effort that results from noticing, attending to, and fully embracing the “yes” and the “no” within, Helminski tells us, is how we create Presence, alive and awake, a sense that “I AM.” A will to act in the world.
Remember the Exodus story, when God first meets Moses by the burning bush? God tells Moses what he expects him to do. Remember Moses’s immediate response? “I don’t wanna.” Moses comes up with a bunch of objections. Finally he says, “Well, who should I say it is that sent me?” God’s answer is interesting: “Tell them, ‘I AM.’” Now this is the highly mysterious, cannot-be-spoken name of God in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps better translated as, “I am becoming what I am becoming.” It is the name of God, but maybe it is also something about Moses in his humanness. Something about Presence. About digging boulders; about discovering a pathway to ourselves; about showing up and changing the course of history. Showing up can change the course of history; never doubt it. It matters what you show up for -- in this church, and in the world. As we are becoming what we are becoming, may we learn – like Moses – what power there may be in embracing the “yes” and the “no” within – within us, within us all. Blessed be.
May we leave this place in full embrace of all our sacred, glorious, conflicted, joyous humanness. Today and every day, may we be alive and awakened to our great work of becoming what we are becoming. Go in peace; remember you are held by a Love that will not let you go.
Kabir Helminski: Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self and The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path of Transformation
