Triangulating My Spiritual Location
First. after putting it aside for over five years, i restarted and then finished the diary and letters of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life). A young Jewish woman seeks spiritual growth in the face of the holocaust and is guided in her search by a godly jungian therapist and palm reader, the path seemed strange but the result seemed marvelous. She dues at age 29 in the service of her family and other Jews. Then i started, but did not finish Henri J. M. Nouwen's The Wounded Healer -- so much of the book is in that title. A Catholic monk and priest, he discusses ministry to Christians in the 1960s. He is critical of what passes for Christian leadership and demands a deeper and more compassionate understanding of the human condition. Then on Christmas, my son gave me Connie Zweig's A Moth To The Flame: The Life of the Sufi Poet Rumi. This is a novelized account of the relationship between Rumi and his "spiritual director," Shams Tabrizi. I think that Rumi was one of the two towering spiritual figures of the thirteenth century, largely due to the direction of his strange friend.
The Wounded Healer. We don't know much about Etty Hillesum's therapist, Julius Spier. But we do know that he was a Jew living in the shadow of the holocaust and Etty seems to come to regard him as a fragile person; she is happy that he dies before the Germans can take him into custody. Though Nouwen does not mention it in his books, he was apparently plagued by loneliness and depression all his adult life. Shams is depicted as a victim of child abuse. The wounded spiritual warrior works from his or her woundedness, but do they also inflict their wounds on those they try to heal? It is Zweig's Shams who most clearly reveals his wounds in his efforts to find and transform his perfect candidate. He must find a true "friend of the Friend" and bring him to complete union with Allah. On his path he finds only frauds, fools and weaklings who he seems to treat with contempt and total lack of compassion.. Even after finding Rumi, he treats those around him, Rumi's family and followers and friends, with this same contempt. Both he and Rumi pay terrible prices for his "direction."
There is an insight that many mystics have or are on the verge of having: that complete union with the Ground of Being (the Friend) occurs only when we cross that threshold from life to whatever lies beyond this life, and that we cross that threshold as equals. This bit of heresy is shared by Western mystics as well as those in South and East Asia. Shams will find all the fools, frauds and weaklings together with Rumi in the Friend's embrace, and he himself will be embraced and welcomed as his own father could never embrace nor welcome him.
First. embody compassion.