Friday, November 19, 2004
HONESTY OR HARMONY ?
Sometimes they are mutually exclusive.
What happens when a Catholic and a Sufi sit down together at the dialogue table?
To recap recent research...
In an interview for "Psychology Today", Sufi Idries Shah, called "the West's leading exponent of Sufism," tells us:
I have not renounced the Eastern technique of pretending to be interested in what another person is saying, even pretending to be on his side. Therefore, I am able to draw out gurus and get them to commit themselves to an extent that a Westerner, because of his conscience, could not do. The Westerner would not allow certain things to go unchallenged and would not trick, as it were, another person.
The Indian teacher who brought Sufism to the West, Hazrat Inayat Khan, tells us:
The best way of action is to consider harmony as the first principle to be observed; that in all circumstances and situations and conditions one should try to harmonize with one's fellow-creature...A harmonious person can bend...all these attempts will not succeed unless...one realizes that harmony is the most essential thing in life (_The Inner Life_, p. 95-96)
Given these statements, it seems reasonable to assume that in dialogue the Sufi who holds harmony in highest esteem will find reasons to agree and will be offended by points of disagreement. The Catholic, who holds truth as the greatest good and views dissimulation negatively, will assert Catholic truth forthrightly, thus offending the Sufi who, in the interests of harmony, may conceal the fact that he has been offended.
This is a good example of cosmologies in conflict.
To see how Sufi-Catholic dialogue might play out, I turned to the papers of the Sufi and Eastern Christianity conference held at the University of South Carolina, October 18-20, 2001, as reported in _Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East_, edited by James S. Cutsinger, World Wisdom,Inc., 2002.
The conference focused on "the heart" as a point of agreement. In his paper, "How Do We Enter the Heart?", Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware writes:
Through the frequent invocation of the Name [of Jesus] we are enabled, wherever we look, to see Christ everywhere and to rejoice in Him. The whole world becomes a sacrament. In the words of the Gospel of Thomas, "Split a piece of wood, and there am I; lift up the stone, and you will find me there. (p. 18)
Bishop Ware was apparently so anxious to find points of agreement with the Sufis that he found the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas to be a suitable source of verification.
Syncretism is forever lurking in the shadows of the dialogue table. Scripture tells us:
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. (2 Tim 4:3-4)
It would appear that Bishop Ware has given us an example of just such a time.
Syncretism is the heart and soul of Freemasonry. The lodge is the place where all religions are equal - where the Grand Architect of the Universe is the god of choice. In a lodge where members belong to different faiths, the sacred books of all of these faiths are placed on the Masonic altar. The lodge provides ritual and liturgy devoid of doctrine, while transmitting concepts of right action in symbols that can have multiple interpretations. The lodge avoids religious disagreements by denying the superiority of any one faith.
Sufism, too, accommodates multiple faiths. As Hazrat Inayat Khan tells us:
When a person...lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. ...If he goes to the Christian church or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. (_The Inner Life_ p. 10-11)
No one can be a mystic and call himself a Christian mystic, a Jewish mystic or a Mohammadan mystic. For what is mysticism? Mysticism is something which erases one's mind of all idea of separateness... (ibid p. 61)
It comes, therefore, as no surprise that Grand Orient Masonic Lodges have embraced Sufism in the form of Sufi Traditionalism. Essentially they are teaching the same thing. And so we discover TraditionalFreemasonry.org, an organization sponsored by Lodge New Isis, within the Grand Orient lodges--a lodge founded by a head of the occult Ordo Templi Orientis, which is no friend of the Trinity.
Neither does it come as a surprise that Idries Shah opens a chapter of his book, _The Sufis_ with this passage:
"Sufi-ism," said Sir Richard Burton, was "the Eastern parent of Freemasonry." Whether Burton was a Freemason or not, there is no doubt that he was a Sufi. (p. 205)
Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour is unique among the world religions. This is a truth no Catholic can deny. The truth is divisive. It pits friend against friend, boss against employee, and family member against family member. Saints have been martyred for that truth. We would shame their memory if we denied this truth or swept it into the background in the interests of interreligious dialogue.
To return to our hypothetical dialogue table, it seems reasonable to speculate that at the conclusion of the talks, the Catholic might believe that the Sufi was a genuinely agreeable fellow who is willing to learn from the wisdom of other religions, and presumably will be open to conversion to faith in Christ with a little more persuasion.
The Sufi might walk away concluding that the Catholic is a disrupter of harmony when he defends his faith, but seems to be at least partially open to the wisdom of Sufi mysticism (and the Masonic Lodge) that all religions ultimately ascend to a point where they merge, and that the concept certaily does promote harmony when it is adhered to.
What sort of dialogue has taken place? Have the Sufi and the Catholic reached a new level of understanding, or have they merely sat at a table and talked past each other? If the latter, would it be better not to have these talks at all?
Certaily it is better to talk than to kill. Would it be even more practical to simply agree that the differences outweigh the similarities; but that Sufis and Catholics will pledge to respect their shared humanity and to co-exist in peace, leaving religion for another day when we have come culturally closer to each other by living in proximity? It's at least worth thinking about.
