About three or four years into my discipleship, around the beginning of 1980, I noticed that when we said our daily prayers, which acknowledged God in “all the names and forms, known and unknown to man,” I could barely relate to the idea of God as form.
I had grown up with Jesus and God, who were holy and aspirational models—one apparently an all-knowing, disembodied, male personage, and the other his human son who had been sent to save humanity and now lived on in the spirit world with his father. After I left the Mormon church, I hadn’t stopped praying. Before discovering Sufism, I’d had a quick affair with existentialism and atheism. Now I had come to a place where I felt like my relationship with God was not all that definite. I wanted to explore this more deeply and from my own experience, not from accepting the wisdom or platitudes of others.
I began to wonder if I was an existentialist by nature. I could more deeply relate to the idea of “God in all things”—a spirit flowing through all life—than I could to God being a male overseer I had to surrender to, ask forgiveness from, thank for everything; I didn’t feel sincere when I prayed. And the Mother God I was beginning to hear about in Sufi classes, as presented by the few women teachers and some of the men, seemed like she might be either a bit intrusive or maybe too passive, one or the other, the apparent Ideal Mother. Always forgiving, always compassionate, always waiting, always knowing what was best for you, just ask Mother, all those stereotypes. I had such a contradictory relationship with my mom. I loved her so much and thought of her as the person who loved me more than anyone (after my dad died). But I also endured her spanking the bejesus out of me, stonewalling me when I made her mad, and conveying the feeling that I would never be good enough and was generally a disappointment to her. I felt like she never knew me (right up through her funeral), and given her secretiveness, I’m sure there must be things I never knew about her as well. Mother God seemed more untrustworthy a personage than even Father God or Son God.
Prior to my involvement with Sufism, a couple of friends had told me they thought that the seeking of happiness was probably a lost cause and not the purpose of life, but my philosophy is that as long as you are a person who looks at life in depth, there is nothing wrong with seeking love, harmony, and beauty. Those aspects cannot help but bring a certain amount of happiness. Sadness and trouble never seem to have a problem finding us eventually, so why not concentrate on the best of life when we can?
On one retreat in the 1980s, I spent some time reading one of Inayat Khan’s books, The Sufi Message, which contained a section called “The Alchemy of Happiness.” In it, Khan discusses how knowledge of God must be approached from both a personal side and a universal side. The personal side is where you relate to God: your prayers go to God, you thank God, and you seek guidance from God. The universal aspect of God was the one I could easily embrace. I could imagine the Spirit of Guidance, God, or Divinity flowing through people, cats, trees, even rocks. The idea that all of creation had a certain divine presence felt true to me.
Khan goes on to say that you need to cultivate the aspect you lack, because only then can God be fully experienced. His advice on cultivating a relationship with God in the personal sense is to assign to God the trait or personality with which one feels most natural—God as Judge, as Kind Father, as Loving Mother, as Benefactor, as Teacher, etc. Reading this, I knew without a moment’s thought that there was one personality and role I needed to assign to God in order to experiment with this concept: God the Friend. I had to have someone I could fully trust, someone I could tell things to honestly and even complain to sometimes. God had to be someone I was not afraid of— someone with whom I could even be angry, if circumstances warranted. And I had certainly had a lot to be irritated about over the years.
I’m not saying I had blamed God for the unhappiness in my life; on the contrary, I blamed myself. But this was like blaming God indirectly, especially if you believed that everything came from God. (This, to me, is the discrepancy in the viewpoint of those who consider themselves too shy to accomplish things and then say it must not be God’s will. That’s like saying God wants mediocrity or a lack of enthusiasm.)
I began to talk to God a lot, now that I was assuming he existed and was my very best friend. (Or She? For some reason, gender for my deity always seemed to be male, or at least a very strong, definite essence—maybe due to the loss of my dear father, or my inability to fully trust my mother, or my associating particular traits with masculinity.) “Wow,” I’d say, “thanks for the parking space”; or, “Listen, I have no idea what to do about this; you really have to help me out here.” That was how I prayed now. Not addressing God in a way that was placating or begging, as I had in the past, or asking, as I had, way too many times, “Why is this happening to me? Why am I so alone? Why can’t I see what is wrong with me?” I now see my pre-God-as-Friend self as a sniveling wimp.
With this, things started to change for me. I found that more small coincidences occurred. I’d be wishing I had some company and within a half-hour someone would call just to chat or ask me if I wanted to go out to coffee or a movie. Or I’d be sad and a favorite song I loved to sing would come on the radio and I’d just have to sing it, and then feel great. I’d had coincidental experiences previously, of course, but now it was becoming so common—when I asked for help, my prayers were answered in some way within a day—that it was difficult to deny a cause-and-effect relationship between prayer and help from God, or whoever was hearing my prayers, even if it was merely my best or higher self. This was a divinity I had not been in touch with in this way before. (For the record, I am not always able to maintain this state. And I find that the more time I spend alone, the fewer the challenges.)
I was still lonely some of the time, but overall, I was becoming pretty happy. This was a real improvement!
23
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singing as prayer
What first drew me to Western Sufism was its uplifting choral music and Dances of Universal Peace, which are like folk dances done to chants of various world religions. When I was living in the Sufi house in northern California, one of the dances we learned was the dervish turn, which entails spinning in one spot with one hand lifted to heaven and one palm down, “anchoring” one’s physical being to earth.
The turn is quite an ecstatic experience when done so that the spin does not make you dizzy. It takes you out of the mundane world, into appreciation for the divinity of life. I never knew if I was doing it right until my spiritual teacher said, after I’d spun for only a few brief moments, “Very fine.” He was not given to compliments, so I took it that I had assimilated the teaching—a welcome confirmation.
Later on, Jelaluddin Loras, who is the head of the Mevlevi Order from Turkey, the original whirling dervishes in the lineage of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, told me after seeing me spin that he could teach me the advanced dervish turn, though I probably would only be able to do it for one ten-minute set.
The turn is a sacred spinning (nicknamed “whirl” by others) that is said to have begun when Rumi reached ecstasy and started turning, his robe inscribing a perfect circle in the dust at his feet. His disciples reasoned that if he turned when he reached ecstasy, they might reach ecstasy themselves if they imitated the turn. Now the ritual is taught with great discipline and performed publicly on December 17 of each year (the day Rumi died and was married to God). There is a long evening of poetry, talks, and Turkish music, and then the turn is performed by practitioners of a year or more. There are three or four turning sets of ten or fifteen minutes each, accompanied by mystical music, though the sound of the white robes whooshing through the air is almost music enough.
Having been told that I could possibly learn to do this, I was greatly encouraged that I might have a small amount of grace, even with my two-inch limp. I declined to learn the turn, however; at this time in my thirties, I was on the cusp of realizing that my physical energy and strength was slightly diminished compared to recent years, unexpectedly ear
ly. And I was already spending most of my free time singing.
Less than three years after I took initiation, and a few months after I moved into the Sufi house, Bill Allaudin Mathieu, director of the Sufi Choir and former musician and composer with Duke Ellington, had announced that he was going to start up another Sufi Choir (the original one had not performed for a few years).
I couldn’t wait to audition. I sang something for him, and he looked at me kindly and said, “Very nice.” Then he addressed me more seriously: “I think you have a deep well of music in you. And I believe you are like me: you have to work very hard at it. If you want to do the work, I’d love to have you.”
I was elated—and then spent a couple of days mulling it over. I’d had so many short stints of musical training, but certainly had never pursued it on a professional level. I grew to understand that Allaudin truly was being kind by comparing my learning style to his. He might have to work hard, but if I was like a kid with a folk guitar and twelve chords, he was more like a student of Mozart. Hard work, yes, but on a very different level.
There would be rehearsals, plus the extensive practice I’d need to do at home, not only to learn the music itself but also to work on my voice, particularly my range and strength. But I decided to go for it.
For the next three or four years, aside from earning a living and keeping up my responsibilities in the Petaluma Sufi house, the choir and my voice were my foremost concentrations. On Sundays, one other household member and I would drive to Sebastopol (seventeen miles each way on narrow backcountry roads). Rehearsals started promptly at ten in the morning and went till four in the afternoon. This was every Sunday, except for two or three months in the summer. I don’t know that I ever missed a rehearsal other than for illness. Which, of course, meant there was even less time for the elusive and longed-for boyfriend. In my early thirties, I thought I heard my biological clock ticking.
At rehearsals, in addition to singing “Ah” on one note for long periods of time to improve our pitch (and hopefully open our hearts), we also practiced blending our voices so no voice was louder than any other. This blending of volume and tone can result in a section sounding like one voice, even though each voice has a slightly different quality. Chills went up my spine, goose bumps traveled down my arms and I felt not just happiness but ecstasy when we achieved this perfect harmony, filled with a sense of emotional and spiritual unity with the other choir members.
It became clear to me during this time that music (along with friendship) was my spiritual path. I had always loved it, and had been singing in groups since I was nine. Now I did it daily in solitude, not just to improve my voice or memorize parts but for the effect I hoped it was having upon my being, my spirit, my emotional and mental state. It brought me peace and joy, and was something I could do that did not always involve standing. It felt like something I could offer the world that might bring beauty and harmony. It was also prayer.
The prayer we used at every Sufi meeting was this: “Toward the One, the perfection of love, harmony and beauty; the only being; united with all the illuminated souls who form the embodiment of the Master, the Spirit of Guidance.”
No words ever spoke to me more strongly than “the perfection of love, harmony and beauty.” To me, music and compassion were the means to this end.
I had not had a steady boyfriend in my first six or seven years as a Sufi initiate. I’d had a couple of short affairs, but mostly I had been celibate and longing for a life mate. I was starting to get older; Planned Parenthood had told me I could have children “at least up through my late thirties,” which had sneaked up on me too quickly.
As the years passed, I came to feel that I carried the story of the name Moineddin had given me, Sabzpari—the woman who lost her lover and her wings. After so long with barely a date, I was beginning to see that it was a long shot that any future mate was going to come from the Sufi community. So I wrote to Moineddin, who had separated from his wife and moved to Hawaii, and asked him to change my name.
He responded in a considered note, “I’ve been thinking that for a couple of years, but I did not feel well enough to change it.” (As a dialysis patient, he had undergone two kidney transplants by this time.) “I will ask someone else to come up with a name for you, unless you have one in mind yourself.”
Jeez, I thought, you might have mentioned this a while back—but going through kidney failure and a divorce was overwhelming, even for a spiritual teacher. I also had been pretty self-absorbed with my loneliness, feeling that being single had been the result of a spiritual deficiency, and my expectations were unrealistically high with regard to his guidance responsibilities. I kept my complaint to myself.
With involvement of several other teachers, I was given a new name in 1982. One teacher got the name in a dream and sent it to Moineddin in a letter. When Moineddin was in San Francisco, he handed the letter to me and asked me to give it to his ex-wife, Fatima, also a teacher. She talked it over with her current husband, and after they decided it was a good name she called Vasheest Davenport, the great singer who had originally inspired me on the Sufi Choir record Lani/Farida had played for me years earlier.
On April 15, after singing a zikr with our local group, Vasheest jumped up from his chair, suddenly remembering he had an important task to do, and gave the name to me in ceremony.
Tracing a heart and wings on my forehead, he said, “I give you the spiritual name ‘Qahira.’” Pronounced ka-HEE-rah, this name comes from an Arabic root having to do with divine power coming through one’s being and taking responsibility but not credit for it. It means “The One Who Has Overcome.” This is what my Sufi friends still call me.
I had begun attending zikr classes led by Vasheest in Marin County in the early eighties. Partly because he had given me voice lessons and knew my voice, and partly because I could not stand up for the forty-five minutes most zikrs lasted, Vasheest began using me to sing solo Arabic phrases over the beautiful choral chanting. My soloist role allowed me to sit in the center of the group rather than outside the circle of chanters and singers. Vasheest also suggested that I be a part of it all by using my voice in musical leadership rather than just sitting there and singing quietly. He began teaching me and a few others to lead the zikr.
I continued to find great joy and fulfillment in my musical pursuits, but even so, I wished for a partner—something that, despite my name change, still continued to elude me. In search of answers, I requested a spiritual interview with Vasheest on the matter in the mid-80s. He was not my primary teacher, but I was going to Sufi classes with him at least once a week, and he had seen my solitary life as a theme for a few years; he’d even suggested particular men from the community to me at various times.
In the interview I told him, with an ache in my throat, “I am so lonely! I just do not seem to meet the right guy—or, if I do meet someone, he may not be interested in being my life partner. It seems like it’s never going to happen.” It was, essentially, a similar plight to the one I’d described to Farida some years before.
What Vasheest said to me was forehead-smackingly illuminating.
“It’s one thing to be attracted to someone as a lover. You are an attractive woman”—always a welcome surprise to me to hear that—“and I can see that there would be no problem in finding men to have fun with or even sleep with. But it’s another thing to look for someone who is a life partner. He might want someone to play tennis with . . . or to go backpacking. He might be concerned that you would have trouble carrying a baby around on your hip. These things are much different than being someone’s lover, or even than being in love.”
We both knew that although there were rogues in our midst (Vasheest sometimes operating as one of them), many of the men I knew in spiritual work would not enter into a relationship lightly. Many of them really wanted a wife, unlike some thirty-to-fortyish men at that time. That they were not approaching me was a compliment, in a way. They might have been afraid of hurting me if it di
dn’t work out or if it looked like I might not be able to handle the full role of wife and mother.
I’d like to believe that this was why I was not finding a mate; it’s far better than thinking that I had some deep personality flaw. Yes, I was strong, but I was also sensitive. I had what I thought was a fair portion of redeeming qualities, not the least of which was an irreverent sense of humor, something I was sure a lot of men could appreciate. I was working on being less outspoken, though my friends tolerated, accommodated, or appreciated my transparency and honest blurting. Usually. Everyone likes those traits with a little more sugar and less salt, something it’s taken me some decades to learn.
This was major stuff. I had not previously seen myself as possibly lacking the ability to be a “whole” wife, in terms of the physical role traditionally expected of a wife and mother, as hard as that may be to believe. I had been looking from the inside— from how I felt, from the kind of person I was, my intelligence, my humor, my music, my devotion, my emotional makeup, and my personality limitations, which I thought were no worse than most people’s. I had seen that my emotional strength might be detrimental, but I knew strong married women. I was working hard on understanding men and their challenges, and attempting to keep my opinions to myself more often, without folding to a male-dominated society. I cooked every night, I did shopping, I did housework regularly, and I worked full-time. But what would it mean if I added child rearing to that mix? I still felt that I could do it, but did others think I could?
Not a Poster Child Page 18