Holy Ramadan
Pat and I have received many wonderful letters, notes, emails and phone calls about the death of our son. One message came today that was particularly intriguing for me since it connected some of my reflections on scripture with the universality of spirituality. Also it came today, the last day of fasting for Muslims, during the month of Ramadan, commemorating the revelation of the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred scripture, by the angel Gibril (Gabriel) to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. I was in the Middle East Store where many Muslims were preparing for the great “Festival of Breaking Fast” tomorrow.
Sadly this also is a time when one pastor of a small church in Florida is getting international attention by his threat, full of hate and misunderstanding, to burn 200 Qur’ans.
The Christian scriptures that stand out for me are from Psalm 95: 7–8: “Today, if you would hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.” In the Gospels Jesus often talks about having “eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear.”
Now the quote sent to us by a friend. It is from a book about Joan of Arc, called “Joan”, by Donald Spoto.
“There followed one of the most important moments of Joan’s trial, in which she spoke a basic tenet of universal spirituality:
Questioner: Do your voices and spirits stay with you for a long time? Joan: They often come to Christians who do not see them, and I have often been aware of them among Christian folk.
It is axiomatic that God does not play favorites. Joan of Arc is only one among many, one of the celebrated in history among those who made an enormous impact on the world and whose actions were predicated on an experience of God. Every true mystic, everyone who has known a fleeting experience of the eternal, knows that this world is interpenetrated with that of the spirit. God is not distant; those who have died are in God and are therefore not distant. The world of angels, spirits and saints is but one sort of hierophantic language to describe the real presence of another world, beyond but in the midst of our own.
This is not to speak of necromancy or bogus spiritualism; it is to affirm that everything in the world belongs to God, who manifests [Himself] in and through creation but is neither defined nor limited by it. “Voices and spirits often come to Christians who do not see them.” That is a wise indictment of spiritual torpor, a failure to ‘hear’ and to ‘see’ the truth that, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
Can you put these thoughts together — Peter, hearing voices, universal spirituality? Maybe we need a touch of madness to have the ears to hear and the eyes to see.
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