One aspect of my spiritual practice is something called “spiritual reading.” It’s a contemplative practice of slowly reading an inspirational text and allowing it to speak to or captivate me in some way.
When the pandemic began in Spring of 2020, I turned to The Revelations of Divine Love by 14th Century English mystic Julian of Norwich. The choice was somewhat obvious. Julian lived during the plague. Some scholars believe that she lost her family to the Black Death. In her grief, she chose to live in a small enclosure built on the side of the church in Norwich. In the midst of a different plague, having experienced significant loss, she opened her heart to the deep experience of Divine love.
Julian’s work is thick with rich imagery. It was helpful for me as I sorted through what the COVID 19 pandemic meant for my life. In those early months, I also sorted through many memories of my last pandemic experience: the 1980s and HIV/AIDS. At that time, many people I knew had died and the government provided no organized support for years. History was repeating itself.
I finished reading and reflecting on Julian’s words. I thought about what text I’d next use for spiritual reading and reflection. I looked at different books and they all seemed to be weighed down by guilt and sin. I needed something to nourish my soul as we moved into the long-haul of the pandemic. I knew people who were sick and some who had died. There was little I could do but take care of myself. My life had shrunk to my home and neighborhood. For many months, I have only left home for food shopping or an occasional drive.
That’s when I turned to the poetry of Hafiz, the Sufi Master. The collection of poetry I’ve read from is The Gift, a translation by Daniel Ladinsky. It’s a book I hadn’t touched in about twenty years. Hafiz, who lived at the time of Chaucer, was a Persian mystic who encountered the Divine in nature and in gatherings of people. One common image in his poetry is a metaphor for the Divine realm: a crowded tavern. Growing up in a blue-collar area where there was a church and a bar on nearly every corner, I could relate to the way Hafiz wrote about the tavern.
Hafiz is both comforting and challenging, provoking the reader to live fully while experiencing the Divine in the stars, and moon, and sun, and trees, and all of nature. He is passionate while rooted in the need for spiritual rigor. Above all, as a Sufi mystic, he understands life and the inter-connectedness of all things as a dance with the Divine.
A portion of one poem captures Hafiz’s simplicity and intensity. The poem is titled, “Now Is the Time.”
What is in the sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?
Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.
This is the time
For you to deeply compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.
Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.
Hafiz has helped me to remember that even in the small routines of my day, when the only person I speak to in real life is my partner, everything I do remains sacred. It is grace. While the pandemic continues and vaccine roll-out is slow, what incites fear? But Hafiz is clear: even in the waiting for the pandemic to subside, everything is sacred. This, too, is a moment of grace.
Photo by Noah-Silliman on Wunderstock