Before I begin I want to acknowledge last night's horrific incident at the city's Lapu Lapu Day festival, and send love and prayers most especially to Vancouver's Filipino community. The spirit of bayanihan, communal unity and cooperation, cannot be quenched. In the face of fear and despair, let us instead take a page from our Filipino friends, who feed, nurture, and enrich our community in more ways than we can ask or imagine, and choose hope, love, and bayanihan.
Back in 2022, I spent the season of Lent studying the proto-Sufi fable known as Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr, popularly known in English as The Conference of the Birds. Composed in the 1100s by the poet Farid ud-Din Attar of Nishapur in classical Persian, this incredible story details the journey of the birds of the world to find their king, the phoenix-like mythical Simorgh. They are led by the wise hoopoe, a bird found across Eurasia with an impressive black and white crest on its head, which in the Qur’an is said to have been a gift to the bird from King Solomon.
The whole story is a parable of the soul’s journey to find God, and the great hardship that must be endured on the way.
“When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ ...The next day Jesus...found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’”
The story opens with the birds gathering together yearning for leadership, as our poor abandoned disciples do in their locked room. The hoopoe, who stands in for a sheikh or spiritual teacher, proclaims that he knows where to find the leader they seek, but he cannot go alone.
Or maybe he will not. After all, he says to them, in a translation from the Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpé, “What use is existence without the Beloved?”
The birds are fascinated by the hoopoe’s stories of the Simorgh, and while many of them are willing to go, one by one they start to find excuses not to.
“Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
The hoopoe shoots down every excuse. Nothing is worth missing out on this incredible opportunity to come face to face with the Beloved.
“You will see greater things than these.”
His conviction is such that the birds elect him as their leader, and choose to begin the journey. They then find themselves terrified of their own perceived inadequacies: weakness, sinfulness, ambivalence, pride, greed, fear of death.
The hoopoe waves all of these away. “Mistakes abound in this world – add this one to the list. If you have done wrong, the door of penitence is open wide, so go and repent. This door never closes.”
The birds go on to travel through seven valleys, each one more mysterious and difficult than the last. All throughout the story the hoopoe, like every good spiritual teacher, especially ours, is offering parables.
There were two that were on my mind as I read the story of poor Thomas yet again.
Some of you have heard both me and Stuart Mennigke share the story of Majnun and Layla, the epic love story Lord Byron called “the Romeo and Juliet of the East.” The name Majnun means “possessed by djinn,” or, for lack of a better word, crazy. Majnun began as an ordinary youth, growing up with the beautiful Layla as a schoolmate, but became progressively more mad with love for her, making their union impossible as her family will not allow it, despite her love for him as well. Sufis use the story of Majnun and Layla as a cipher for the soul’s desperate longing for God.
Some of you may remember Stuart telling the story of Majnun lying on the ground picking through the dirt. A passerby asks him what he’s doing, and he says, “I’m seeking Layla.” When the passerby says this makes no sense, because Layla couldn’t possibly be there, Majnun says “I seek Layla everywhere on the chance that I may find her somewhere.” This little story is one of the parables told by the hoopoe.
I believe that Thomas stands firmly in this tradition. Rather than hiding away with his fellow disciples in a room locked out of fear, I like to imagine Thomas is...somewhere, presumably howling for his missing beloved, searching through the dust and dirt.
There is another parable that cements this association for me, and helps me to hear this story of Thomas not as a story of shame and doubt, but as a story of deep spiritual enlightenment, through the practice of holy audacity, a characteristic the hoopoe calls essential for seeking the Beloved.
When the birds – spoiler alert – finally arrive at the court of the Simorgh, as Wolpé translates, “bodies without wings or feathers, feeble and sore, hearts shattered, souls surrendered,” the angelic herald at the door chastises them for arriving filthy and ragged, and tells them if they come inside, they will be burned away into nothing. The birds respond, “Even though union with the Beloved may not be our fortune, at least the burning is ours.”
They then use a quote attributed to Majnun:
“Were all who live on earth to give me praise for an eternity, I would not want it. My beloved Layla’s curses are praise enough for me.”
When Thomas returns from picking through the dirt and hears that his fellow birds encountered their great Simorgh, he acts out of this same holy audacity.
“I won’t believe unless I see it for myself!”
Knowing what we know about Thomas, the one who said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him,” back in Chapter 11 when Jesus was set to go to Bethany, does it make sense to see his later pronouncement as an act of doubt?
Sure.
I also think it makes just as much sense to see it as “Come at me, lover.”
Why else would he get what he wanted? Jesus comes, and grants his request. He playfully chides Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Is this a scolding? Maybe.
It could also be a moment of unmitigated delight, imagining a future where disciples thousands of years separate from this teacher, disciples who believe in resurrection despite the advent of nuclear weaponry and genocide and planetary annihilation, are still just as wildly audacious in their love for him as his Thomas.
In his embarrassing, audacious love, Thomas teaches us that it is not in a far-off imagined Paradise garden of perfection that resurrection, wholeness, and healing come.
Rather it is in the blood and muck of today, the wailing and the swearing and the hopelessness.
It is in the flatline.
It is in the air raid siren.
It is in the fist pounding into the wall because there is nowhere for the scream to go where it will be answered.
It is in the “Lord already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.”
It is in the, “I will not believe. I cannot believe.”
Thomas understands. He was not there and he needs to see the nail marks. He insists upon it.
Only when he sees them does he understand: this is his beloved.
Once the birds have passed through the pain of the journey and the agony of love, they discover that, through a clever bit of wordplay, they themselves have become the Simorgh, the Beloved they seek. There is no longer any separation.
As they ponder how this could be possible, they hear,
“A mirror is the Beloved’s sun-like face.
Look into it and see both body and soul,
yourself, soul and body, you.”
A Jesus without nail marks is simply an apparition. A Jesus with them, is us.
There is no good news to be found in a perfect, gleaming white, polished saviour. The only thing that saves us is a wounded disabled God who looks like us.
When you come to the end of the story, the birds return from fana, spiritual annihilation, after ‘more than a hundred centuries,’ to a new, altered state that Sufis call baqa, which means, perpetual existence.
Maybe even, eternal life.
Attar writes,
“How can I even explain this?
A new book must be started.”
“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.”
Attar finishes his masterwork,
“I have said all I needed to say.
Now is the time for action.”
May this, too, be the prayer of this conference of birds. This story of eternal life is only just beginning.
