An old Sufi story tells of how Mulla Nasrudin was sitting in a tea shop one day when a friend came excitedly to speak with him.
wisdom from the Desert Mothers & Fathers
An old Sufi story tells of how Mulla Nasrudin was sitting in a tea shop one day when a friend came excitedly to speak with him.
‘I’m about to get married, Mulla,’ his friend said, ‘and I’m very excited. Mulla, have you ever thought of marriage yourself?’
Mulla Nasrudin replied, ‘I did think of getting married. In my youth, in fact, I very much wanted to do so. I waited to find the perfect wife. I travelled looking for her, first to Damascus. There I met a beautiful woman who was gracious, kind, and deeply spiritual, but she had no worldly knowledge. I travelled further and went to Isfahan. There I met a woman who was both spiritual and worldly, beautiful in many ways, but we did not communicate well. Finally I went to Cairo and there, after much searching, I found her. She was spiritually deep, graceful, and beautiful in every respect, at home in the world and at home in the realms beyond it. I felt I had found the perfect wife.’
His friend questioned further, ‘Then did you not marry her, Mulla?’ ‘Alas,’ said Mulla Nasrudin, shaking his head, ‘she was, unfortunately, waiting for the perfect husband.’
The perfect ‘something’
We can spend a great deal of time waiting for the perfect meditation, for the perfect moment of prayer. Which is why we spend a good deal of time in these sessions reminding ourselves that prayer is not primarily something we do, but something God does, within us and for us, at a depth we cannot see.
Prayer, says St. John of the Cross, happens ‘secretly…hidden from the faculties…so hidden that the mind cannot speak of it.’ (1) This is why we cannot and should not try to judge our practice, and should try to avoid getting caught up in worries about whether we are praying correctly.
The wisdom and healing processes of meditation – indeed of all prayer – take place at the deepest level of our being, largely out of sight. In meditation, we commit ourselves to a future we cannot see or know, so trust is essential. As St. Paul puts it, ‘we walk by trust, not by sight,’ by what is seen (2 Corinthians 5:7).
Wisdom from the Desert Mothers and Fathers
If we find ourselves, like Nasrudin, waiting for the perfect something – for the perfect meditation session, for the perfect moment of prayer – we can find great help and encouragement in the sayings of the Desert Mothers and Fathers.
These contemplatives of the early Christian centuries had very little to say about visions, miraculous blasts of light-filled insight, or spiritual highs – except to suggest great caution, or even to reject them, as in this lovely saying:
A tempting, prideful thought appeared to a monk disguised as an angel of light, and said to him, ‘I am the angel Gabriel, and I have been sent to you.’ But the monk said, ‘Are you sure you weren’t sent to someone else? I am not worthy to have an angel sent to me.’
At that moment the tempting, prideful thought vanished.
In another saying, the brothers standing around the bed of Abba Sisoes as he was dying saw that his lips were moving:
‘Who are you talking to, father?’ they asked.
‘See,’ he replied, ‘the angels have come to take me, and I am asking them for more time—more time to grow.’ His disciples said, ‘You have no need.’ But the old man said, ‘Truly, I am not sure whether I have even begun…’
In the eyes of his spiritual children, he was already perfect; but in his own eyes he was still at the very beginning.
Abba Theodorus is recorded as saying:
With a modest mind and a humble heart, let us repeat over and again the prayer that the great saint Arsenios used to offer to the Lord:
‘My God…because you are compassionate, grant me the power to make a start…’
How might we summarise their wisdom?
Again and again they offer the same simple, compassionate advice. Take time each day to centre in the heart. Watch over the movements of the mind and passions. Rest in God when you need to. It is enough to just begin and keep beginning, trusting that God will take care of you.
You might have noticed that when healing miracles happen in the Gospels, Christ doesn’t say, ‘I healed you,’ but ‘your trust has healed you.’ ‘Your trust has made you whole.’ (2)
Perhaps perfection is not a final thing or state to be achieved, but an endless beginning, an endless opening and unfolding within the infinite love we call God.
This blog is based on one of the teachings given in a recent online meditation group gathering. You are warmly welcome to join one of our future gatherings.