Coming Closer to God (Page 2 of 4)

What I meant in my question was that do you plan to take it beyond the shores of the United States?
Yes, I will answer that. Murshida Duce laid at Baba’s feet an order of Sufism that had evolved from the Chishtiya lineage. This was a branch of Islamic Sufism that came from the Qutub of the thirteenth century, Moinuddin Chishti. Meher Baba wanted to pare away from it all ritual, dogma, tenets, practices, etc. that had accrued around that stream of Sufism in the seven centuries it had been flowing away from its source. He wanted to lay bare its core, which, in Baba’s words, is “love and longing for God.” Then he wanted to put himself at the centre of it. This fresh stream was to flow from him.
So in 1952, Sufism, which Baba renamed Sufism Reoriented, had an entirely fresh start. Its connections with the past were entirely severed and Sufism was to begin once again centered on praise and worship of the Avatar of this Age. So we have no connection whatsoever with Sufi…

Islamic…
Yes, Islamic groups. I probably know as little or even less about them than many others do.

But in terms of universalizing it, taking it beyond the shores of North America, is there a plan or a blueprint whereby you might want to take Sufism beyond the shores of North America and make it inclusive.
First, I don’t think of myself as laying plans or blueprints for Sufism. I think of our Order as being guided by Beloved Baba. We think of Baba laying the plans and charting the directions. And at this time we have had no call to extend ourselves in any way in that direction, either north up to Canada or south to South America.

Or to any other country.
Well, to any other country no, of course not, since Meher Baba chartered our school of Sufism for the American continent, very important to understand that it is for the American continent. So we, of course, don’t have any intent to do anything in another country. That isn’t the guidance that Baba has given us.

In the Charter again, in the Sufi Charter, Meher Baba termed the organization as the order of Sufism Reoriented. Yet today it is often called a school of spiritual mysticism. I am not very clear. Is Sufism Reoriented today functioning as a school or a spiritual order? And when I say a spiritual order, I am looking at the Sufi spiritual orders like the Chishtiya or some of the other Islamic spiritual orders where you have initiation and so forth. Is it functioning as a strict spiritual order or as a school of spiritual learning?
In my understanding those two concepts are not in conflict or mutually exclusive. The answer is we are both. We are chartered as both. I believe that all spiritual orders also provide instruction and nutrition for the growth of their members, whether it is St. Teresa’s Carmelite sisters in Avila, whether it is St. Francis’ brethren in Assisi or Nizamuddin Auliya and his students in Delhi. They all provide opportunities for students to come and ask questions and have them answered. They give talks or discourses to keep people meditating on Divinity, thinking about Him, taking His name and so forth. They have musical gatherings in which beautiful music is sung that carries the message that they want their students to remember. They publish books. St. Teresa wrote books about her experiences of the spiritual path so that her sisters could understand these processes.

Murshida Conner lights the dhuni at Meherabad assisted by her mureeds.

When new members come into Sufism Reoriented, do you initiate them? Is there an initiation process or a ceremony?
There is a provision in the Charter for initiation of new members. In the past we did have initiations. I, myself, was initiated as a new member. . .

…by Murshida Duce.
...yes, by Murshida Duce. It is a simple ceremony, nothing elaborate at all. In recent years we have initiated a few members but in the interest of keeping the boundaries of Sufism flexible and permeable we have moved away from general initiations. It seems helpful for people to be able to explore our Sufi path and then if they find that they are drawn back out into the world because of unfinished learning there, to freely leave without having to formally be uninitiated, so to speak.

My next question I think is very important. Since one of the precepts of active faith outlined in the Charter is to serve and strive for human brotherhood, universal fellow-feeling and world peace through spiritual enlightenment, does Sufism Reoriented have an outreach programme that could bring the organization in the forefront, in universal terms, specially working towards world peace in tangible terms?
Sufism Reoriented has for the past 30 years been pleased to invest a lot of energy in the Meher Schools in California. The Meher Schools is a preschool and elementary school with pre-care, after-care, and summer school that serves 380 children from the broader community. These are not Baba families. They are people from our general community. The purpose of the school is to infuse Meher Baba’s principles of the New Age of cooperation, harmony, brotherhood and love into childhood education. We feel this is an important project, one that we have cherished.

Is that a part of the curriculum in the Meher Schools?
One might ask, how does one do that? We don’t explicitly talk about Meher Baba but we try to live his principles at the school. We consciously support our staff in trying to live his principles of toleration, harmony, avoidance of lower motivational patterns of anger, criticalness and so forth, in their dealings with one another and in their dealings with children. We ask them never to criticize children or evaluate them, even when the children are not in their presence and to foster individual creativity rather than competitive learning in the children.

Very interesting.
We also try to structure learning in a way that fosters the idea of being part of a group rather than the isolated island of the separative ego. Children, for example, study at tables rather than individual desks – tables where they are all together and can talk with one another and ask questions of one another. When they present materials before the class instead of coming up one by one, they come up in little groups. And if one makes a mistake, they ask the others what the answer is. So they get used to associating cooperation with learning rather than competition.

Do you train the teachers before they start teaching the children?
The teachers…95% of the teachers are members of Sufism. So they learn these principles in their Sufi classes. They talk about them explicitly with one another at school. They try to formalize them by writing manuals that operationalize a bit on how they use those principles in the classroom.
Another way we imbue children with these principles is through the curriculum, which places a heavy emphasis on the arts, primarily song and drama. We have two children’s choruses at our school and produce two ambitious plays each year. Students of Sufism have written over 100 songs especially for the children at the Meher Schools that bring to life the principles of Baba’s New Humanity and many of the plays the children perform have been written for the same purpose. We hope to publish a songbook next year, illustrated by Diane Cobb, called Morning of My Life that brings together the favourites among these songs.

So this is one aspect of your outreach programme. Are there any others?
From time to time we have put out a book that is geared for the general public. Murshida Duce wrote a book called What Am I Doing Here? It was meant to capture the interest of people who live out in the world who are beginning to frame questions of a deeper nature about life — Why is there suffering? What is death? What happens after death? — these kinds of things. She felt that Meher Baba’s message answers many of these questions and that he wanted the world to know these truths.