Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Feast of the Holy Name - Saturday, January 1, 2022
A few years ago, a friend invited me to join a Sufi prayer service in New York. The service—called zhikr, which means “remembrance”—consists in large part in chanting the divine names. After the traditional salat prayers, made in the direction Mecca, about thirty of us gathered in a circle. Facing one another, the sheikha began by intoning, very gently, la illaha illa’ llah. There is no God but God. Or, put more literally and mystically, there is nothing but God. We repeated the phrase back to her, la illaha illa’ llah and began to move our heads and then our bodies very slowly to the left and then back to center. Gradually the chant picked up in volume and pace. It got loud and declarative—there is nothing but God—then soft and sweet again: there is nothing but God. This movement back and forth, up and down, must have gone on for ten minutes or so, before flowing into another of the divine names, and still another, and still another, until it seemed we were all caught up together into the heart of God.
I have never, at any other time, experienced anything like that evening of prayer. It was timeless. For the space of our chanting, swaying, and eventually dancing, we were all joined to one another and to God, and time ceased to flow around us. It was both a remembering of our essential unity with God and one another, and a time of forgetting anything but our bodies, our breath, and the humming connection between the particles of our being.
Pir Ziya Inayat-Khan, the head of the Inayat Sufi order, explains zhikr this way:
“The essential practice in Sufism is ‘zikr,’ which means remembrance—remembrance of God, remembrance of the source and goal of all being, remembrance of our true home… Flowing endlessly from this One the Sufi discovers a force, an emotion, which will not fit into the narrow boxes of human language. The closest we can come to naming it is to speak of ‘love.’ There is no higher calling than to make one’s life a pure channel for this primal force, the compassion and yearning that has given rise to all that is. Sufism is the path of purification and remembrance by which the heart is made its vessel.”1
Although the tradition is much quieter and smaller in Christianity than in Islam, we, too, have practices of praying the divine name. Best known is certainly the Jesus Prayer, which, in its fullest version goes like this: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. This prayer is not mere confession. Nor is it only or primarily an act of contrition or a call for forgiveness. Its goal is not to comfort, but to unite the soul with God. Those who have prayed the Jesus prayer for decades attest that it eventually settles so deeply into the heart, that the heart calls out its love to Jesus every moment of every day. This ancient prayer is said to draw the person back to God, to knit the two together, so that, as in zhikr, we remember that we have never been nor ever will be separate from the One we name.
The Sufis say that the name Allah is the name that contains all names. We could say the same of the name Jesus. While Paul reminds us that Jesus is the Name that is above every name we should not hear the word “above” in a hierarchical sense. No, Jesus is the name by which we call the Word of God, God’s very substance, in all its creative and mysterious depth, the Word made Flesh, the vast infinitude and mystery of the Godhead, made accessible to our love and our longing. Jesus is the face of God turned toward humankind, indeed toward all creation, to draw us ever deeper into the heart of God.
I used to really dislike what we call the Prayer of Humble Access, a now old-fashioned devotional prayer used at the time of Communion. But, as my brothers can tell you, my opinions are more strongly expressed than strongly held most of the time. I have come to find great depth and love buried in the words of that prayer, which I’ve modified and condensed to suit my own relationship with God. As I pray it, it goes like this: “O Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under the roof of my house, but only speak your Word in me, and my soul shall be healed.”
One day recently, the Lord caught me by surprise. The Spirit jumbled up the words I was whispering in heart, and I found the prayer emerging of its own will almost: “O Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under the roof of my house, but only speak my name in you, and your soul shall be healed.” I was asking God to speak my name in God’s soul, and praying for God’s soul to be healed. Tears welled up before I could feel ashamed and abashed at my impertinence, and I was able to rest in the gift and the truth of that prayer.
As much as our prayer is an approach to God, it is much more God’s approach to us. As Paul reminds us, we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes within us, with sighs too deep for words. Sighs that often sound like the name Jesus. As we pray the name of God, as we repeat our feeble Jesus over and over again, giving voice to our longing for God, just so God is chanting our name in her heart, crying out in longing and in love for each of us, drawing us nearer and nearer in her desire to be—in Julian’s wonderful phrase—“one-ed” to us again.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. You might say, in the beginning there was nothing but God—la illaha illa’ llah. Then God, “the prodigal who squanders himself” (in Karl Rhaner’s brilliant phrase) spoke the Word—the name Jesus—shattering the silence. Our own names, our very being, the flesh of our bodies and the ground beneath our feet, is the echo of that name reverberating throughout time and space. As we center ourselves in the name that is above and below and within every other name—Jesus—we can begin to remember once again that there is not now, nor has there ever been anything but God. God with us, God within us, God around us. Nothing but God.
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