February 2, 2025.
Dear Friends,
We will gather together remotely for our Badaliya and Peace Islands Institute faith sharing on Sunday, February 2. 2025 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm. Please join us on Zoom, or in spirit, as we encourage Inter-faith relations and pray together for the success of the fragile ceasefire agreements in Gaza and Lebanon, and an end to the on-going Israeli incursions by the IDF and settlers in the West Bank. We wait with hope for a peaceful transition to democracy in Syria as they negotiate with the diverse factions throughout the country after a long civil war. As violence continuous in far too many areas of the world may there finally be an end to war as a solution to conflict in the Ukraine, Haiti and the Sudan. Our prayers are on-going for all the victims of human-created violence as well as the increase of natural disasters due to climate change all over the world, including the devastating fires in Los Angeles. Let us continue to pray for the many humanitarian groups risking their own lives to offer much-needed aid.
We continue to live in as precarious a time as it was when the scriptural accounts were written, and before that when the earliest disciples experienced the events of Jesus' life. Just like us, the authors were telling and re-telling their experiences in order to fully grasp the spiritual meaning of the life of Christ and the amazing capacity that encountering Jesus had to transform their lives. In today's feast of the Presentation in the Temple Jesus is brought to Jerusalem to fulfill the Mosaic Law that every first born male child be consecrated to the Lord or offer a sacrifice of a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons. The prophetic voices in this story, however are of an old man named Simeon and an 84 year old widow named Anna. Each of them spent their days in the ancient Jerusalem Temple waiting for a miracle: Simeon, that he would not see death until he had seen the longed-for Messiah, the Christ, the salvation of Israel by Divine Love; The prophetess, Anna, who was a witness to the wonder of Simeon's recognition of Jesus and announced it to all who were awaiting this miracle.
But wait! The prophetic words of Simeon called this child "a light for revelation to the Gentiles" as well as "glory for your people Israel." Moreover turning to Mary, the child's mother, he declared, "Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted - and you yourself a sword will pierce - so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." (Luke 2:22-40)
This time in the Church calendar is called "Ordinary Time" and this feast day is perhaps placed here to indicate the every day realities of following the Mosaic Law at the time of Jesus as well as an invitation to glimpse the future vision of the Divine intention for Israel's Messiah who will offer salvation to all of humanity, Gentile and Jew alike. Moreover, this journey was going to be fraught with pain and suffering and cause division. This young mother, Mary, would experience the piercing heartbreak of her son's journey just as all of us will, revealing the hearts of far too many throughout human history who have, and will suffer the pain of loss and death due to envy, fear and injustice, violence, war and destruction, poverty and oppression; the all too human story of our time and of all time.
This leads us to the origins and meaning of the prayer movement that Louis Massignon and Mary Kahil established called Badaliya. I have written about this prayer of substitution many times in these letters, describing the Arabic root letters bdl from which the word Badaliya is formed and alluding to Massignon's association of the word with the Islamic Sufi tradition of Abdâl; those love mystics chosen by the Divine Lover of humanity to heal the wounds of the world by a selfless offering of their lives for the well-being of others. The seeds for this prayer movement were sown in the heart of Louis Massignon at the age of 17 when he met the well-known French writer and spiritual seeker, J-K Huysmans, well before Massignon's experience of the Muslim world, or his own dramatic faith experience, in the midst of the Islamic world, that drew him back to the Christian tradition of his youth.
Huysmans was writing the biography of the 14th century Dutch Saint Lydwine of Schiedam who Massignon would later identify as an example of an Abdâl. Huysmans envisioned a law of equilibrium, a mysterious balance of good and evil. He wrote: "All through the ages there have been saints willing to pay by their sufferings the ransom for the sins and faults of others, and even now this generosity is hard to understand. Like the needle of a compass, when the world inclines too much to the side of evil....God allows epidemics to be unchained, earthquakes, famines and wars.... but God's Mercy is such that He then excites the devotion of his saints.... that an equilibrium be re-established." (Buck. Dialogues p.38-39) He continued to suggest that so few are called to this vocation today that those of us who are not saints are being called upon "to learn to experience our own suffering as a mysterious offering of ourselves for the well-being of others."
Many years after this first encounter with Huysmans and Saint Lydwine, Massignon envisioned members of the Badaliya as called to offer themselves as a community of believers in Christ for the well-being of all Muslims and for the world. What this means is an openness to entering into the actual spiritual and psychological experience of our Muslim friends, of their own faith tradition, a "crossing over to the other", in Massignon's words. In Christianity, being baptized into Christ means becoming more and more transformed into the very life of Christ by the power of Divine Love as witnessed in the ministry of Jesus and the ultimate offering of his life for all of us.
J-K Huysmans struggled throughout his life to "throw a little light, however uncertain, on the dark and terrifying mystery of suffering." (ibid. p. 30) Medieval biographies of the saints often described their willingness to take on the pain and sufferings of others, to suffer in their place that they may be healed or even to prevent the destruction of cities by war or natural disasters due to their sacrificial offerings of themselves. Huysmans took St. Paul's words to heart that some souls were meant through the offering of their own suffering to make up for what is lacking in the Passion of Christ. Many of their bodies, like the Stigmatics, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Catherine of Sienna and St. Lydwine, were returned to youth and beauty after they died. Huysmans came to understand that this kind-of self-sacrifice was grounded in unconditional love for life, for the ability to see God in other human beings, by fully taking-in the unconditional Love of the Divine for all of humanity and offering it to others.
Today these stories of the medieval saints are quite foreign to the majority of us who live in the world of advanced technology and instant information. Words like, reparation, atonement and even self-sacrificial love and even sin and evil have become either archaic or politicized beyond their original depth of meaning. And yet, Huysman's struggle with human suffering and final understanding of a need for a mysterious balance of good and evil in the world is strikingly modern. That balance includes our internal conflicts as well as the external behaviors around us.
Massignon came to believe that Islam is a necessary and mysterious design of God in the journey toward fulness of life in Christ and essential for the church to fulfill its mission in the world. His 50 year research on the life and legacy of the 10th century mystic, martyr of Islam known throughout the Muslim world as al-Hallâj, the Love Mystic, reveals the mystery of Divine Love that invites us all to become lovers of Life, of one another. But it is also a call to self-sacrifice, a de-centering of the Self in order to cross over to others and even to offer oneself in their place out of love when they may be threatened. Those are the Abdâl like al- Hallâj or Martin Luther King Jr, and Paolo Dall-Oglio SJ, Father Christian de Chérgé and the six other Monks of Tibhirine and so many others standing on the side of peace with justice, the primacy of Love over Death.
"Mystical substitution" is a spiritual journey of becoming love, compassion, humility and justice in our world.....This implies a "substitution that not only transforms the individual but also affects friends, family, community and ultimately society itself..... to substitute oneself for a non-Christian is to assume a posture of welcome and respect of his/her values, without trying to Christianize or transform his/her own faith. This is an inner process that allows us to clearly appreciate the wisdom and qualities that other traditions bring to the world. In living the values of another, even if they are not Christian, we become capable of incarnating, embodying within ourselves, a profound sense of human solidarity that goes beyond religious differences...In the mystic's vision, human souls are not isolated, but profoundly interconnected in a transcendent reality. Thus, that which one carries or offers - whether it be their suffering or their virtues - can be shared or communicated to others. This relies on a vision of unity in love and charity where each person can contribute to the spiritual good of everyone else."
I believe the call to Badaliya goes beyond our human capacity for empathy and allows us to truly experience what so many are experiencing today; to be emotionally tuned-in, capable of weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice because we feel what others are feeling too. Badaliya is a courageous calling to risk all that we are for the sake of our common humanity, the fullness of life in the Divine imagination.
Peace to you and yours,
Dorothy
See www.dcbuck.com for all past letters to the Badaliya and Peace Islands