Hajj – Pilgrims All

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

November 6, 2011

 

Reading:  “Mecca,” from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, pp. 346-348.

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by peo­ple of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham Muhammad, and all the other prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.

"I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca. I have made my seven circuits around the Ka’ba, led by a young mutawaf named Muhammad. I drank wine from the well of Zem Zem. I ran seven times back and forth between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al-Marwah.  I have prayed in the ancient city of Mina, and I have prayed on Mt. Arafat.

"There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.

“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Through­out my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered 'white'—but the 'white' attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all, … irrespec­tive of their color….

"During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug)—while praying to the same God—with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the 'white’ Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana….

“I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man--and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their ‘differences’ in color….

"Each hour here in the Holy Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white. The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities—he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites. But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the ex­periences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spir­itual path of truth—the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to….

"All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of all the Worlds.”

Sermon: Hajj – Pilgrims All                              -Rev. Paul Sprecher

The Hajj – the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – is one of the five pillars of Islam and is obligatory once during the lifetime of each Muslim who is physically able and can afford to do so.  It is the largest and best-organized pilgrimage in the world today and probably in the history of the world, drawing at least two million worshippers each year.  Today is the most sacred day of this year’s Hajj, Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, celebrated as part of the Hajj but also as a major holiday all around the Muslim world.  This feast remembers and celebrates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice Ismael at God’s command, Ismael’s willingness to be sacrificed, and God’s provision of a cow as a substitute for the sacrifice of the son.  (Jewish tradition holds that Abraham was instructed to sacrifice Isaac, ancestor of the Jews, and that a ram was substituted.  Islamic tradition asserts that it was Ismael, their progenitor.)

While the hajj is the largest and one of the most familiar of pilgrimages, the notion of the sacred journey is common in many religious traditions.  Most of us learned in high school or college about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, an account of a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.  The pilgrims of whom Chaucer writes prove to be neither particularly righteous nor particularly pious.  There are also perpetual pilgrims and mendicants in almost every religious tradition in the world – like the dervish Fatih in our story for all ages this.  Even Unitarian Universalists have pilgrimages.

I served as ministerial intern at Arlington Street Church just before being called here to Second Parish five years ago.  During the time I was there, we frequently hosted groups of Unitarian Universalist teenagers who were traveling to Boston to see the birthplace of Unitarianism.  Arlington Street Church was a favorite stop on this pilgrimage because the church itself is beautiful and intriguing but also because William Ellery Channing served the congregation at the time he gave his famous Baltimore sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity” and thus launched Unitarianism as a distinct movement in 1819.  Even better than the sanctuary, though, is the bell tower, a unique draw for any teenager.  You have to climb up some difficult stairs to get up to the floor from which to play the bells, but once you get there you are in a world quite different from the rest of the church.  You can play anything on those bells; we had many songs annotated with the number of the bell rope to pull to play the tune.  One of my mentors, George Whitehouse – community minister at Arlington Street – used to love playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to celebrate important Red Sox victories.  If the kids were really adventurous (and seemed like a trustworthy bunch) we would take them even higher, up still more challenging stairs, all the way up to the bells themselves and the giddily high room at the very top of the tower with a view of all of Boston laid out before you.  I got to tag along quite a bit – and lead some of these tours myself – because you had to go through my office to get to the bell tower.

My time as ministerial intern at Arlington Street Church and also at the Church of the Larger Fellowship – located at the Unitarian Universalist Association’s headquarters at 25 Beacon Street – was something of a pilgrimage for me as well.  I had long admired Channing and I also wanted to see how Unitarian Universalism was practiced in its home city.  Directly across from the front doors of Arlington Street Church stands a statue of Channing himself in the Public Garden.  The church has one of those high pulpits so common in New England, and preaching from there was quite a unique experience.  Every time I served as preacher on a Sunday, I would walk to the front doors, look toward the statue across the street and ask, “So, Bill, did I do OK?”  He never answered, but I mostly felt he would have approved.

The essence of a pilgrimage is to go to or to find a place that speaks to you, whether through its physical presence or the presence of a person or people there who pull you away from your ordinary life toward something new, different, and probably surprising and unsettling – something like what Dinar was seeking as he set off to find his secret, hidden teacher.  The journey often requires laying aside the things in our lives that give us status vis a vis others in our lives and communities.  Thus, upon arrival in Mecca, the pilgrim puts on what is called the “garment of consecration,” which consists solely of two pieces of unsown cloth and covers all parts of the body except the face, hands and feet.  This simple garb eliminates all rank, all difference of status or wealth, and contributes to the sense of universal humanness that Malcolm X wrote of in his account of the hajj:

…we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.[i]

 A pilgrimage often includes rigorous self-discipline. Thus on this day of the hajj, pilgrims must fast all day after sleeping in a tent city overnight; they must stand (if they are able) from noon to sundown on Mt. Arafat, where Muhammad delivered his farewell address; and then they stay awake all night preparing for the symbolic stoning of Satan the next morning. 

Pilgrimage occurs in many religious traditions.  Forrest Church tells the story of the most famous Christian pilgrimage this way:

The greatest travelogue of the soul in English literature is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s pilgrim is named Christian. His quest is for salvation, to flee worldly snares and fleshly distractions and secure eternal bliss in the great Hereafter. Christian makes it to Heaven, but not without many adventures along the way. He struggles through the famous (if unpronounceable) Slough of Despond; ascends the Hill of Difficulty; traverses the Valley of Humiliation; battles with pagan, pope, and demon; plucks up his courage in crossing the Valley of the Shadow of Death; and survives, most notably and memorably, the many attractions of that great city Vanity, with its unsurpassed fair [to arrive at last at the Celestial City].[ii]

Sometimes the journey of the pilgrim is solitary; sometimes it is in company.  Always its goal is transformation, insight, a new start, an opportunity to see the world with new eyes.  Sometimes the journey takes a lifetime, as it does for Christian in “Pilgrim’s Progress.  Similarly, wandering Christian monks, Hindu and Muslim fakirs and Muslim dervishes like Rumi or Fatih in our story for all ages spend a lifetime on pilgrimage, always seeking and finding new insight, new ways of seeing and understanding, new wisdom.  They often choose to pass what they have learned on to others.  Pilgrimage always involves a journey inward that is made possible by leaving the familiar and taking an outward journey.  

Many of the events of the hajj recall events in the life of the patriarch Abraham, founding father of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.  According to Muslim tradition, Abraham and his oldest son Ismael constructed the Ka’ba, the holiest site in Mecca around which many of the events of the hajj are centered.  The first event of the hajj is to make seven circuits around the Ka’ba counterclockwise.  Pilgrims run seven times between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al-Marwah to commemorate the desperate quest of Abraham’s concubine Hagar as she sought water for her son Ismael after Abraham abandoned both of them in the desert.  The hajjis then drink wine at the well of Zem Zem, which was miraculously revealed to Hagar by God so that she and her son could survive.  They cast pebbles at three rocks where according to tradition Ismael was tempted by Satan to run away from the sacrifice God demanded of him and Abraham.  They also honor the memory of Muhammad by standing at the site of his farewell address from noon to nightfall while fasting.  All of these rituals remind the pilgrims of the foundations of Islam and enable them to participate in the most fundamental events of their religious history and thereby confirm and strengthen their faith.

Journeys of pilgrimage are difficult and demanding, and there is a natural temptation to avoid the hardship and just get on to the destination.  Dinar in our children’s story this morning is constantly impatient, pressing ahead toward his goal of finding his hidden, inner teacher, all the while ignoring the wisdom Fatih is conveying to him in the course of the journey.

Ah, yes, the easy way to get to the end of the journey without obstacles.  Nathaniel Hawthorne retells and modernizes the story of Bunyan’s account in Pilgrim’s Progress by imagining an easy journey that is to lead much more directly to the destination, the Celestial City.  Here’s a gloss of Hawthorne’s revision of the story, which is named “The Celestial Rail-road”:

The enterprising citizens of the City of Destruction constructed a railroad between this flourishing town and the Celestial City. Think of the advantages. First, one doesn’t have to shoulder one’s burden; it can be placed in the baggage compartment. And they built a bridge over the Slough of Despond. Hawthorne’s guide ("Mr. Smooth-it-away") describes how they turned this slough, a disgrace to all the neighborhood, into a foundation sufficient for the bridge’s pylons: "by throwing into the slough some editions of books of morality, volumes of French philosophy and German rationalism, tracts, sermons, and essays of modern clergymen, extracts from Plato, Confucius, and various Hindu sages, together with a few ingenious commentaries upon texts of Scripture—all of which, by some scientific process, have been converted into a mass like granite…."

They cut a tunnel through the Hill of Difficulty and used the excavated dirt as landfill for the Valley of Humiliation….  The Valley of the Shadow of Death is blocked from view by a quadruple row of klieg lights lining each side of the tracks. These lamps cast a somewhat eerie glow but keep passengers diverted from having to contemplate the stark reminders of mortality that litter the valley below.

Most marked of all, at least in Hawthorne’s view, are the pilgrims themselves.

“By the aspect and demeanor of these persons it was easy to judge that the feeling of the community had undergone a very favorable change in reference to the Celestial pilgrim-age. It would have done Bunyan’s heart good to see it. Instead of a lonely and ragged man with a huge burden on his back, plodding along sorrowfully on foot while the whole city hooted after him, here were parties of the first gentry and most respectable people in the neighborhood setting forth towards the Celestial City as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage were merely a summer tour….  There was much pleasant conversation about the news of the day … while religion, though indubitably the main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the back-ground.”

There was only one downside to this wonderful railroad. Though it simplified the religious journey in oh so many ways—offering shortcuts and sparing travelers the giddy heights and echoing depths of experience and consciousness, as well as all troublesome pangs of conscience—one problem remained. Its final stop was not Heaven, as promised. It was Hell.[iii]

A pilgrimage is above all a journey of the soul.  It reminds us that we are human, all too human, and that our journey will end at a destination that we can, at least to some extent, aim ourselves toward. 

So where does your spirit need to journey?  How might you travel toward the destination of listening to your hidden, inner teacher?  What mountaintop would reveal to you the essence of your life, would allow you to see with new eyes?  The notion of finding God on the mountaintop goes back to ancient times.  The image evoked is of a God above the clouds, loftily disconnected from the petty affairs of everyday life.  But perhaps, even as you ascend to the heights on your pilgrimage, God is coming down from the mountain to participate in our lives here on earth.  That is, of course, the foundational story of Christianity, that Jesus came down from the heavens and became completely human in order to experience what it’s really like to live in this world. 

And so the journey, the pilgrimage, ultimately leads back to where we started from; as T.S. Eliot puts it,

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our explaining

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.[iv]

With this cleansing of the doors of perception made possible by our exploring, our wandering, our pilgrimage, we may be ready – in the words of William Blake:

To see the world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

The destination toward which we aim provides a distant goal for the journey, but it is only by taking the journey itself the hard way, removing ourselves from the accoutrements of everyday living, and listening, listening with all our heart to what the journey has to teach us on the way that we achieve the true meaning of pilgrimage.

May we be blessed as we travel the journey that is our life.

Amen.

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