This lady's FOR turning

Further to the topic of turning I happened recently upon a most enjoyable and enlightening interview on CBC with the theologian, Richard Kearney [available here and about an hour long. He's Irish, widely read and a pleasure to listen to.] The topic of the talk is anatheism, a word I'd never come across. The prefix 'ana', from the Greek, means something along the lines of to go up/back/again; it encompasses the actions of re-turn and re-peat and re-member. The book on which the talk is based can be previewed here and you will see that the subtitle is 'Returning to God after God'. Kearney holds that atheism is part of religion, the part that embraces the absence of God. I find I can go along with him because I appreciate that he addresses the question of the ways trauma influences the life of faith. At some time in life, for many of us, God may (and perhaps should!) become a stranger, we may encounter a dark night of the soul, or possibly even come to an experience of the extreme in the so called 'death of God.' What, where and how are we to be once our lives have been ruptured?

Kearney communicates the dynamic of the Absence and Presence of God using the metaphor of dance . . .  and my imagination filled with images of the passion of flamenco, that wild, strict, strong, sad and fierce form, rather than anything conventional, pretty and 'nice'. [Listened to an interview with this photographer the other day, Lena Herzog, and you can take a look at her flamenco pix here]

I also thought of the beautiful Sufi form of prayer, the zikr. I did not know that the word meant remembrance in Persian: beautiful. Turning, revolving, is a fundamental condition of our existence.

There is no being which does not revolve and spiral and whirl -- from the dance of our deepest atoms, to the circulation of our blood, from our soft spinning on the planet to the far flung spiral galaxies' splashing out in space.

From Daniel Ladinsky's translation of Hafiz's poetry called The Gift, these few verses from the poem, ZIKR:

Remembrance lowers the cup into

His luminous sky-well.

The mind often becomes plagued and can deny
The all-pervading beauty
Of God

When the great work of zikr
Is forgotten.

I have chained my every dancing atom
Into a divine seat in the Beloved's Tavern.

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