We'd like to share with you a testimony by a brother who attended the 2009 Las Vegas retreat:
"Thank you for being open and for inviting me in to experience something that is deeply personal and could have subjected you to judgment or scorn from someone whose heart and intentions you barely knew. Please extend my gratitude to all of the brothers that I met and their families (despite that their names have been lost in the whirlwind of memories I have from the weekend). Each made me feel so welcome and warm among you despite vast differences between our cultures and upbringing. The reality is that the experience that I had at your retreat, despite only attending the limited amount that I did, opened my eyes to something beautiful and spiritually moving. The truth is that there is one god and that god is Allah. There is not one Christian god and another for Muslims; the one god is the god of ALL people, and the people do not define god, but he creates all of us.
So I was happy to discover that the practices I have devoutly held myself to (sometimes to the scorn of people who would claim to be my Christian brothers) have a parallel in Islamic Sufism. I asked you a number of questions this weekend to flesh out a little bit the depths of your spirituality, and upon each point, there was no difference between what I believe and practice and what you do other than differences in the words we use and slight diversities between the details of the practices to express the same profound base principles. I also lack the guidance of the Qur'an, which somehow I believe God has been whispering into my heart throughout my life, and I am thrilled to prepare my soul for it.
One of my guiding principles is based upon a teaching of Jesus where he said to the leaders of the Jewish synagogues at the time (and by reflection to anyone engaging in a religious practice):
"You blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Woe unto you hypocrites! You make the outside of the cup and of the platter clean, but within they are full of extortion and excess. You blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also."
I found the dhikr you practice to be a validation of all of my own exercises to cleanse my "inner cup and platter" and to focuse my spiritual eye to the singular glory of Allah. I have yet to pick up the Qur'an, but I am regularly focusing myself in prayer and repeating as many times as I can throughout the day "La ila ha ila Allah." I am attempting to get to the point that (even though I don't have prayer beads) I can count my devotion to God by my pulse beating All-ah, All-ah, All-ah at approximately 60 beats per minute. I believe this experience and the love of those friends I found seeking the same experience, who called me "Brother Benjamin," will guide me to not only look over the table of the feast that is Islam but to be able to (again, as Jesus said) "feast upon the word." I want to bite in to the Qur'an, taste it, and savor it until my soul is full of its nutrients. I do not intend to approach it like a McDonald's Happy Meal. Thank you for having the humility to be moved by Allah through a long series of seemingly random events that are leading me to whatever purpose he has for me. I continue to say thank you, but the truth is that the praise belongs to Allah, and I humbly ask that you pass along to the others who shared in guiding me this past weekend my sincerest appreciation for their devotion to the one and only god of all the universe, the merciful, righteous, creator of ALL of us (Christian and Muslim-born alike), who can count each of us like the beads you carry with you, and each of us is special to him. Praise be to Allah."
* Brother Benjamin *
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