Convention

My father was born in Atlanta, Georgia at the end of Summer and the Great Depression in 1940. After time at both SMU and Baylor, he’d go on to earn a Doctorate in Theology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary working as Assistant Pastor uner Reverend W.A. Criswell at First Baptist, Dallas. Dad spoke Greek and Hebrew at the dinner table, and told the kind of jokes you had to think about for a minute.

But you’d always laugh.

Cary Heard loved Gary Larson’s The Far Side. A connoisseur of stories and anecdotes, it’s safe to say these were his stock-in-trade. And when I say he knew stories, I should be more clear because Dad knew so well how to tell them. This quality, rare from what I can tell, translated into so many things; scripture, not the least among them. In fact, such a skilled interpreter of scripture was my father that at one time or another during my childhood, he presided over a statewide convention of Southern Baptists numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

A gifted teacher, my father’s wit and humor cut straight through political and social red tape. It had to. Picture a room filled with folks hopped up on emotional, evangelical Christianity. There were issues. Always. And people came to my father for advice on everything from how to buy a car to how to tell their children they weren’t in love with each other anymore. Not easy. I got to watch Dad walk people through unimaginable, even hopeless situations. He dealt in ideas and modes of thought which were by no means commonplace, and he encouraged me by way of his example and reputation to remain open to things I didn’t enjoy and couldn’t understand.

Sometime in mid-thirties, with my father in his study, I was rummaging through the stacks in his library and came upon an old, ornate copy of The Qur’an. When I asked how it ended up in his collection, he explained it had belonged to my Uncle Bill, indicating the handmade ‘Ex Libris’ tag in the front which bore his exquisite calligraphy. Standing there, with it open in my hands for the first time, I remembered seeing it in Bill’s library as a boy. As an aside: other items in Bill Mabry’s library included authentic Roman Centurion battle armor, complete with helmet and sword, and the tail of a tiny African deer bound as the hair atop what I can only assume was a totem depicting extraterrestrial beings who visited The Gambia c. 3,500 B.C. The way that room smelled; Persian wool in bright rectangular patterns on top of original dark hardwood floors, vaulted ceiling, more light than necessary, and enough large, well-established plants to invoke an ecosystem.

Bill Mabry, who Dad asked to come from Shreveport to join him on staff at Park Hill Baptist in North Little Rock, was an author and poet. I looked up to him if for no other reason than he was my father’s closest friend. The kind of teacher who didn’t need to speak much, Bill was soft-spoken and easy to talk to because you could just tell he was listening. His calligraphy was widely known and highly valued in our community, as were his stained glass pieces. Our home was filled with Bill’s work. He lived a lifestyle that seemed to always have him returning - coming home - back from somewhere I’d never heard of with books and art and stories. Bill spent most of his life looking for inspiration and insight well beyond the borders of any sort of canonical religious text. In so doing, he wandered deep into the heart of traditions I’d always thought were out of bounds. So when Dad told me Bill would want me to have his Qur’an, if there is a better example of a young man holding what he knows is a treasure but one which he simply cannot fathom, I’d love to see it.

♫ One Thing / one thing..
leads to another ♫

Almost a decade later, I would come to consider the following story a treasure of the highest value in every sense. How I came to it owes much to men like my father and his closest friends. Here is a story which draws its lineage from the whole of human religious thought. Its narrator in this instance, Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi, spoke these words aloud to his scribe, Husam al-Din Chalabi c. 1250 in Konya, Turkey. He uses the framework of Islam to anchor its threads. If you know anything of Mevlana’s teaching you’ll hear him teasing Husam with the idea that their faith traditions, all but dictated to them by geography and the times in which they lived, are nothing but posts on which to hang garments or as many wet towels. At the end of the day, Rumi comes from the crossroads of Buddhism and Christianity as much as he does from Islam. His Afghan heritage is rife with Buddhist teachings and folklore, and anyone who reads his Mathnawi is well aware he was a follower of Christ. I felt at home in his words. Today I fancy my father, a Southern Baptist Minister of some thirty years, hiding copies of the Qur’an and other extant apocryphal texts, poems, and stories in his library as such treasures for me to find when I was ready and able to receive them.

The Gazelle

A hunter captures a gazelle
and puts it in the stable
with the cows and donkeys.

The gazelle runs about wild with fear
and confusion.

Every night the man pours out chopped-up straw
for the barn animals.
They love it, but the gazelle can’t eat it.
She shies away - nervously pacing
from side to side in the big stall,
trying to get away from the smokey dust
of the straw and the animals milling to eat it.

Whoever has been left for a time
with those who are different
will know how forsaken
this gazelle feels.

Solomon loved the company of the hoopoe.

“Unless she has a valid excuse to be absent,
I will punish her for not being here
with the worst punishment there is.”

And what might that be?

What the gazelle is going through:

to be confined somewhere
apart from your own kind.

The soul is that way in the body!
A royal falcon trooping with crows.
It sits here and endures what it must,
like a great saint, like an Abu Bakr,
in the city of Sabzawar.

Once the great King Muhammed Khwarizm
beseiged Sabzawar. They gave up easily.

“Whatever you require as tribute we will give.”

”Bring me a holy person,
someone who lives united with God,
or I will harvest your inhabitants like corn.”

They brought sacks of gold. 
They knew no one in Sabzawar lived in that state.

“Do you think I am still a child
that I should be fascinated with coins?”

For three days and nights
they called through the town
looking for an Abu Bakr.

Finally, they saw a traveler
lying in a ruined corner of a wall,
sick and exhausted.

Immediately, they recognized a True Person.

“Get up!  The king wants to see you.
You can save our lives!”

“I'm not supposed to be here.
If I could walk, I would already have arrived
in the city where my friends are.”

They lifted him above their heads on a board
like corpses are carried on
and bore him to the king.

Sabzawar is this world,
where a True Person wastes away,
apparently worthless,
yet all the king wants from Sabzawar
is such a one. 

Nothing else will do.

Muhammad says:

“God does not look at outward forms,
but at the love within your love.”

The Qalb, the inner heart,
that space in which seven hundred universes
are just a lost speck,
we're looking for that in the small,
seedy town of Sabzawar! 

And sometimes we find it.

One who has that love is a six-sided mirror
through which God can look at us, here.

The gifts come through such a one.
His palm opens without conditions.
That union cannot be said.

I leave this subject with you.

Wealthy people bring money.
God says:

“Bring devotion to one
whose loving mixes with mine.”

That love is what God wants.
That love is a mother and a father to us
and is the origin of every creature.

Adapted from Persian by Coleman Barks