Here in Aberdeen I work in child­care. When it’s bed­time, I tell the chil­dren sto­ries about Nar­nia. Some­times I also tell sto­ries that I have made up, and we come up with new ideas togeth­er. This always involves a large amount of mag­ic and fan­ta­sy. Sto­ries about strange crea­tures and mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers are not only fas­ci­nat­ing for chil­dren. They touch some­thing with­in us that is real. A mem­o­ry, maybe. This week I lis­tened to a talk by Llewellyn Vaugh­an-Lee, a Sufi teacher. He put it like this:

And if we can give a space to God, to love, to pas­sion, to mag­ic, to this oth­er, then I think we can remem­ber what it real­ly means to be a human being – which our cul­ture is try­ing to erase from our memory.

I have become more and more aware of how our present civil­i­sa­tion has cen­sured dimen­sions of human con­scious­ness from our aware­ness. The libraries got burned. The thought police moved in. And rather than beings of radi­ance and light, we have become con­sumers. And that’s what our life is about.

And if we can just, both indi­vid­u­al­ly and as a com­mu­ni­ty, give a space to the radi­ance of the oth­er, to the beau­ty of the oth­er, to the mys­tery of the oth­er, to the real secret of what it means to be a human being, to be made in the image of God — it is so beautiful.

Source:

• The Gold­en Sufi Cen­tre — audio archives
  • The First Step, talk held by Llewellyn Vaugh­an-Lee in Lon­don, 2016.