Letting Go of Our Death Grip on the Holy Land
Exploring Terra Nullius, “Nobody’s Land.”
HOUSES MADE OF BUTTERFLIES:
Something beautiful but infective.
Something that favored idealism over practicality.
— Druidic Speech
I recently read that Druidic speech — the language of Druids — was rich with imagery. Imagine a house …made of butterflies. Did you imagine a structure made of patterned paper-thin wings held together for just an impossible moment before it all flew apart? When it “fell apart” so to speak, you wouldn’t say the house is broken; you’d say the house is wild and both everywhere and nowhere.
No one expects butterflies to hold still in a precise menagerie so that a house can look like what we expect a house to look like. It would be cruel and unnatural to distort the natural pattern of a butterfly into a frozen immovable thing for nothing but our fantasy of home.
I think holy landscapes are much the same — at least, that’s what I’m proposing in my upcoming book, The Song of the Mystery.
All my life I’ve been hearing about Islamic supremacy from even the most well-meaning Muslims. The discomfort when I hear phrases like “the Muslims” as if just the name can band together millions of people who don’t know each other, and will never know each other — people who don’t even know themselves — felt…sad and empty. Most people hear these things and get on with their day. For better or worse, I cannot.
After writing my first book, it became clear that the territory Muslims are drawn to is off. The map is blurred.
I think back to the toys I had as a very young child in the 80’s. There was this one toy with a picture on the screen, and the screen itself was made up of many vertical lines. When you slid the knob across the bottom of the screen, slowly the picture would change into another one that was also always there in some form. There were two pictures on that screen. There will always be two pictures. We get to decide which one we want to look at — which one we want to see as real.
Islam is the same. The ideas I’m proposing are that knob that reveals the image beneath the picture we’ve thought of as the only one that exists. For 1400 years, followers of this faith have had the sense that only one image exists. That there is only one map of a holy land and on it are two territories: Mecca and Jerusalem.
There is another picture. In the sequel of the trilogy of books I’m actively working on, I offer an alternative Islamic perspective of “Holy Land.” This is something that has been brewing within me for over a year; it is still brewing.
Holy Land is a metaphysical landscape for Muslims and a tangible bricks-and-mortar space for Jews. As I share in the first book, Judaism is the foundation and Islam is the crowning. The foundation is tangible ground. The crown is an activation point, a crowning that marks initiation when we return Islam to the Dark. The crown is adorned by the moon’s changing phases, by the stars that pierce the veil of Night. One is not better than the other; they are different technologies. It’s an idea that also deepens the lens of co-existence: we’re not meant to take up the same space. Rather, we are custodians of different grounds. But the radical proposal that offers another picture — the proposal that invites Muslims of faith to let go of their death grip on Jerusalem — was inspired by heartbreak.
Year after year, I see the territory disputes in Jerusalem between Muslims and Jews — I mostly see Muslims clinging to some fantasy of what the holy land should look like. I see a death grip on an idea that is killing everyone around us. Of course, the situation is complex and layered and there is heartbreak on both sides. I cannot claim to know of the challenges faced by those who live on the ground. But I do know the mentalities of those far away who fight for a holy land because they believe it belongs to “the Muslims” — this behemoth that has stripped us of our faith potential by encasing us in a crowded and suffocating monolithic identity.
Building on the story of book one, I expanded on the idea of the Dark. The Dark’s characteristic is beyond words. An aspect of it is expansiveness and nothingness. Nothingness belongs to Islam. That is a two-faced gift. How you look at it depends on where you slide the knob.
In one of my favorite films, Kingdom of Heaven, having just lost Jerusalem to Saladin, Bailian of Ibelin asks Saladin, “What is Jerusalem worth?”
Saladin replies first with “Nothing.” He starts walking away, turns around again, holds both fists up in the air with a smile, and adds: “Everything.”
There are two ways to look at the idea of nothingness. In one picture, you know that you have been offered sacred ground. You have been offered the chance to belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You have been given a holy ground that no one can ever take or destroy. This holy land is timeless, and time-less… without time, without any anchor to a human story. In this picture, all of Islam is a seed faith that we are meant to plant in the Dark, plant back into the rich metaphysical world that all of Islam’s most sacred stories are pointing to. In that, you could no more claim a holy land than you could claim Dark Matter, the mysterious stuff that fills the universe — unseeable, unconquerable.
In another picture, nothingness is terror in which God has abandoned you, in which your measure of yourself is nothing. The Islam of chaos that has terrorized the world, the Islam of supremacy, is a picture where is a picture of terror. The terror exists because there is an attempt to claim something — to hold on even if by a death grip — to something that doesn’t belong to us.
Islam is a terra nullius, “Nobody’s land.”
An inhabited space that doesn’t belong to anyone.
A land with no master.
Perhaps peace in holy lands will be achieved when Muslims let go.
When we return to our faith. Return to the Dark.
Return to the gift of nothingness.
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