The practices
We can try starting, and even continuing indefinitely if we like it, with a Sufi practice. Sufis have recently come to be known as the “good” Muslims, mostly on account of catching hell on a regular basis from the fundamentalists, though in fact the vast majority of Muslim people are not only good Muslims, they are good people. If you find the mere thought of a Sufi or Muslim practice triggering, and if you haven’t already, you can make a quick visit to chapter Six and tap your Islamophobia away right now.
In the mystical traditions of Islam, and especially in the Sufi traditions, among the 99 Beautiful Names of God that carry the meaning of forgiveness, two can be especially helpful to us in this work: Al-Ghaffār, “The Forgiver” (or “The Absolver”), with a connotation of continual forgiveness, and Al-Ghafūr, “The Forgiving” (or “The All-Forgiver” or “The Pardoner”), with a connotation of penetrating deeply to whatever is being forgiven. Of the number of translations of the roots of Ghaffār and Ghafūr, my favorite is related to a word for “covering,” not in the sense of concealing, but in the sense of mending—like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, making it more beautiful than it was before, with the gold perhaps being where the spirit of genuine repentance and the spirit of loving-kindness melt together: harking back to the epigraph of this book, we don’t need to scrunch up our faces. You can find a variety of pronunciations online; I like the one in which the initial “gh” is pronounced like French “r,” only maybe even more softly—that fricative in the back of the mouth pairing with the fricative of the “f” in the front, smoothing and mending the broken places.
“Ya,” sometimes translated as “Oh,” asks—invites—the essence of these qualities to be present with us and heal us. So we may begin by invoking these two manifestations of the Divine with 33 repetitions of “Ya Ghaffār, Ya Ghafūr.” After saying the practice out loud, we may do it on the breath, breathing in “Ghaffār” and breathing out “Ghafūr.” We can then sit in silence with it, just feeling it.
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