DELIBERATELY DIVERSE | Terry Pierce
Editor’s note: “Deliberately Diverse” represents the individual thoughts and opinions of a group of Taylor friends who almost never completely agree about anything but enjoy diverse discussions in our beloved community.
I did not grow up a churched Christian. My first encounters with God came in recovery meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Twenty years ago, at a time of grief and depression in my life, I attended a retreat sponsored by a Sufi community in Austin. I learned a simple method of contemplative prayer called remembrance which is to sit with a string of beads and repeat or remember the name of God at each bead.
I began to pray with that community because I found peace from my grief and my anger in those community prayers.
I learned to pray five times each day at the time that all Muslims are praying, and I learned politeness, “adab.”
Adab is an Arabic word that refers to behavior or etiquette.
The inner politeness is how I present myself and am present with God; it is to be in the deepest humility and surrender to God.
The outer politeness is how I present myself and am present in the world.
On the outer, adab is to prostrate myself in prayer, my forehead pressed to the ground.
In politeness, I wash myself before I pray. Whether man or woman, I am modest in my dress and cover my head and form to pray; and I am modest in my language and response towards other people.
I recognize that everything is God, and I respond to everything from that recognition — that is what it means to be in the adab.
This community called my name as precious beloved of God. They taught me to be polite, to listen and to be obedient, and to value those things as expectations of how I am to interact with all of God’s creation.
They showed me what it was to live a religious practice in community daily, to be received in the community in my brokenness and imperfection, and to experience God’s love through the community. In the Sufi practice of daily prayer, my sense of God as transcendent, all-powerful, mysterious and unknowable is heightened by the beauty of the language and by radical obedience to a schedule that demands my presence in prayer before anything else.
Reverence in that community for the prophet Isa, Jesus, led me into a new relationship as believer, beloved and servant of Jesus, the Christ. In understanding what this community believed Jesus was not, I understood that I was called to proclaim what I believe he is.
I could name Jesus, incomparably divine and brokenly human, Son of God who is God. This Sufi community showed me how to worship God and how to incorporate spiritual practice as a way of daily living.
My relationships with them led me to claim my place in the Christian community, understanding what it is to worship in every breath and to proclaim Jesus Christ Lord “not only with our lips, but in our lives.”
The Rev. Terry Pierce is vicar of St. James’ Episcopal Church in Taylor.
