Sacred Hospitality

Badaliya: The Way of Mystic Substitution

God does not dwell in bodies that are whole.—Hildegard of Bingen

Part 2

Massignon now takes up the story. In October 1906, barely twenty, agnostic, already a scholar, he sailed from Marseilles for Morocco. On board, he met a young Spanish aristocrat, Luis de Quadra, returning to Cairo. De Quadra, a homosexual, told how him he “had quit Christianity for Islam so as to continue adoring God without remorse for his life, in the manner of Omar Khayyam.” The two formed a bond that would last until Quadra’s suicide in 1921. By then, the friendship had long become a practice of compassion in which Massignon offered himself (pledged his life) as a“voluntary hostage” for the saving of his friend’s soul. In its early stages, however, his relationship with Quadra (and others) threw him into a profound moral crisis.

Embracing Arab life, dress, and customs, Massignon pursued his studies with ferocious brilliance, while suffering anguish at his private life. The only light in the darkness came from Sufi mystics whose texts he was discovering and reading with new eyes. One day in Cairo, in March 1907, de Quadra pointed out a verse by the tenth century mystic, Al-Hallaj: “Two moments of adoration suffice in love, but the preliminary ablution must be made in blood.” This was the Al-Hallaj (later the subject of Massignon’s magnum opus) who was crucified in Baghdad in 922 for asserting “Ana’l Haqq.” “I am the truth” (or“My ‘I’ is God.”). Massignon wrote: “The meaning of sin was given back to me, and then the piercing desire for purity read on the threshold of a cruel Egyptian spring.” Al-Hallaj was the hook that would turn his life around.

On December 19, 1907, seeking his life’s meaning, Massignon reached Baghdad. He was introduced to the elite. He made friends with a leading Muslim family, the Alussy’s, who had access to a rich library of manuscripts. They rented a house for him in a neighborhood where no Westerner lived and cared for him spiritually and morally with exquisite grace. Speaking of Hajj ’Ali Alussy, Massignon wrote: “I was his guest. He took me as I was and tried to make me reach my destiny.”

Living as an Arab among Arabs, Massignon drew suspicion. Was he a spy? What was he doing? To dispel any doubts, he decided to continue his explorations outside the city. On March 22, 1908, disguised as a licensed Turkish offer, he left Baghdad with a small caravan. Before he left, the Alussy’s persuaded him to let them engrave his name on a small crystal seal above the word abduhu, “his servant.”

It was an exciting venture. He was attacked by Bedouins, but remained undeterred. Then things began to come apart. On April 28, he had an argument with a servant, who had been spreading rumors about his “effeminate manners.” Massignon responded angrily. The servant ran off with the purse. Undaunted, Massignon pressed charges. Meanwhile, doubts had arisen about his identity and his mental stability. He decided to turn back. “Brokenhearted,” he boarded a Turkish steamer to take him up the Tigris to Baghdad, the only European on board. He felt suspect, isolated. For the first time in his life, he was moved to pray. “It was in Arabic that I made my first prayer to him. “Allah, Allah, as’ad du’fi” “God, God! Help my weakness!”

He surrendered his revolver to the captain, who had grown concerned with his passenger’s increasingly erratic behavior. It grew worse. Massignon broke into the captain’s cabin, seized his revolver, and pointed it at the captain. He placed Massignon under observation. Physically constrained, Massignon despaired:

I began to suffer from myself. Examination of conscience: look at how I was ending up after four and a half years of amorality, justly wiped out for the greediness of my science and my pleasure. Dying in a terrible situation; my family would be happy to forget me. . . . I decided to put an end to myself.

With a small knife, he struck at his heart, making a superficial wound. Bandaged, he became more agitated, even delirious. He ripped off the dressing, shredding his shirt. He threw himself about. His face grew red. He cried out, “I want to die.” Again, he was forcibly restrained. In this condition, between continuing bouts of agitation, the Stranger visited him. “Shortly after the knife thrust, I submitted to another stroke: interior, extraordinary, torturing, supernatural, ineffable. As if the very center of my heart were burning and my thoughts wrenched apart. . . .”

The Stranger is the God of Abraham, of Mohammed, and of Mary’s Fiat. He is the welcoming God whom we welcome, the great Yes that unites two in one. “God at once guest, host, and home.” His approach is announced “by an internal break in our habits” or “by the acknowledgement of sin.”

Responding to a questionnaire, Massignon replied, “the discovery antecedes the theory, commotion precedes denomination. ”“Before the Lord who has struck the blow, the soul becomes a woman, she is silent, she consents. . . . She starts only to commemorate in secret the Annunciation, viaticum of hope, that she has conceived in order to give birth to the immortal.” Like the Virgin, the soul does not ask why or how but only says Yes. “The frail guest that she carries in her womb determines thereafter all her conduct. It is not a made-up idea that she develops as she pleases according to her nature, but a mysterious Stranger whom she adores and who guides her.”

The Stranger who visited me one evening in May before the Taq, cauterizing my despair that He lanced, came like the phosphorescence of a fish rising from the bottom of the deepest sea; my inner features revealed Him to me, behind the mask of my own features. . . .The Stranger who took me as I was, on the day of His wrath, inert in His hand like the gecko of the sands, little by little overturned all my acquired reflexes, my precautions, and my deference to public opinion. By a reversal of values, He transformed my relative ease as a propertied man into the misery of a pauper . . .

The transformation continued. A second peak occurred (May 8) in Baghdad, in hospital.

Taken up for the second time into the supernatural, I felt myself warned I was going to die: a burgeoning spiritual dawn, a serene clarity inciting me to renounce everything. I clung to a beloved name, repeating it to myself, declaring to myself: “If he has betrayed me, I want to be sincere for two and carry his name with me always.” The serene clarity increased in my soul: what is a name in the memory? Does not God possess this creature infinitely more than I? I abandon him to God.

The “beloved name” was de Quadra’s, but there were others. “I felt with certainty a pure, ineffable creative Presence suspending my sentence through the prayers of invisible persons, visitors to my prison, whose names disturbed my thought. The first name was my mother’s (she was at the time praying in Lourdes), the fifth was the name of Charles de Foucauld. . . .” The second would be de Quadra, the third, hazarding a guess, Al-Hallaj, the fourth perhaps Huysmans.

Greater things would follow, but not before a third supernatural event: “A harrowing sensation, suddenly the presence of God, no longer as a judge, but as a father inundating the prodigal child. I quietly locked the door of my room and prostrated myself on the tiles, finally weeping my prayer all night long, after five years of a dried up heart.” Over the next sixty years of incomparable scholarship and service, under the sign of Al-Hallaj, to whom he attributed his saving, Massignon’s faith would deepen and ripen, gradually finding its true form under the continuing intercession of Charles de Foucauld, Al-Hallaj, and J.K. Huysmans. To these would be added St. Francis of Assisi.

Bamford concluded.

Bulletin 73 • Index