STEP ELEVEN

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying for knowledge of Divine Will and the power to be a vehicle of it.


Malcolm X went through two religious conversions that brought him further into alignment with the will of God. Imprisoned for being a cat burglar, he was approached by a minister of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed and found himself drawn to the man’s decency and clarity of presence. It took a while, though, to find the courage to give his will over to God in the traditional Muslim way. "For evil to bend to its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God is the hardest thing in the world," but he did it and his life was changed. "It was as though someone else I knew of had lived by hustling and crime."


Was Malcolm an addict? He knew drugs because he knew the streets, but his real attachment was to hatred. Sufficient to grow up poor and black in America, to know the bootheel of white policemen, to see your mother manhandled by a traveling white salesman, to look at your light brown skin and your red hair in the mirror and know in your blood you were a child of rape. The Black Muslims introduced him to the spiritual life but also gave him a theology that explained the evil of whites.


This worked well enough until his pilgrimage to Mecca where he prayed and circled the Kaaba with thousands of Muslims who were white. His heart broken once again, he surrendered his racialism to Allah and sought the door to making an alliance with whites of conscience.


The basic prayer of remembering God among Muslim people is the fatiya: washing one’s hands and face, prostrating in the direction of Mecca while whispering the first sura of the Koran to "God most gracious, most merciful." The crucial thing, an Iranian friend tells me, is to "put your forehead to the dirt because we want to be very, very small before God." Five times a day.


Remembering. To re-member — that is to re-member a self, a world that has been dis-membered; to return to wholeness.

To strive for anything less than "liberty, dignity and integrity among people and nations…would be unworthy of a free and religious people," said Eisenhower. Free, yes — free enough to celebrate the presence of fellow citizens who are not in the least religious. And yes, we are, by and large, a people committed to Spirit in all its many manifestations.


Whether you’re a Muslim waking to morning prayer, a Buddhist sitting still and watching her breath, a Pentacostal singing in tongues at a Wednesday night service, a Hindu doing puja to remove obstacles, a Catholic taking the sacrament, a Navajo offering a pinch of pollen at sunrise and recommitting to the way of Beauty, a Jew lighting the Sabbath candles or an atheist walking on the beach with a friend and pondering "the meaning of it all," we all have solitary and communal ways of returning, deepening our relationship with that center around which our life turns. The times insist that we take our different ways seriously and respectfully, to give our whole selves to the path so the mystery of peace becomes intimately familiar.


Life lived between the solace of the Presence and a world gone mad, the prayers are always the same: "Make use of me," and "Show me how," and "May I be a vehicle of your kindness."