I join the visitors at the gates (work in progress) consists of 40 mourning rituals, one for each of the Sufi mystic Shams al Tabriz’s 40 rules of love.
“Sufism is a mystical path of love. The Sufi is a traveler on the path of love, a wayfarer journeying back to God through the mysteries of the heart. For the Sufi the relationship to God is that of lover and Beloved…The journey to God takes place within the heart, and for centuries Sufis have been traveling deep within themselves, into the secret chamber of the heart where lover and Beloved share the ecstasy of union. Through this mystical journey the Sufi wayfarer comes to experience God as a deepening experience of divine love, a love that belongs to both the created and the uncreated worlds, form and formlessness.” -Lewellyn Vaughn-Lee
As E.D. Goodwyn writes in The End of All Tears, when grief is particularly traumatic or problematic, we may remain in a “persistent ambivalent state”, simultaneously refusing to accept the loss even as we recognize the stark reality of it. Through symbolic language and actions, ritual allows us the possibility to act on and embrace this liminal state.
These rituals mourn the loss of our humanity in enabling and perpetrating the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the continuation of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.