The Community of "Arcane Discipline"

"As he struggled with the shape that faith assumes in the world of the Nazis, the discipline of the secret was Bonhoeffer's partial answer about how the type of faith to live in the 'world come of age' might secure its boundaries within the world. While immersed within the world in the most profound way, the community of 'arcane discipline' would not drown in the waters of modernity. These boundaries were not to be protected because of a desire for personal piety, or the religious path of withdrawal from the world, rather the mysteries of the church were to be guarded and protected lest they become reduced to something that does not bear the power of God in the world."

The thoroughly modern dervish finds much of value in the prison writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the paragraph above (from Jeffrey Pugh's 2008 study of Bonhoeffer entitled Religionless Christianity, p. 146), the dervish would substitute for "the mysteries of the church" something on the order of "the beautiful vision." That vision arises from the contemplation of nature...

and meditation upon the so-called 99 most beautiful names of God...

both of which are stimulated by the hanific desire for an ever elusive, unmediated relation to "the Real."

The key word here is desire: for it is the passional self that requires an "arcane discipline" to inculcate the habits through which the beautiful vision is made manifest in the daily activities of an ordinary life.

Such is the manhaj or methodology of disillusioned "sainthood."