The Dervish Diaries

A Dervish is a man or woman who, in the words of D. H. Lawrence, has "come through." What does this mean? It means to accept, with Lawrence, that "a man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification." Dervishes don't passively inherit their religion, but actively appropriate it from a wide variety of sources and make it conform to the demands of their individual genius.

Moreover, "to come through" means to remain on the margins of established religiosity and yet never cease from knocking on the establishment's bolted door: for the term "dervish/darvish" means, quite literally, one who hangs about the doorways, who knocks, who importunes...

The goal of such impertinence is not to gain admittance to the "in" crowd: for the dervish, perpetual outsider that she is, is always already where she belongs. Her goal is to persuade those who lock themselves inside to open up; to allow their eyes to adjust to daylight; perchance to step outside themselves (lit., to become ecstatic).

To be a dervish is to be willing to play a perpetual waiting game and pay that game's going price--no matter how dear.

O pillars of flame by night, O my young men
spinning and dancing like flamey fire-spouts in the dark
ahead of the multitude!
O ruddy god in our veins, O fiery god in our genitals!
O rippling hard fire of courage, O fusing of hot trust
when the fire reaches us, O my young men!

And the same flame that fills us with life, it will dance and
burn the house down,
all the fittings and elaborate furnishings
and all the people that go with the fittings and the
furnishings,
the upholstered dead that sit in deep arm-chairs.

[from Lawrence's poem, "Spiral Flame"].