‘Guest Room’ recently posted the sermon by Sabura Allen given during the Sufi retreat in Australia, and her story of love developing into harmony and producing beauty has touched many. Nuria Daly attended the retreat, and she sends the following account of her own efforts to put Sabura’s example into practice.

The Effect of Love and Beauty on an Unhappy Boy

Following on from our Retreat at Amberley on awakening to Beauty and Sabura’s wonderful homily, I wanted to put this into action.

My granddaughter brought her three children over for a visit. It was her youngest one’s seventh birthday, the only girl, and she was very happy with her gifts and attention. Her oldest brother is ten years old but is very big for his age and also obese. He was sullen and awkward and did not want to try to do anything even in play, because he ‘knew’ he couldn’t do it. I felt very sad and sorry for him, and so decided I would put the Sufi way into action the next time I saw him.

The opportunity came at Easter, when they all came over for the Easter Egg hunt. When this boy was little, he used to love lying with his head on my lap and I would stroke his hair. So this time, I sat next to him and stroked his back, I told him stories of my life in South Africa, and gave him a beautiful box for his treasures. I gave him an old elephant hair bracelet I had from those days in Africa.

 I asked if he had trouble learning to read and write at school (I knew that he had), and told him that I also had trouble with this. I told him how my father yelled at me once because I could not read a word at the bottom of the page that I had got right at the top of the page. But now I had written a book!

 I asked him if he had friends at school, and told him I didn’t either at primary school, but that later on I rounded up the other loners and we formed a group who became very close. As I told him this, he did not seem to respond. 

On the way home, though, his mother texted me that he was crying and missed me! She texted again later that night, when she was putting him to bed.  He was quite hysterical and wanted to see me again. I was astonished how this little bit of Love and my ‘seeing’ him had had such an effect. We arranged that my Granddaughter bring him over again alone. This she did some days later. He came in with a big smile and gave me a bear hug. I sat next to him again and rubbed his back – harder this time. He laughed and said it tickled, so we had some fun with that. Touch is so important!

 I told him some more stories and gave him a ‘sacred scarab’ from Egypt (tourist version, of course) and showed him all about it on Google. He was fascinated, and this went into his treasure box too. His mother also told me she had just put him on a diet, and he accepted it with no trouble. He left happy from this visit and has been fine since.

 Meanwhile his mother told me, he asked to see my book, which was about my father’s Jewish ancestry, and he was very impressed at how many words there were! I told him I would tell him more stories from the book when I saw him next.

So we see that Love, Harmony and seeing the Beauty in another, however buried it is, can have magical results.

Nuria Irene Daly