As the reality of Hocaefendi’s passing on gradually trickled through my disbelieving consciousness in the first few days that followed, and as the reality that he is gone from our world dug into my mind, I gradually arrived at a sensibility that took the shape—if, as is my wont, I were to try to cast it into a (rather banal) image—of an emotional sandwich.

The meat of the sandwich is comprised of three related forms of sadness. I am overwhelmed with grief and a sense of mourning, for the loss of someone so precious and the understanding that there will be no further opportunities to stand or sit in his presence, converse with him, and to feel emanating from his being the intensity of intelligence, compassion, concern for others rather than for himself, genuine and profound humility, and, simply put, charisma that I have had the privilege of experiencing a handful of times within the past decade. 

That sense of personal grief and sadness is accompanied by my sense of empathy for all of the tens of thousands of individuals beyond myself, near and far, who have been swept up by the wonder of Fethullah Gülen—his words, his actions, his vision—who like me will be bereft of the chance to feel his concrete presence nearby again. More subtle is the sense of mourning for all of those younger people who are drawn to the values, principles, and teachings associated with Hocaefendi who had not yet met him in person and who will be deprived of that opportunity. Who can calculate the numbers of these, going into the future?

This treble sense of grief is, however, sandwiched between two joyful outer slices of fresh, sweet-smelling and -tasting emotional bread. I am joyful on Hocaefendi’s behalf that he has returned to the Beloved Source. His is a return that—in the manner in which he was his own kind of Sufi—has been his ultimate goal; it is a return yearned for as a terminus of and reward for accomplishing his divinely-appointed task: of shaping and shepherding hizmet within our human realm. That yearning and return—and the tears he so often shed in this world of ours—make me think of the words from the Mesnevi (Bk I) of Jelaluddin Rumi, which resonate, together with so many other words and concepts, from that wondrous 13^th-century Sufi poet with whom Hocaefendi shared such a unique spiritual relationship:

Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated:
“Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a source,
longs to go back…”

Like Rumi and other Sufis, Hocaefendi is that reed, pulled as we all are at birth from the divine reedbed—and longing to return to it. The Sufi who longs for being reunited in Love with God believes that God longs to be reunited with the Sufi: the lover and the beloved are the beloved and the lover….

If joy on his behalf for his happy return to the reedbed is one outer part of my emotional sandwich, the other is both drawn from the same words of Rumi and transcends them. For we who have sought to further Hocaefendi’s work and his vision are the reed bereft of him: he is the loving and beloved reedbed from which we have been forcibly cut off—but we are also the ongoing fulfillment of his vision. I rejoice when I consider all around me—in the Washington, DC area where I live and out to the four corners of the world that I have visited—the countless members of the Hizmet Movement who are engaged in good works inspired by him and by his vision. These extend from shaping exemplary schools in thousands of locations, often (even in the United States) where schools, much less fine schools, are not easily established; to helping provide clean water in remote African villages where clean water is not easily found nearby; to an ever-expanding number of interfaith and multicultural programs that bring people “of diverse tribes” together so that they “can get to know one another.”

The broken-off reed that is silent begins to make beautiful music when the breath of life is breathed into it: it is at once God’s spirit animating the hizmet-filled life of Hocaefendi and also his myriad followers, inspirited by his ideas, whose lives have been animated by the breath of his, Hocaefendi’s, teachings, to bring musical harmony into the world. I rejoice as I consider the splendid role that the Hizmet Movement is playing—and how, in the immediate aftermath of Hocaefendi’s Transition, its members were drawn together more warmly than ever—and I smile with a sense of the extraordinary and beautiful future of hizmet that will make him smile as he observes us moving forward to be part of the process of helping to perfect the world in an ongoing and loving partnership with the Beloved Source to which he has himself just returned.