In Memoriam

Gillian Margaret Harris

9th December 1941 – 24th December 2022

Gillian passed away on Christmas Eve last year.

I remember Gillian with much fondness as she taught me the discipline of the whirling dervishes known as the “turning” and the ceremony of the mukabele, which means ‘coming face to face”.

The process of learning the “turning” was a gruelling one. I remember there were weeks of early morning training, turning for what seemed like an eternity with our arms held up high, until it felt like the weight was almost too much to bear. I remember that Gillian was quite demanding, pushing us further and further in our training. I can still hear her voice urging us on, “Keep turning! I didn’t say you could stop!” and yet it was done with much kindness and love.

I remember going to work after the training sessions and a strong sensation of floating above the ground as I walked along the street.

Initially we learnt to turn on the spot, and then we learnt to turn and move as a group around the room.

The parallels with zikr are very strong and it induces a meditative state in which, as you turn, the heart opens and the mind becomes still. It is such an exquisite feeling at the conclusion of the ceremony when the music ends and the turners stop moving around in a circle. There is a period of silence as each turner revolves in one spot. It feels like such a deep silence, akin to the deepness at the end of zikr. It feels like a focus of stillness, as if the whole world stops, while each participant turns around their own heart centre, at one with the Infinite.

I feel such gratitude towards Gillian for passing on to us the Sufi wisdom of the dervishes and the beautiful poetry of Rumi. Gillian was the first person to bring the “turning” to New Zealand in 1982, along with her husband Michael, having learnt it from a teacher from Istanbul while they were living in London.

At Gillian’s memorial service the words of Resuhi Baykara were recited:

“When you turn, you do not turn for yourself, but for God. We turn around in the way that we do so that the light of God may descend upon the earth. As you act as a channel in the turn, light comes through the right hand and the left hand brings it into the world. We turn for God and for the world. And it is the most beautiful thing that you can imagine. If you are quiet and in a state of prayer when you turn, offering everything of yourself to God, then when your body is spinning there is a completely still point in the centre. In the knowledge that there is only Him you can experience the universe turn around that still point. The heavens respond and all the invisible kingdoms join in the dance. You must be like a compass, one foot firmly fixed in the centre of your faith or religion, the other makes a circle of the whole world, taking and learning from the best of everything and every other faith.”

I wasn’t able to attend Gillian’s memorial service but recently I watched a recording of it. As Michael, Gillian’s husband said in the service, Gillian had “so much heart, so much giving, so much humour.” Her daughter Juliet spoke about how she was headstrong, independent and resourceful. Michael spoke about how she loved to support and bring people together. She was quick in mind and wit. She also had distinctive laugh and a wicked sense of fun. Michael related how, three weeks before she passed away, there was a planning meeting to talk about her funeral and she said “I do hope I die, you’ve all gone to so much trouble!”

She worked as an actor and toured in Europe for a while in her twenties and joined a local repertory theatre group when she returned to New Zealand. Gillian trained as a counsellor later in life. She also worked as a marriage celebrant.

Michael estimated that she performed the role of marriage celebrant at over fifty weddings and donated all the money that she earned to a charity that she and Michael were involved in.

In addition to teaching the “turning” she was deeply involved in the practice of meditation and the non-dualistic Advaita tradition of Shankaracharya and was a pivotal member of the Wellington Meditation Centre, formally known as the Wellington Study Group.

I will remember her with much fondness, gratitude and love.

Yaqin

Remembering Gillian

by Arif

Gillian Harris was a distant cousin I felt close to, through our mutual movement in Sufi circles. Separated by the Tasman Sea, we met only a handful of times, but she made a profound impression on me, which continues to ramify.

We last met when I attended a philosophy conference in Wellington in 2018, giving a paper on my interpretation of quantum physics. After explaining my theory to Gillian at a family gathering, she captured the essence of it beautifully in a single phrase: “ever expanding circles”.

She also sent me a verse from Shakespeare that so poetically captured an aspect of my theory that I used the quote to open my latest paper, which was published online this week. She said in her email:

I said I would let you know the quote which came to mind when you described the quantum work you are doing. Ever expanding circles

The quote is from Henry VI Part 1: Joan la Pucelle (St Joan) describes how it will be when she has rid France of England’s Henry VI:

Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceases to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.

Despite the context the quote has been with me since I read it many years ago and I gave it to the stained glass window designer. I asked that she made circles turning to the left.

(That is the way we move with the Dervish turn).

Gillian included in her email a photo of this stained-glass window that features prominently in a door of her house.

In my version of quantum theory, a photon, a single quantum of light, “ever expands” from its source as a spherical wave, until it is about to “disperse to nought”, at which point it does not disappear, but suddenly localises, then resumes its expansion. This process repeats, until it is absorbed, making an impact on matter, which itself is an expanding wave, and this process continues “for ever”.

In a similar fashion, I trust that the spiritual light that Gillian channelled from the Source, through her turning, and even more through her living, will not “disperse to nought”, but continue to make an impression, however faintly, on all of us, in ever expanding circles of influence.