The marriage of storytelling and spiritual formation is as old as the religious spirit of humankind. Farid Ud-Din Attar, a twelfth-century Persian poet and mystic, offers an imaginative example of this union in his Conference of the Birds, a tale describing the pilgrimage of all feathered creatures to their king. It is a spiritual journey that moves in five stages from a sense of longing for the inaccessible splendor of the royal court, through hope, boldness, and despair, to a final, shocking encounter with a majesty elusive as it is grand. The use of metaphor in describing passages of the spiritual life is demonstrated here at its best, as Attar explores the metaphors of impassioned love, the mirrored majesty of the king, and God as a treasure hidden in the world. His work suggests many parallels to the language of Christian and Jewish spirituality and his stories richly deserve retelling.
