Birthdate: June 30, 1942 URS: November 24, 2022
Murshid Wali Ali Meyer died at home, the Mentorgarten, in San Francisco on Thanksgiving morning, November 2022 lovingly attended by his wife Sabura Rose Meyer and Mary Shaffea Bartley, a long-time friend. His passing followed a difficult time of dementia, but during which, he still shared his love through his presence with his extensive community.
He was born Melvin Feiler Meyer, in Starkville, Mississippi on June 30, 1942. He attended the University of Alabama at a time when it was a segregated institution. He was named College Newspaper Editor of the Year for his newspaper’s editorial campaign, offering ethical and moral reasons to bravely support integration in the South. He went to graduate school at Vanderbilt University, where he studied Theology and Philosophy.
Wali Ali was married first in 1971 to Jessica Khadija Hall. He moved to Virginia with his daughters and new partner Mira Scheibner from 1985-1994, where he taught English and Eastern and Western Philosophy at Tandem Friends School.
He returned to San Francisco and in 1998 he married Sabura Rose Meyer née Smith. He is survived by his sister Marjorie Goldner and his five children: Abraham Cohn (Abe), Alia Gaffney, Neshoma Daisy Whalen, Amina Meyer Mousa, and Murali Meyer. His grandchildren are Melanie Cohn, Kelsey Cohn, Isaiah Meyer, Dylan Gaffney, Naim Mousa, Aisha Mousa, Adam Mousa, and James Whalen.
In 1968, he came to San Francisco and met his life-long teacher of Sufism—Samuel Lewis (Murshid Sam). After Murshid Sam’s passing in January of 1971, Wali Ali founded the center known as Khankah Sam, and continued to lead others on the path of his teacher for five decades. He edited a number of Murshid Sam’s manuscripts for publication and then served as the Director of the Esoteric School of the Sufi Ruhaniat International. He co-authored a significant book, Physicians of the Heart, A Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah (2011). He was also known as a brilliant speaker and was invited to travel and teach all over the USA and in Europe as well. Over the past 50 years he has provided his students and other spiritual wayfarers with extraordinary support and guidance, teaching that “You are already perfect… and there’s always room for improvement.”
Those who knew of his last project have been waiting for the release of the biography of his teacher, Murshid Samuel Lewis, which should be published in 2023. He worked on this incredible dedication over the last 8 years.
Wali Ali taught that “Our work is to let our love be large.” He is very much missed by his friends, hundreds of students, and especially his wife Sabura, his children, grandchildren, and his two dogs Bart and Sheba.
A Memorial Celebration is scheduled for March 12, 2023 afternoon at Guzman Hall on the Dominican University Campus in San Rafael, CA.
Wali Ali was the gatekeeper and soul of Murshid Sam’s work.
RIP
I will always appreciate and rely on his generous, profound support and confidence in me.
Wali Ali was a Master of the esoteric work. He diligently carried the message of his beloved friend and teacher Murshid Samuel Lewis. He dedicated his life to this work. He edited many of his papers and wrote his biography. Thru the dharma classes he brought thru the works of the Zen Masters. My heart was opened thru studying these works. In my Physician’s of the Heart book, he prayed ” May the way be opened within and without”. He taught much of our work is “soul to soul”. My friend, the path has been filled with respect, sincerity and love. We walk in the light with this love. Remember the perfection of each rose and grace.
My Friend
When you visit my grave,
Be sure to bring your drum and your tambourine.
Only a joyful heart can sing with the chorus of angels,
Only a drunken soul can join in the celebration.
– Rumi
Dedicated to my good friend Wali Ali Meyer (ra)
Bilal Hyde, May 22, 2023
‘The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.’
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
The magnificence of your Soul continues to light the way.
Blessings, dear Wali Ali, on your URS day.
Mary Shaffea
Some months ago I walked round the pond with my little dog. I was thinking of Wali and how he was and wasn’t there with us. He loved to walk round this pond with Bart, our sweet black lab, now also romping in the fields of joy with my beloved. This day the light was pale and slanting towards late afternoon. The water was still and the trees ringing it, a mix of greens and branching grays, held the moment. There were birds on the water, some of which I could glimpse through the thicket of trees, the way flashes of verdant awareness will sometimes appear in the ongoing foliage of thoughts.
As we walked along in that low-lying and quiet light beside the hidden pond I heard a duck suddenly take flight, heard the stillness ripple into watery life, the splash of ascent, a claim on the sky as those webbed feet and wings remembered they belonged to something vast and boundless. It was such an ordinary moment, a bird taking flight from a pond. And it was an extraordinary moment as all at once I heard the experience deep within my own body, felt the splash and muscle of flight as a winged interiority.
It was remarkable to suddenly belong wholly and absolutely to an experience of life as it was arising, to be shaped by a bird who splashed and winged its way from muddy pond into clear sky and yet who was at the same time feathering a sky within me. We were each other, bird and I, the revivifying baptismal splash, the rebirth into flight, the quilled communion with stillness. For a boundless moment I was coextensive with the reverent universe in all its holy and ordinary minutiae.
It is two years since my beloved took flight, his great winged Soul finding Its way out of the body It had loved and tended for 80 years, out through that most delicate and palpable river, Breath. Journeying together with him as far as I was able, to the very edge, that last, shared, intimate, outbreathing.
What the devastation of Wali’s absence in my life has laid bare is a glimpse that the belonging we seek is to be found in allowing the articulate embrace of our own wild interiority to begin to know us, to allow Love to learn us. It takes a lifetime to become accustomed to ourselves, to realize that emptiness needs awareness to notice it. Feral and refined, it creatures its way through the bloom of our half-remembered wholeness with utmost loyalty.
And as I think back on that late afternoon with my little pup at the pond, and consider this community Wali loved so dearly, that he dedicated and gave his life to, and continues to give to, I feel him as an unbounded sky beneath my feet inviting each one of us to recognize that innate and numinous hinterland waiting to bless us as the wild sacrament of our own remarkable life. This is how he lived, this is what he gave so freely, so generously, beyond his masterful teachings, his erudition, his brilliant writing, this capacity to kneel to the wild and unruly holiness of our own authenticity and say, Yes, this is the Soul’s fiat.
I love you, darling, beyond and beyond and beyond.