while not hiding from the pain
When I’m watching the news and seeing the violence of the day, or witnessing the struggles of family and friends facing hardships and tragedies, it is hard to believe that I live in Love’s universe. Where is Love for the three year old girl dying from cancer, or a bomb, or a bullet? Where is Love for her mother who mourns her death? If indeed we do live in Love’s universe, Love cannot be an overbearing ruler or absentee landlord. Nor can it be a distant clockmaker who got things started and now watches with detached amusement. Instead, Love must resemble a compassionate and supportive companion, offering guidance without imposing its will, enveloping the entirety of existence in empathic tenderness, and sharing in all the suffering. This Love will be softer, but much more beautiful than, say, the Love of a tyrant or dictator.
This is the concept of Love that Whitehead embraced when he spoke of God as a great companion: a fellow sufferer who understands. It resembles the Love of whom Rumi speaks when he speaks of the divine Beloved toward whom his heart and all hearts are drawn. To be sure, Rumi may have been more inclined – much more inclined – to see God as all-powerful, at least in principle, than was Whitehead. Still, both imagined God as an attractive power: a loving reality to which we are naturally drawn, as a lover to a Beloved, or a friend to a Friend. This page serves as an invitation to bring Rumi and Whitehead into conversation. Both believe, in their respective ways, that we in Love’s universe.
– Jay McDaniel
Wading into Rubies
I’ll be frustrated, dull and barren as a stone,
if I don’t step out of my petty self,
take off its tight shoes,
and wade into rubies.
Rumi’s poetry is one of Islam’s greatest gifts to the world. It is rooted in the holy Qu’ran and inspired by mind of Prophet Muhammad. It is deeply Muslim.
It also speaks to the wider world, touching people who travel other religious paths and no religious path. “Every religion has Love,” Rumi writes, “but Love has no religion.”
Rumi’s poetry helps Muslims and people of all faiths discover a sense of being loved, of being embraced by divine love in, not apart from, our humanity: our yearning, our desire for intimacy, our search for truth, our brokenness, our humor, our confusion, our thirst for beauty, and our compassion for others. It is an invitation to wade into the rubies.
As we wade we discover the very purpose of life: love and mercy, We may be surprised by the discovery. We may have thought ourselves to be more thorny, more sour, having suffered too much pain to risk loving others. Still we seek a softness in our hearts:
I saw myself sharp as a thorn.
I fled to the softness of petals.
I saw myself sour as vinegar.
I mixed myself with sugar.
An aching eye seeing through pain,
a stewing pot of poison,
I was both.
Reaching for the antidote,
I touched compassion.
I touched mercy.
Our touch of compassion comes, not simply from willing ourselves into our better and more expansive selves, but from discovering that what we had taken to be boundaries or walls between ourselves and others were non-existent. We are more connected with others than we ever knew.
Where the water of life flows,
no illness remains
In the garden of union,
no thorn remains.
They say there’s a door between one heart and another.
How can there be a door where no wall remains?
I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead, for example, who offer images of the entire universe as composed of events without walls, and who suggest that we ourselves, breath by breath and moment by moment, are events not things. And I’m reminded that Whitehead, like Rumi, believes that the universe spirals toward and out of a Love deeper than words. A divine Love that has no religion except Love.
Process philosophers will add that the Love of love’s universe acts through love, not through coercion, force, or violence. Not by manipulating our wills, but by inspiring our wills, like a teacher, like a poem, like a garden, like a lover. There are many things in our world that cut against the love of Love’s universe. Our own thorniness, our own petty selves, are among them. And so is the violence: the terrible pain we inflict on one another and on the earth, sometimes blasphemously, in the name of God.
To live in Love’s universe is not to pretend that all things are God’s will. Nor is it to hide from the pain. It is so suffer with others, to share in the pain, and to seek a Beauty past the pain, a beloved community. In this seeking we are beckoned by the Love in the center of the spiral.
The very appeal to Love can seem to some to be overly romantic, vacuous, sentimental, and out of touch with the sadness and tragedies of life. And yet we might rightly respond, with help from Rumi and Whitehead, that Love is, in fact, the only hope: the place where the waters of life flow and life without walls finds its place.
Love is an asymptotic ideal, a horizon toward which we are forever drawn, as lover to the Beloved. And yet it is also found every time we are touched by another, with boundaries fallen away, and we share our common humanity, our common rootedness in a heaven from which we emerge and to which we return: an alpha and an omega.
Heaven is on earth, to be sure, and also beyond the earth. God is, for Whitehead, a primordial place in which all possibilities reside: non-spatial and non-temporal. In this sense God is remotely like a king on a throne: mysterious and powerful. But God is also the primordial heart amid which the love on earth is given into heaven and recycled back. Whitehead puts it this way:
“What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
The Beloved of Rumi, I suggest, is this great companion.
– Jay McDaniel, November 18, 2023
Process and Rumi
Recently, a friend asked me if there are connections between process theology and the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. A former student of mine, she had taken two courses with me: “Process Theology” and “Contemporary Islamic Thought.” She saw connections between the two and wanted to start a monthly reading group where seekers would read poems from Rumi and discuss process theology.
As it happens, I had been co-teaching an eight-week online course with a friend and colleague, Sophia Said, on Rumi and Process Theology, so I was ripe for the question. (Please see recordings of our course, available to the public by clicking here.) The course was sponsored by the Bethlehem Centre in Canada, Process and Faith, the Cobb Institute, and the Interfaith Center of Arkansas.
I responded to my student that there are, or can be, connections, but that they have remained unexplored, with the exception of the course I taught with Sophia Said and a very good chapter called “Rumi: The Dance of Love” by Bruce Epperly in his book “The Mystic in You: Discovering the God-Filled World.”
This page serves as a supplement and complement to that chapter, offering resources for those who are familiar with process theology and want to know more about Rumi’s outlook on life or vice versa.
One feature of process theology is its recognition that we, as human beings, are not simply thinkers or even doers. We are, within our very depths, feelers. That is, our very existence consists of acts of feeling and responding to the presence of other things: other people, the more-than-human world, and God. Whitehead believed that thinking itself is a form of feeling, namely a feeling of the presence of ideas. If the word “heart” is a metaphor for the feeling side of life, Whitehead believed that it’s all “heart.”
Another feature of process theology is the idea that the universe is embraced by a feeling Heart, a loving Consciousness, who lures each and every creaturely heart toward wholeness. This Heart is, of course, God. From a process perspective, God is forever inviting us on a journey to be with God. This “withness” includes moral action and an enjoyment of life, but it can also include intimacy with God. Rumi’s outlook on life invites us to recognize this call to intimacy, to “withness,” with the loving Heart of the universe. It offers a qualitative science of the heart.
Rumi has understood this “withness” much more deeply than have process theologians. We in the open and relational world need to learn much from him. I hope this page can help. It is a potpourri of springboards for reflection and discussion, and I encourage you to scroll down as the spirit moves you.
- Rumi’s Poetry: A Scholarly Introduction
Sufism: The Harvard Pluralism Project
Poems read by Rumi scholar, Fatemeh Keshavarz
Let’s Love Each Other, performed by Haleh Liza Gafori
GOLD by Rumi, translations by Haleh Liza Gafori (review by Dylan Cook)
Colorless, Nameless, and Free: Haleh Liza Gabor discusses a Rumi Poem
Crest of a Wave: Rumi and Whitehead
Dhikr in Process Perspective
Whitehead, Rumi, and Beauty: Bruce Epperly
Sufism: The Threshold Society
Listening of the Soul: Zaid Shakir
Quawwali
New Sufi Music by Arooj Aftab and Petros Klampanis
In the House of Remembering by Kabir Helminski
- Jay McDaniel, November 18, 2023
Rumi’s Poetry: A Literary and Historical Introduction
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poetry of Rumi, the Persian scholar and Sufi mystic of the 13th Century. His great poetic works are the Masnavi or “spiritual couplets” and the Divan, a collection of thousands of lyric poems. He is closely connected with four modern countries: Afghanistan, as he was born in Balkh, from which he gains the name Balkhi; Uzbekistan from his time in Samarkand as a child; Iran as he wrote in Persian; and Turkey for his work in Konya, where he spent most of his working life and where his followers established the Mevlevi Order, also known as the Whirling Dervishes.
With
Alan Williams, British Academy Wolfson Research Professor at the University of Manchester
Carole Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews and Professor Emerita of Edinburgh University
And
Lloyd Ridgeonm Reader in Islamic Studies at the University of Glasgow
Harvard Pluralism Project on Sufism
“Sufism refers to the inner dimension of Islam which aims to attain mystical knowledge and love of God through meditative practices, or dhikr, ethical cultivation, and purification of the heart and self. Though Sufism began with individuals, Sufi communities, or tariqahs, were formed around them providing a template for spiritual guidance. Poetry, art, liturgies, biographical and philosophical works, and other forms of Sufi literature were also produced. Today, Muslims practice Sufism in a variety of modes and mediums.”
“Sufism, or tasawwuf, is not a separate sect of Islam, but rather a stream of interpretation emphasizing the interior path of mystical love, knowledge, and devotion to God. Though the Prophet Muhammad and his companions can be considered the first Sufis, Sufism formally began in the 8th century as a homage to Muhammad’s simple lifestyle and spiritual life during a time in which some Muslims considered the community as straying from this ideal. Many attribute the origins of the name “Sufi” to the coarse wool garment (suf) worn by these early ascetics, symbolizing renunciation of material luxuries. Others suggest the term derives from the Arabic word for purity (safa). This early movement would soon develop a variety of orientations, doctrines, ritual practices, literature, and formal communities.”
The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi
Krista Tippett’s Interview with Fatemah Keshavarz
Like This!
If anyone asks you about the huris, show your face, say: like this! If anyone asks you about the moon, climb up on the roof, say: like this! If anyone seeks a fairy, let them see your countenance, If anyone talks about the aroma of musk, untie your hair [and] say: like this! If anyone asks: “How do the clouds uncover the moon?” untie the front of Your robe, knot by knot, say: like this! If anyone asks: “How did Jesus raise the dead?” kiss me on the lips, say: like this! If anyone asks: What are those killed by love like?” direct him to me, say: like this! If anyone kindly asks you how tall I am, show him your arched eyebrows say: like this!
God
When His light shines — without a veil — neither the sky remains nor the earth, not the sun, nor the moon. God embraces all…there is nothing that is not a part of him already.
Remember God! His remembrance is the strength in the wings of the bird that is your soul. The souls of all friends of God are connected with one another. You must seek anything that you wish to find. Not so with the Friend…You begin to seek after you find him
GOLD
by Rumi
translated by Haleh Liza Gafori
New York Review Books, 112 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook
There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the thing that brings us into this world, ties us together, and makes the days pass more pleasantly. Don’t we love to live and live to love? And aren’t all the best songs love songs? Yet, offering up love as a balm to life’s problems feels cheap. We’re often skeptical, understandably so, that love alone can save us from issues like debt, disease, and desolation. In Gold, Rumi speaks to our inner skeptics. Line by line, he tries to show us how love only helps and never hurts. “If you plunge like a fish into Love’s ocean,” he asks, “what will happen?”
This love of love is likely familiar to anyone who’s encountered Rumi before. Born in the thirteenth century in present-day Afghanistan, he remains one of the most popular poets in the United States. He was an Islamic scholar and a well-respected preacher for decades before he ever wrote a single verse. This changed when Rumi met the poet Shams-e Tabrizi, who turned him onto Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, and opened his heart to poetry. The body of work that resulted from this seismic meeting has been read the world over and endured nearly a millennium. However, Rumi’s popularity in the English-speaking world is largely built upon translations of questionable integrity. Many of Rumi’s English-language translators (notably Coleman Barks) don’t speak a word of Farsi, instead relying on old translations to rehash the poetry again and again. In a New Yorker article, Rozina Ali describes how much of Rumi is lost in this game of literary telephone, including connections to Islam that permeate his work. By and large, translators have found it acceptable to cherry-pick Rumi’s poetry and strip away its cultural and religious context.
Gold, translated beautifully by Haleh Liza Gafori, fulfills the need for a careful, considerate rendition of Rumi in English. Gafori’s task was not a straightforward one. The very word “translation” feels insufficient here because of how much this poetry was edited. In her introduction, Gafori explains that this collection is sourced from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a sprawling text of over 40,000 verses. Each poem here had to be cut from this endless cloth, reshuffled, styled with modern enjambments, and, finally, translated. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of Gold not as a translation, but as a collaboration between two equal poets that spans centuries.
And what music they make together. Gradually, these poems unearth a love-based philosophy for life. Rumi advocates for love in all its forms, whether it be romantic, platonic, religious, or personal. It’s in this last capacity that Rumi is particularly poignant. He has a sneaking suspicion that most of us don’t love ourselves enough, trapping us in unhappiness:
Caged in self,
you drown in anguish.
Storm clouds swallow the sun.
Your lover flees the scene
Outside yourself,
the night is moonlit.
Lovers drink Love’s wine.
It flows through you,
Rumi reminds us that there are two distinct versions of ourselves: the self that exists in our minds and the self that we show to the world. He wants us to reconcile these halves by loving the inner self, the part we hide away, until we only have one face to show. Rumi believes we can free ourselves from self-imposed restraints. Just as, “A lion leaps out of his cage. / A man leaps out of his mind.” Still, he acknowledges that being kind to ourselves isn’t always easy. Perhaps one reason we’re hesitant to accept love as a solution is that we’re not properly trained in it. Love isn’t a feeling, but an action that we must consciously make and consciously keep. Rumi describes the challenge of choosing love, and the rewards it reaps, writing:
I saw myself sharp as a thorn.
I fled to the softness of petals.
I saw myself sour as vinegar.
I mixed myself with sugar.
An aching eye seeing through pain,
a stewing pot of poison,
I was both.
Reaching for the antidote,
I touched compassion.
I touched mercy.
It’s an impressive feat that Rumi’s lessons, which can sound so heavy-handed in the abstract, land gently through Gafori’s verse. In the original Farsi, these poems were ghazals, a poetic form wherein individual couplets are linked by a common refrain. Gafori doesn’t reproduce this form exactly, but she does capture its springy, mantric effect. In one poem, Rumi and Gafori create an oasis together:
The cure is here, the cure for every ill is here.
The friend who soothes the ache is here.
The healer is here.
The healer who’s felt every shade of feeling is here.
They go on to decorate their oasis with sunlight and wine, with flowers and dance. It doesn’t matter where “here” is. “Here” is an atmosphere more than a place, but it’s real, and Rumi and Gafori lull us there. They don’t tell us why they’re bringing us there until the end, commanding us to, “Be silent now. Let silence speak.” Love can bring us to beautiful places, but we can only see their beauty if we take the time to do so. Gold is filled with these revelatory moments. Often, it’s a single line that neatly ties together a poem like the final, central cog that gets a machine running. Poems build to a pitch, release, and leave perspective in their paths.
“Every religion has Love,” Rumi writes, “but Love has no religion.” For Rumi, love is much broader than religion. To read Gold is to enter a world where love is water that drunkens the earth when it rains, or where love is a fire that we’re happy to let consume us. There’s something bittersweet in these wonderfully surreal images. They’re pretty, but they’re unfamiliar to our world. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel loved every time you got caught in the rain? Maybe Rumi’s poetry stays relevant because we still haven’t lived up to his ideals for what love can do for us. Love, paradoxically, is something larger than humanity but stems from individual humans. Rumi teaches us that love is inside all of us, and it’s our job to dig it up and show it to the world. Or, as Rumi puts it, “you are a gold mine, / not just a nugget of gold.”
Dylan Cook
Colorless, Nameless, and Free
Discussing a Rumi poem with Haleh Liza Gafori
Poet and translator Haleh Liza Gafori joins us to closely read and discuss a poem by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273 CE), one of the greatest of all Sufi poets. We discuss the poetic constraints of the ghazal form, Rumi’s encounters with the divine, and the significance of his friendship with Shams, a man who transformed his life and poetic practice.
Haleh Liza Gafori’s translations of Rumi’s poetry appear in Gold (NYRB Press, 2022).
You can learn more about her work as a vocalist, poet, translator and performer here.
To learn more about Rumi, visit the Poetry Foundation website.
Crest of a Wave:
Rumi and Whitehead
Imagine a wave rolling toward a shoreline. Our selves are like the crest of the wave—different at every moment but always in the present. Moment by moment, we inherit from the past while moving toward the future.
At each moment of our lives we are a moment of cresting: an actual occasion of experience, to quote Whitehead. These occasions, our very selves, are more expansive than we realize. We are not bound by our bodies or isolated by the boundaries of our skin. Nor can we be reduced to our sense of identity, be it ethnic or religious. Moment by moment, we are, in Whitehead’s words, moments of concrescence: a coming together of the entire universe in the immediacy of a single moment.
This coming together is not an abstract idea or a mere point in space. It happens through our own perceptions, feelings, and ‘prehensions,’ as Whitehead put it. As we prehend other people, they become part of us; as we prehend the stars above us, they become part of us; as we prehend the plants and animals around us, they become part of us. While our sense of being individual egos, temporarily separate from others, is crucial in our developmental process, it is not the whole story. Moment by moment, we are broader than we recognize. We are not simply nuggets of gold; we are gold mines, says Rumi.
Rumi’s poetry frequently invites us to awaken to this expansiveness, this world-inclusive field of feeling, which is our true identity. “Let’s love each other,” he says.
His poetry also beckons us to awaken to an even more expansive Self in whose living presence our lives unfold. This is the God of love. God resides within us at all times, as a lure to help us break free from our limited self and extend love to others. Simultaneously, God exists beyond us as an all-encompassing companion—a friend not only to us but to the entire world.
We can experience this Companion through earthly companions, who serve as windows through which we glimpse the light of the profound Companion. Rumi experienced God through his friend Shams. We may well feel drawn to this Companion, not just as a friend and guide, but as a Beloved: our beloved, to be sure, and also the Beloved of the universe. All things are spiraling toward the One in whose life the many unfold. All things are spiraling toward an Omega who is also an Alpha. This is how Teilhard de Chardin would put it.
To the extent that we offer ourselves to the Beloved, we also give ourselves to the world. We love the world in God, and we love God in the world. God and the world are mutually immanent even as God is so much more than the world.
Eventually, we come to realize that the shore toward which we are spiraling, much like rolling waves on the sea of life, is, in fact, the Beloved to whom we are drawn. The shore is already present in the rolling of the waves, in us.
There is nothing to crash into except the small ego, which has not yet grasped the vastness of the true self. This true self is both quiet and passionate. It is quiet compared to the noise within our minds that might otherwise distract us. Compared to the noise of our ego, our small self, it is colorless and nameless and free. It is Silence with an upper case S. And yet it is also passionate, with an unfettered zest for life. It is Eros with an upper case E.
This Eros is forever drawn toward, and seeks, the Beloved. The Beloved is seen in each living being. All living beings become the Shams of the true self. The true self is the crest of the wave, forever moving toward a shoreless shore, always here-and-now. As Rumi says, “Let’s love each other.”
- Jay McDaniel
Dhikr in Process Perspective
There dwells within each heart a beckoning, a calling, to live from the wisdom of the Poet of the World: to live from the wisdom of Allah.
This calling is not simply an abstraction we entertain in our minds. It is the baraka of Allah: the blessing and the presence of the divine Poet asking us to become co-poets and help create a world of beauty. Of course Islam is not the only religion in which the calling is heard. Baraka is within each human being as an invitation to become a vessel of divine poetry on earth. The best kinds of poetry we can create — the ones most pleasing to Allah — are wisdom and compassion, justice and beauty.
Sometimes this beckoning is hidden from us, like a reed hidden within a bed of reeds. It is hidden by our anger, our jealousies, our selfishness; and it can also be hidden by cultural and historical circumstances that shape our lives. Even our religions can hide it from us. Sometimes our religions help us to become vice-poets on earth and sometime they hinder us.
Still, with help from or despite our religions, the beckoning can be heard if we listen closely, with ears of the heart. This is because, as the Qur’an explains, the beckoning is closer to us than our own breathing. Moment by moment, breath by breath, the beckoning is our initial calling, our initial aim. It precedes our existence, coming from the distant source.
Toward what are we beckoned? We are beckoned to love one another and to live lightly on the earth. We are beckoned to be good parents, good friends, good neighbors, good people. We are beckoned to love all living beings, animals included. And we are beckoned to live from the wisdom of the Poet, rather than from the whims of the moment or the vicissitudes of personal preference. Only when we leave the center of our lives open, so that the spirit can enter, can we love others without making idols of them. When we make idols of things we don’t really love them. We just love our attachments to them. This is why it is so important to love the Poet.
Beckoned to Remember
In leaving the center open, we simultaneously remember a quiet voice we may have forgotten. After all, the beckoning has been in us and with us from our very birth. Our remembrance is not the acquisition of new information or new knowledge, but rather a remembering of what we may have forgotten. It is a homecoming.
How to remember? Perhaps we can learn from the prophets and their ways. Prophet Abraham and prophet Moses, prophet Jesus and prophet Muhammad — peace be unto them all — offer invitations to remember. Every culture, every people, has its prophets. None of these prophets are perfect people; but all, in their prophetic moments, are invitations to the remembering.
Encouraged by the wisdom of the Prophets, we are encouraged to become prophets ourselves. This does not mean all have the same calling or that we are called to be the same. To the contrary, the Poet beckons all into differences — different identities, different cultures, different personalities, different ways of loving — so that we might know each other. In the very knowing there is the joy of being alive. This joy delights Allah, too.
Dhikr
One way to remember the calling is to repeat the names of the Poet, so that the very idea of living from the Center becomes a morning star — a guiding impulse — of our daily and corporate lives. The beckoning of the Center cannot be segmented into compartments of life, as if relevant only to the privacy of our minds or personal belief. The beckoning is for the whole of our lives.
The many religions of the world have developed practices which can help us respond to the calling and remember. One of them is dhikr, the practice of repeating the names of Allah in song and silence, so that the very guidance of Allah becomes our frame of reference, our morning star, in times of trial and in times of wonder.
The value of dhikr depends on the spiritual condition of the person who recites the names; he or she needs to be sincere and warm-hearted. He or she needs to want to live from the source. If a self-centered person recites the names of Allah, the very reciting can become a ventilation of the ego or, still worse, a falling into a frenzy of hatred. But if a kind person recites the names of the Poet, then the reciting can be a channel of goodness in the world.
The value of dhikr also depends on the cultural circumstances a person lives. Dhikr is effective if a person lives in a culture of generosity and justice; if there is a minimum of hatred and a maximum of love. Indeed one purpose of dhikr is to help the heart be transformed into a mercy, a compassion, that delights the divine Poet.
This Poet has many names — at least ninety-nine. Some of them invite a recognition of the incomparable majesty of the Poet and also of the fact that we are accountable to the Poet at each moment and at the end of our lives. We cannot and do not live anonymous lives. Always there is the witness of the Poet. Others invite a recognition of the tenderness of the source, of the fact that the Poet longs for us as fervently, perhaps even more fervently, than we long for the source. Rumi put it well: The One Whom We Seek is Seeking Us, too.
Dhikr helps us remember the Poet and build upon times when we have lived from the Poet’s guidance. It makes space within our hearts so that we can hear the Voice. The cumulative effect of dhikr — the repetition — creates a melody within our lives by which we can hear the voices of others in grateful ways. If we have ears to hear we know that all sounds are signs (ayat) of the Poet.
The natural world is likewise a sign of the Poet. And so are events in history, either because they remind us of how fall we fall short of who we are beckoned to be, or because they inspire us to become who we are beckoned to be, or both. When we have ears to hear, we also have eyes to see. Eyes of repentance and eyes of hope, eyes of sadness and eyes of wonder.
What to chant? Allah Hu is one example of a chant available to the community of those who seek to live from the wisdom of the Poet. In listening to versions that come from the surrendered heart, we ourselves partake of the Melody within the melodies. For a moment, if we have ears to hear, we hear the meaning of surrender ourselves, and become the lovers we are beckoned to be. Whatever our religious affiliation, or absence thereof, we become carriers of the poetry and surrendered to its spirit. We become people of the breath.
– Jay McDaniel, 11/18/2023
Whitehead, Rumi, and Beauty
Bruce Epperly
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead asserted that the aim of the universe is toward the production of beauty. Whitehead was echoing not only Plato, who believed that the beauties of this world remind us of the eternal Beauty, but also the essence of Rumi’s mystical vision. According to Rumi, “The universe displays the beauty of thy Comeliness! The goal is Thy Beauty—all else is pretext.” Human beauty arises from God’s beauty, and the faces of those we love turn us toward a Beauty that lasts eternally and satisfies our every desire. “The moon-faced beauties of the world have stolen beauty from Our Beauty. They have stolen a mote of My Beauty and Goodness.”
The beauty Rumi experienced in his relationship with Shams inspired him to dance with joy before God’s Beauty. Beauty grows our spirits and awakens us to a Love Supreme. God said to Love: “If not for thy beauty, how should I pay attention to the mirror of existence?” The world is like a mirror displaying Love’s perfection. Oh friends! Who has ever seen a part [the human experience of love and beauty] greater than its whole?15 Love takes us beyond dogma and the ambiguity of creeds that both inspire and divide humankind. According to Rumi, “Love’s creed is separate from all religions: The creed and denomination of lovers is God. . . . My religion is to live through Love. . . . The intellect does not know and is bewildered by the Religion of Love—even if it should be aware of all religions.”16 When we experience God directly, we experience an abyss of love, energizing and illuminating us in ways beyond belief. Once again, let us affirm with Rumi, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
Epperly, Bruce G.. The Mystic in You: Discovering a God-Filled World . Upper Room. Kindle Edition.
The Listening of the Soul
While much has been written about human speech and the distinction it bestows upon our species, far less attention has been paid to the human’s ability to listen. For Muslims, listening can be even more important than speech, for it is the ability to listen that serves as the beginning of spiritual guidance, which in turn is a critical means for achieving the raison d’être of human existence—namely, serving God. We read in the Qur’an, “I have only created the jinn and humankind that they serve me” (51:56).
For the conscientious believer, the highest function of our ability to listen is to support the journey to God while still in this world. Success in that journey is predicated on a person’s ability to nurture his soul, or the nafs, which Muslim scholars understand as the essence of a person, as the part of the human constitution that serves as the locus of emotions, appetites, and passions—whether praiseworthy or blameworthy—and that gives the physical human body its personhood. Like the physical body, the nafs can change; it possesses the ability to move beyond its basest form, the lustful or bestial soul (al-nafs al-shahwāniyyah/al-bahīmiyyah) to the realm of human perfection (al-nafs al-kāmilah).
– Zaid Shakir, Zaytuna College, The Listening of the Soul
In the House of Remembering:
The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching
By Kabir Helminski
Thirty sohbets or spiritual conversations
about the Sufi path from a shaikh of the Mevlevi Order.
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat,
reposted from Spirituality and Practice
Full disclosure: We are initiates of the Mevlevi Order and Kabir Helminski is our shaikh. He is profiled in S&P’s Living Spiritual Teachers Project, and he has led many of our e-courses. So the teachings in this book are familiar to us, and we can vouch for their ability to touch the heart, expand awareness, and make important and essential connections to a community.
The first essay “What Do We Need a Spiritual Path For?” reminds us of our first encounter in person with Kabir Helminski. It was at a retreat about the poetry of Rumi, and a small group of people new to Sufi teachings were gathered in a circle. Kabir asked “What do you yearn for?” Here is his explanation of why that is a central question from In the House of Remembering:
“First of all, my sense is that people are led to various religions and mystical traditions by a yearning from within. Something in them feels unfulfilled. It’s like an inner drive or hunger. It’s not, ‘I want to follow a religion so I can be a good person.’ Or maybe it’s more a sense of ‘I don’t want to just be at home. I want to be together with others. I feel like I need to be in a holy place.’ There is something more than just being nice, kind, and all of that. There’s a deeper yearning operating within humans who undertake a spiritual practice. There is something else calling us. These things are part of a bigger whole.”
Many of the sobhets here explore what it means to be part of that bigger whole and what is necessary to enter into an experiential relationship with the Divine. These talks cover dealing with fear; going through an initiatory process such as fasting; making regular room in our day for a relationship with the Divine; polishing the heart to be a reflection of the Divine; the inner ablution to cleanse oneself of the negative influences of envy, pride, and resentment in order to be ready for prayer and worship; educating the heart; and more practices.
Throughout these talks, Helminski quotes from the Qur’an, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the poetry and discourses of Jelaluddin Rumi, and the writings of other Sufi saints such as Hafez and Ibn Arabi. He also takes up difficult questions such as why certain prayers are not answered and how to dissolve the false self. He explores why we need to be grateful for challenges and difficulties. Defining a dervish, Helminski writes: “A dervish is one who stands on the threshold where two worlds, the finite and the Infinite, the physical and the spiritual, meet.” And it is best not to take up this role alone. Community life and spiritual companionship are essential to the Sufi path.
We would call this book a primer on applied spirituality. An important reality of the Sufi path is that it goes through the ordinary events and circumstances of our lives. The goal is to be aware of that. Helminski says, “We can live our lives in such a way and develop to a point where we’re more sensitive to those moments when we are present with Divine Spirit. . . . We have to work. We have responsibilities and obligations. However, all of that work can take place within this wider field of remembrance. Within this context we know we’re in Love’s universe.”
“Money and real estate occupy the body,
but all the heart wants is expanding friendship.
“A rose-garden without a friend is indeed a prison;
a prison with a friend becomes a rose-garden.
“If the pleasure of friendship did not exist,
there would be no reason for men or women to exist.
“A thorn from the friend’s garden is worth more
than a thousand cypresses and lilies.
“Love sewed us securely together,
We owe nothing to the needle and thread.
“If the house of the world is dark,
Love will find a way to create windows.
“If the world is full of arrows and swords,
the Armorer of Love has fashioned our defense.
“Love itself describes its own perfection.
Listen and be speechless.”
(Divani Shamsi Tabrizi, 1926)
“This kind of poetry grows in resonance over time. The more you read of it and of Rumi, the more bells go off in the heart and the more overtones you hear. There are some really important essential things expressed in this poem. Silence is not a lack of sounds. Silence is presence itself.
“In a Sufi circle one of our primary objectives has to do with opening up our inner life. This develops a capacity of the soul to sustain a certain kind of consciousness.
“That consciousness is not unlike what some call ‘mindfulness.’ We call it ‘presence.’ One dimension is becoming present to our own inner space and allowing the spaciousness to open up. That spaciousness is usually filled with a lot of content, thinking, emotion, desires, and distractions.
“We tend to focus on the content. We think we are the content. An inner voice making statements like ‘I’m happy,’ ‘I’m sad,’ ‘I feel good about myself,’ ‘I feel terrible about myself,’ is the typical content of our inner space. But what each of us essentially is, is not the content, but rather the context. Our essence is a frame of consciousness. It is a capacity for seeing and perception. Beyond any kind of belief or religion, there is the reality of opening up inner and outer consciousness.
“This process of mindfulness is more than a way to achieve stress reduction and relaxation as it has been and is being used in the corporate world, pop psychology, and academia. Mindfulness is just a first step.
“We’re intending to awaken a capacity to see and to be present. Ultimately that capacity is going to lead to something quite extraordinary, aside from ourselves, aside from who we think we are. Ultimately it’s going to lead to a relationship with what we could call ‘Divine Guidance,’ ‘Wisdom,’ and ‘The Source of Cosmic Love’ itself.
“It’s said in our Tradition that the human heart is a threshold between two worlds. The threshold is between the limited material world and the infinite spiritual reality. The heart is the threshold. We should be on that threshold all the time, bridging these two worlds.
“When we live in that reality and are aware of that presence, we are in remembrance. It changes everything. We can realize that we are not just the content of our experience. We’re also this beautiful context, which is divine and purposeful, guiding us stage by stage to deeper and deeper truth. Every stage of our life, if we’re seekers, leads to a greater richness of meaning in our lives. Then we can be grateful even for the thorns because we know it has come from the Beloved.
“All the heart wants is expanding friendship. It is not the kind of friendship that is a social satisfaction and can even lead to dependency and attachment. Rather, it is the friendship of other conscious hearts, who are in that state of remembrance and in that state of coherence and resonance. That’s what lifts and heals us.”