RUMI AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE HOLY

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

October 7, 2007

READINGS

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.

Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.

Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Don’t turn from the delight that is so close at hand!

Don’t find some lame excuse to leave our gathering.

You were a lonely grape, and now you are sweet wine.

There is no use trying to become a grape again.

SERMON

“Hearken to this reed forlorn, breathing ever since ‘twas torn

from its rushy bed, a strain of impassioned love and pain.

The secret of my song, though near, none can see and none can hear.

Oh, for a friend to know the sign and mingle all his soul with mine.

It is the flame of Love fired me. It is the wine of love inspired me.

Would you know how lovers bleed? Hearken, hearken to the Reed.”

These words open the Mathnawi, the epic work of 25,000 rhymed couplets by Jalal al-din al-Rumi, and in important ways they offer a window into this 13th century Persian poet and Sufi master’s approach to spiritual awakening and understanding.

In the poem Rumi compares himself to a reed torn from a streambed, singing a song of, in his words, “love and pain,” that is blown through him from a secret source that, though near, none can see, and yet embodies a love that both bathes him in flame and intoxicates him. It is the kind of image that resonates across religious traditions: an experience of transformation. A feeling fills us with both warmth and longing, that gives us a sense of deep connection and well being, and yet also humbles us before a reality so profound we cannot see how to grasp it all.

In fact, I would argue that this feeling is the source of religion itself. Beyond the creeds and cathedrals and clergy, it is this remarkable human feeling of depth, connection, well being and humility that fuels every religious tradition, that gives each its vitality, its urgency, its meaning. Whatever claims it may make on us, religion derives its authenticity from how it helps us frame and explain that feeling and helps us integrate it into our lives.

Every tradition, of course, has its own way of explaining this experience. Some describe as an encounter with a supernatural figure, such as God, the Goddess, Christ, Allah, or Yahweh. Others may frame it as a hint of nirvana, or a brush with the mystery underlying all things. In a pluralistic tradition like ours that honors many paths to spiritual growth there is no consensus on how we name this feeling, and yet we recognize the importance of this deep sense of connection that anchors our spiritual wellbeing.

In September I announced that this year as we are engaged in strategic planning for the future of our church I would be focusing one sermon a month on statements that I think help describe who we are and who we want to be as a church community. Last month I proposed that we gather in community to learn to live what love teaches. Today I offer the second of those statements, that we as a community invite and make room for the experience of wonder and the holy.

Rumi offers a good entrée to this subject, for his poetry, while centered in the Sufi tradition, speaks deeply to the many dimensions of spiritual search across all traditions. The struggle he walks us through is very much a human struggle that each of us grapples with in our own ways. At the same time, if we are going to approach Rumi’s work we need to be careful not to forget the context in which he was writing: one very different from our own time and place, one that today I hope at least briefly to acquaint us with.

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and attend them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows

who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Welcome difficulty.

Learn the alchemy true human beings know:

The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given,

the door opens.

Welcome difficulty as a familiar comrade.

Joke with torment brought by the friend.

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover,

And then are taken off.

That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath,

Is the sweetness that comes after grief.

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen.
Not any religion or cultural system.
I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground.
Not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all.
I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next,
Did not descend from any Adam and Eve or any origin story.
My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless.
Neither body or soul.
I belong to the Beloved, have seen the two worlds as One,
And that One call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human Being.

Like many Muslims, the name the man we know as Rumi was given at birth in 1207, 800 years ago this month, was Muhammad, in honor of the Prophet of Islam. From an early age, though, his father, an Islamic scholar, called him Jalal al-Din, a name eaning “Splendor of the Faith.” The boy was born in Afghanistan, but lived much of his adult life in eastern Turkey, a region then under the control of Rome, known by Arabic and Turkish speakers as Rum, hence the name Jalal al-Din al-Rumi.

His early life followed the expected trajectory. He trained under his father in Islamic law, and became a serious student of Sufism. Eventually he was elevated to the rank of shaykh, or revered teacher.

Like the Sunni and Shi’ite strains of Islam, Sufism is grounded in the Qur’an, but the way Sufis approach it is quite different. For the majority of Muslims religious life is mostly a matter of practice – prayer, fasting, charity, and the observance of Islamic law. There is none of the fascination we in the West have with theology and belief. Their statement of belief is simply the affirmation that there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.

Sufis, however, seek to mine the Qur’an for its more symbolic or mystical dimensions. Their goal is a personal relationship with God that they seek to achieve through distinctive forms of prayer and Qur’anic study that aims to ferret out hidden meanings.Sufi teachers often founded schools or lodges where they taught and promoted religious practices.

Rumi advanced as one of the leaders of his father’s school until his late 20s when he met a figure who would change his life, a traveling Sufi mystic named Shams al-Din al-Tabrizi. There was something in his meeting with Shams that electrified Rumi. It was as if the conventional forms of religious observance that he had learned and taught had been broken open, and he was flooded with a sense of what he felt as divine love.

He abandoned most of his teaching and occupied nearly all of his time with Shams. This relationship, as you can imagine, occasioned jealousy from his followers to the point where Shams eventually had to leave. During this time, though, Rumi began for the first time to write poetry and to adapt to his own practice the whirling, ecstatic dance that his followers, the dervishes, continue to the present day.

Much of Rumi’s poetry centers on the hurdles to finding spiritual clarity, to opening ourselves to an elemental love that suffuses all things, that, in Mary Oliver’s words, makes the world fancy. His images and metaphors seek to shake his readers up and knock them off balance –

“Every morning is a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness that arrives like an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and attend them all, even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture.”

He takes the expansive Islamic perspective, which embraces Jewish and Christian prophets, and then pushes it even further: Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen, not any religion or culture system,” not east or west, not from the ocean or up from the ground, neither natural or ethereal, neither body or soul. All qualities, all differences fade in his union with the Beloved, where all things are one.

The path to awakening, he insists, is not to be found quietly cuddling with a book, but through experience, through striving to embody that mystical union –

“Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do.”

And don’t be fooled into thinking that such a path involves quietly zoning out in blissful pleasure.

“How could I know melancholia would make me so crazy, make of my heart a hell, of my two eyes raging rivers?

How could I know a torrent would snatch me out of nowhere away?”

He urges the readers to embrace their ears and uncertainty:

“I’ve said before that every craftsman

watches for what’s not there to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole where the roof caved in;

a water carrier picks the empty pot; a carpenter stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill.

Their hope, though, is for emptiness, so don’t think you must avoid it.

It contains what you need!"

“Dear soul, if you were not friends with the vast nothing inside,

why would you always be casting your net into it,

and waiting so patiently?”

Spiritual discovery is a journey, he suggests, that engages every part of us, and once we attend to it we are irrevocably transformed.

“You were a lonely grape, and now you are sweet wine.

There is no use trying to become a grape again.”

Across more than seven centuries where they emerged in a culture that we today have a hard time fathoming Rumi’s evocative words speak to us still, calling us to attend to a dimension of human experience that awakens a greater sense of meaning, a sense of depth and connection that in the words we read earlier from the Sufi master Hafiz, “gladdens our hearts.”

“Those who don’t feel this Love pulling them like a river,

those who don’t drink dawn like a cup of springwater

or take in sunset like supper,

those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.”

“This moment this love comes to rest in me,

Many beings in one being.

In one wheat grain a thousand shear stacks.

Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of stars.”

I suggested when I began that Rumi’s poetry offers us a way to think about the experience of wonder or the holy that resonates with our own tradition. Some of the imagery and references may be unfamiliar, but what makes the poetry so accessible to us is its openness. Rather than dictating to us who or what we experience, Rumi invites us to open our minds, our hearts, our senses to discover for ourselves what we find there.

This thread, the invitation to find in our own experience the grounding for our spiritual understanding, was at the heart of first major reform movement in the early Unitarian church in the 19th century among the New England Transcendentalists.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson urged the graduates of Harvard Divinity School to, in his words, “cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” he could have been reading from Rumi. The image he presents in his essay “Nature” of standing on bare ground “my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space . . . . I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me” could have been dictated by a dervish.

The Transcendentalists opened up our religious movement by inviting us beyond the reasoned examination of the scriptures and texts to bring our experience as individual seekers to bear on our religious understanding. That thread continues today in our purposes and principles where the first source of our living tradition is named as “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to renewal of the spirit and openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

Part of what we offer as a religious community is the opportunity for each of us to consider and explore how that experience emerges in our lives and how it influences our understanding. We may, with Emerson, be bathed in the blithe air on a mountaintop, or like Jalal al-Rumi find ourselves in the company of those who break open our narrow views and help make clear our deeper connections with each other and the world around us.

In time we may, with Mary Oliver, look out on the world and always see something fancy in it: Each, stone, each flower, each face singing to us. With that perspective in mind I look back on my day and recollect moments with friends and loved ones and the light shining in their eyes. I look out the window and watch the rusts, reds and yellows spread across the trees as if enveloped by an all-consuming fire. I hear the last of the summer’s crickets chattering their ancient chant deep into evening.

In this guest house of an existence it seems to me that there is a sweetness underneath that we would do well to take time to taste, available to us all, offered up with our birthday suits, a love that, if we make room for it, comes to rest in each of us.

May it be so with you.