COME, COME, WHOEVER YOU ARE

A Sermon by James Ishmael Ford
10 November 2002

We’ve just passed through a brutal and battering election. In this room a few feel the right and the good triumphed. In this room rather more feel otherwise. But now, whatever our choices during that election, we’ve come together here into this sanctuary. Here we are, taking a breath, seeking a moment of good companionship and allowing ourselves time for a little reflection.

Naturally questions have followed us as we walked through those doors, trailing us like shadows. In the wake of that election perhaps they’re even a little more starkly obvious. What is the point of it all? How do we find meaning and purpose and possibility in our individual lives? And, of course, where is that meaning and purpose and possibility in our public lives, as citizens and as members of the great family of all living creatures?

Here are the questions I think we need to be addressing today. From what source do we get nourishment? How do we continue to engage when the stakes seem so high and the consequences of wrong choices so dire? From where do we derive our moral compass?

Well, how appropriate, I believe, that months ago we committed to making this Sunday at least touch upon themes derived from Islam. In that context our Society here was hosting a meeting of our Newton area clergy a month or so ago, and were being visited by a panel of Islamic scholars.

We had an hour and a half. So they really didn’t have time to go into anything in depth. Still, after the scholars departed for another meeting, one of our clergy members, a rabbi, commented how she hoped at some point we could get past discussions of Islam that point out how Islam means "peace."

A more important question those scholars could have addressed, and indeed, we might address, is within Islam what is the source? Within Islam how can one find that deepest place which informs personal and public behavior? Well for me that would inevitably mean a reflection on the Sufis.

Truthfully regular orthodox Islam holds little appeal to me. I’ve read the Koran and do find it a compelling and powerful document. But I’ve met a fair number of Muslims over the years and in general they’re just a little too much like the fundamentalist Baptists of my childhood for my tastes. But the Sufis, that’s another story, entirely.

In fact I suggest we rational and liberal Unitarian Universalists might learn something of significance from the Sufis. If, that is, we’re willing to look relentlessly into the heart of the matter. Now such looking can be difficult. It often reveals our own shortcomings, our own selfishness, or festering resentment, or foolish certainties. But that looking can also reveal something beyond the mire of our egos.

And in that context the Sufis offer us something of great value. Today when we’re facing harsh political and economic decisions at home, and facing the possibility of a generation of wars abroad, we need such friends and guides as the Sufi teachers to help us.

So, who are these Sufis? There is some confusion about the term "Sufi." The most common etymological definition suggests the word comes from wool, the material used for robes worn by Sufis. A rather less likely etymology, but in some ways quite telling is that the word Sufi means "pure." Etymological speculation aside; Sufis are the mystics of Islam.

Their history is complex and there are numerous varieties of Sufis. One thing they tend to share in common is that they exist at the margins of Islamic society. In fact when totalitarians take over one of the first things they do is outlaw the Sufis. This was true in Turkey only a couple of generations ago, and it was true in our own times when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran. Sufis tend to make trouble. They call people to look closely and to seek that which is most important. And their most important is rarely is what governments think is most important.

In the brief time we have here I want to focus attention on one particular Sufi, tell a little of his life, and suggest that what motivated him might inform us as we engage difficult times and seek that compass which will guide us through the night. I want to spend the rest of our time today speaking of Jalaluddin Rumi, also called Mevlana, meaning "our teacher," and just a little about his message.

Jalaluddin Rumi was born in the year 1207, in Balkh, in what is today Afghanistan. However while Rumi was still quite young his family fled the Mongol advance and settled in what is today Turkey. His father, Bahauddin, was a renowned teacher of theology at the university in Konya. And it was he who saw his child’s intellectual gifts, and happily became the boy’s first teacher.

When his father died Rumi begin studying with an associate of his father’s, another scholar Sayyid Burhandeddin. Rumi studied closely with Sayyid for nine years. During this time the young scholar also traveled widely, visiting such intellectual and spiritual centers as Aleppo and Damascus, always seeking out the wisest teachers, questioning them closely, listening deeply.

At the end of his formal studies, legends say Sayyid foretold to Rumi how "A great friend will soon come to you. You and he will become each other’s mirror. He will lead you to the innermost parts of the spiritual world. And you will lead him, as well. Each of you will complete the other, and you will become the greatest friends in the world."

Whether this prophecy was actually made or not, Rumi wasn’t waiting. It was time to begin teaching. Soon he was generally recognized for his intellectual capacity as well as a sweetness of personality and a depth of character uncommon for any age and within any community. His fame as a teacher and eventually as a spiritual guide began to spread beyond Konya.

Then at the age of thirty-seven, the now established scholar and religious leader met the wandering ascetic Shams of Trabriz. And the prophecy was fulfilled. And Rumi’s world was transformed. And, I suggest, so was ours.

Coleman Barks gives a translation of one of Rumi’s poems that could have been written out of this meeting. "In your light I learn how to love./In your beauty, how to make poems./You dance inside my chest,/where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art." Here eros and agape are intertwined. Here it becomes impossible to differentiate between human love and the love of God.

The two fell into each other’s company, never wanting to be separated from the other. Their love was an echo of divine love, something we all can hope for, but few among us ever really understand. Certainly people around them couldn’t understand this love between these two men.

The homoerotic quality of their relationship wasn’t much of an issue in that time and place. But the passion and the obsession and the mixing of flesh and God, that was hard to comprehend, for many impossible to understand.

Of course, within that lack of understanding, there was terrible jealousy among Rumi’s students. And eventually when Sham’s disappeared it was rumored Rumi’s students had murdered Rumi’s love. His heart broke. It is said that he went into the garden of his home, reached one hand up to God and began slowly turning. What we do know is that the practice we recognize as so distinctive of the Mevlevi order, the Whirling Dervishes was born out of this loss and longing.

Out of that breaking heart came something so beautiful and powerful and mysterious, that we find ourselves nearly a thousand years later here in the suburbs of Boston exploring just what it could possibly mean. Sayyid Burhaneddin had predicted Rumi would "drown people’s souls in a new life and in the immeasurable abundance of God… (Rumi) would bring the dead to life and give this world of tears meaning and love."

I have no doubt it was here that Rumi became Mevlana, "our teacher." In his early fifties he began composing the Masnavi, the great epic poem that is sometimes called the Koran in Persian. And as powerful and important as it was, it was only a part of the outpouring of his teachings about the true nature of love. Rumi’s poetry and sermons all point to how we can burn, how the dross of our lives can melt away, and how the pure gold that is our true nature can be revealed.

I remember the first time I attended a Sema, the formal observation of the death of Rumi and the great celebration of the Mevlevi order. The first thing that happens is the semazins, dervishes, the Sufis walk into the hall, wearing great black cloaks, and those tall hats perhaps you know from pictures. After they sit a reed flute begins to play. It echoes the "Song of the Reed," the opening lines of Rumi’s epic poem.

"Listen to the reed as it tells its tale;/it complains of separation./Since they cut me from the reed-bed,/men and women have been crying over my lament./I wish for someone with a heart torn apart by separation,/so that I can tell them the meaning of the pain and the longing...

"My secret is not far from my weeping,/but neither eye nor ear has the light to find it./Body from soul, soul from body are not veiled,/but no one understands what this means./This call of the reed is fire, not wind./Everyone without this fire—is lost to the true./The fire is love that came down into the reed;/its fervor is love that came down into the wine./The reed is the companion of everyone parted from their beloved."

The lament of the flute ends with a roll on a drum. Then, the semazins throw off their black cloaks and in their white jackets and skirts, begin to walk to the sheikh, their spiritual teacher, with their arms akimbo across their chests. They bow to the sheikh, their arms stretch out and they begin that ancient dance of the heart.

After they’ve all spun out into the hall, the sheikh joins them. She or he holding open her jacket, his jacket, looking at that beating heart just beneath the skin, and slowly and deliberately turns. For me, every time I witness the dance the sheikh feels to me like a star slowly moving through the great night. And the semazins feel each and every time to me like planets and comets shooting along on their own courses.

But just beneath this I know each of the semazins is following a path that is somehow connected to the sheikh and to the line of community back to that dance between Rumi and Shams. And of course, it spins back even farther, past the history and the dreams to the dance between creation and God, an event out of which plays all the worlds and all the dreams and all the possibilities.

So, what does this mean? What does it really mean? And what can it tell us, you and me as we decide how we’re to act in these perilous times? These times filled with wars and hunger and longing? Well, if we ever hope to be of any use in this world, I think we need always to remember that love.

And what is love, ultimately, but the great burning? It is a burning of our foolishness and selfishness. It is a burning of all our false dreams. Love is about loss. And it is about a mysterious finding. At that moment, when we think we’ve lost everything we discover our true nature, our true possibility, the dream God dreamt for us.

The love here is not mawkish, or sentimental or even sweet. It is a terrible love in the fires of which our names "self" and "other" are devoured. And all that is left among the ashes is the face of connection, where we see how we exist only within each other, our true name revealed, our true place in the cosmos bare, open, vast as the sky.

This is the way to peace and possibility. And I suggest that peace and possibility is something we only find as we surrender to love. In our pure presence each of us to the other, and of ourselves to what we truly are beneath all our grasping and anger and certainties is something so precious and beautiful that truthfully it defies naming.

But perhaps it isn’t too disrespectful to call it the compass. If we allow ourselves the dangerous possibility of seeing ourselves in another, we can discover something more precious than all the wealth of this great nation. In that seeing we discover the place that births our individuality and our communities and the cosmos itself.

We move into the flames at the heart of the universe. And what do we find? Well, maybe we discover we are truly part of a caravan of hope and possibility. Maybe we can discover how we are on a journey through a desert and toward a place of peace and joy. Guided by this compass of that burning and true love, we can, I am absolutely certain, make our way through.

So, let us listen to our teacher, Mevlana. Let us open our hearts to the way of love. Let us be prepared to burn. And let us be prepared to live full and naked and completely connected each of us with the other. It is the only way through. The only way. But, and this is the good news, it will take us through and to the place of our hearts dreaming.

May each of us discover this as our own truth.

With Mevlana and all the saints, I pray each of us finds this love.

Amen.