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What these poets are telling us is not meant to sound beautiful. It is the most radically empowering message. No wonder the Church has always persecuted “mystics”- those who put their trust in the Presence within. No wonder Sufis are considered a danger to Islam.
There is a contemporary American poet, Mary Oliver, who says it like this:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
It is the gentlest, tenderest of messages. You, as you already are, in this body, as this body, are already the Divine Presence. You are already flawless. As you are - not as you think you are, not as what you are trying so hard to be. A gentle and radical message of empowerment. Our hiding in a hole we have dug ourselves takes many forms. But fundamentally, basically, we have learned that we should hide – because we are unworthy, flawed, not deserving of respect. This message, this assumption, has broken, disempowered, oppressed, disenfranchised the spirit of millions, for centuries, and is continuing to do so. Through economic oppression, physical and verbal cruelty, war, manipulation, you name it. Our bodies are not ok, our sexuality is not ok. Our anger is not ok, our courage to be uncertain, our spontaneity and unpredictable creative spirit are not ok, our being what we are is not ok. And so, all we have is this sense of an identity that has, at least, a semblance of control, some semblance of solidity even if it has a tense anxiety at its core. Along comes this gentle message of the mystical poets. Gentle, radical, and devastating. Devastating, because it says, you are not what you are striving so hard to be, and because it asks us to be seemingly honest about our most treasured illusions. Gentle, because it says, you are already something infinitely, almost unimaginably more beautiful and profound. And radical, because it says, there is no longer any need to try and change. There is no longer any need to do violence to yourself. There never was.
When Rumi was asked what a Sufi is, he answered: a man or a woman with a broken heart. Every time I allow this poetry to touch my heart, as it gently calls me back to this immediate aliveness, it also never fails to bring me to an awareness of something in me that I call brokenness. Not only is there the pain in the heart that we all share, the pain of not being seen or supported, or even of the various ways in which we have all been violated, traumatized or had our spirit crushed, but also of defeat. My attempts at rising above, escaping from, or becoming immune to human suffering have failed. In that sense, I am broken. And even though I can sometimes still be fooled into believing that others have succeeded where my own personal identity-project has crashed, I believe that this brokenness, this defeat, is also something we all share, though most of us haven’t admitted it yet. Once again, Hafiz winks at us in humorous complicity when he says, O my sweet, crushed angel – you have not danced so badly after all.
There is no call, in this poetry, to turn away from or deny this brokenness. In fact, to the degree that we fail to acknowledge or embrace the acutely sensed experience of it as part of what it means to be here, we will be unable to acknowledge this brokenness in others, unable to fully relate to the world around us, and we will, I believe, continue to cause harm.
Says Rumi:
Those tender words we said to one another
are stored in the secret heart of heaven:
one day like rain, they will fall and spread
and our mystery will grow green over the world.
The tender words, which are spoken in this poetry, invite us to stop trying to turn our isolated identity-project into a success at the expense of others or the environment. They are spoken from the radical tenderness of knowing ourselves, our broken selves, intimately, honestly. We only need to look around to see that mankind is hugely traumatized and that the degree of trauma is mounting, not diminishing. We need to embrace ourselves in this brokenness, as this brokenness to allow ourselves to become permeated with the Presence that we are. Then, we will be able to relate again, intimately, with ourselves and with others, and with the world around us.
To fall into the unknown like that brings fear. It certainly does for me. This poetry, to me, is like gentle rain that waters the seeds of what is real in us. The world desperately needs these seeds to grow and bear fruit – to grow green. It is this living presence in us which connects us to a living reality that we all share. It is that seed we need to nurture. I, for one, am unable to imagine anything that is more fundamentally relevant – politically relevant – than this. In this way, how we nurture that in us which is most deeply personal and intimate – the One who hides inside us – is hopefully on its way to becoming profoundly political.
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