Submitted by LOGOS - Overseer on
If praying creatively has a role model, someone who embodies its divine and intimate, spiced –up energy most ideally, Persian Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) is the guy. Rumi was a highly respected, traditional Islamic teacher and scholar who one fine day met a wandering radical mystic named Shamsuddin of Tabriz, and immediately entered into a jumpin’ and juicy nontraditional adventure of ecstatic love. The two men spent delirious weeks together engaged in sobbet, mystical communion and discourses.
A few of Rumi’s family members and students became very jealous of his exclusive relationship with the Shams – not to mention more than a bit worried about Rumi’s change of lifestyle – so they had the Shams run out of town, and when the Shams later returned, someone murdered him. (And you thought your relatives were tough.) Needless to say, Rumi was devastated. Out of the intense, almost unbearable separation from his companion, a legendary mystic poet was born.
Amazingly, Rumi had no prior training in classical poetry when he began belting out his profound (and world famous) musings, yet the verse that emerged from him stands today as some of the most eloquent and beautiful in Persian history. Rumi would spin and dance around a pole in a mosque for hours and hours, singing his pain but also his gratitude for how his relationship with Shams showed him how to intimately express divine love on earth. From sharing a meal with friends to enjoying a glass of wine, from the feel of his body dancing to the caress of flowers – everywhere he looked, in everything he experienced, Rumi saw evidence of the spiritual love that he and Shams participated in.
Rumi became raw human love caught in divine fire. His prayers burned with sensual honesty and radical self exposure. His lush phrases married his humanity to divinity. In much of his poetry, it’s impossible to tell if Rumi is talking about Shams, himself, of God. All three have been colored red in his love, merged in their meaning and effect, and their core, are all the same.
Have you ever seen pictures of those beautiful, mystical, white-robed whirling dervishes from Turkey? They’re modern-day students of Rumi, imitating his original ecstatic spins, using their bodies and their hearts and souls to express their prayers, to connect with the divine and to offer thanks.
What sets Rumi’s prayer-poems apart from most kinds of traditional prayer is that they are openly sensual, even sometimes overtly sexual as well as mystical. Addressing God as lover or beloved brought Rumi to a unique place in prayer in which he could become as personal, emotional, vulnerable, needy, exhausted, energized, happy, sad, lustful, demure, silly, serious, jealous, or enlightened as any true lover often feels. He whirled, he sang, he tranced, he moaned, he delved into himself and his heart like a man on fire. In short, Rumi let it all hang out.