Rumi and the Path of Radical Love with Taya Mâ & Omid Safi – Sufi Heart Podcast Ep. 28

approach the teachings of the path of Love or of Islam or of Sufism or whatever tradition it is that draws you closer to God an interactive model don't look at it purely and simply as receiving the teaching but also keep a journal of your responses to the teachings to the stories and when something touches your heart write that down and write down what it was and what it made you think because sometimes those momentary realizations are like a lightning bolt in a dark sky and for one minute everything is clear and you see your own self clearly and then it may be gone [Music] welcome to the Sufi heart podcast with Omid Safi featuring teachings and stories from the wisdom of the Islamic tradition Omid invites you to a meditation on the transformative power of love and recalling the necessity of healing our own Hearts through healing the world if you'd like to support omid's podcast please visit beherenownetwork.com forward slash Omid Hello friends and welcome back to the Sufi heart podcast we have taken a little break um over the last few weeks I had the great 410 of leading one of our illuminated tours programs to Turkey but now I'm back and we are back and I'm very delighted to get to share with you today A beautiful conversation it's one that I shared with our friends at the 2023 Mystics Summit and this is part of The Shift Network and we had a wonderful conversation on Rumi and the path of radical love so um I think for some of you who might be looking to have an opportunity to get a sense of roomy's main teachings and also how he is situated in this wider path of love that is really the Zenith of Islamic spirituality this conversation could be a really helpful one so I'm very grateful to all the friends that um The Shift Network for this conversation at Taya for having been such a great interviewer and asking such beautiful questions and I hope that this reaches your heart as well we hope to be sharing more podcasts coming up in the next bit and wishing you and yours a lovely summer season thank you hello I'm teyama we have the great pleasure of being here with Sufi teacher and author Omid Safi to explore Rumi and the path of radical love Dr Omid Safi is a teacher in the Sufi tradition a professor at Duke University and a leading Muslim public intellectual appearing often on major news outlets including PBS BBC and CNN he's a columnist for on being has a podcast called Sufi heart and is the founder of illuminated courses and tours guiding Journeys in turkey and Morocco and offering online courses open to spiritual Seekers of all backgrounds his books include memories of Muhammad and radical love teachings from the Islamic mystical tradition welcome Omid it is such a great joy to be here with you thank you so much to you it's a pleasure to be with you and with our viewers tell us about Rumi and the path of radical love well um you know what is there to say about this uh luminous Sage whose life and being and teachings have shaped the path that so many people have journeyed on for everywhere from Iran and turkey to South Asia central Asia and now over the course of the last century in Europe and North America uh to put it very simply Rumi is um someone who in his own lifetime was called The Offspring of the soul of the prophet The Offspring of the soul of the Prophet really a child of uh the Prophet Muhammad in a spiritual sense and someone who's probably the most clear Exemplar of the path of radical love on this Bold and Beautiful luminous tradition that has is its roots deep in the Islamic context um the Quran and the example the being of the Prophet Muhammad but like an ancient tree that opens up a canopy far beyond its roots has also touched the lives of seekers and lovers and dreamers from all over the world from many different cultural contexts religious contexts and um and he keeps on giving some more than 700 years after his Earthly but not his Heavenly demise it's such a gift to hear I'm curious if you'll tell us a bit more about radical love and what radical love means yeah thank you um so you know this word radical um nowadays we tend to use it in the context of um someone who goes to the extreme someone who's an extremist and um of course closer to our own home um you know sages like Dr King have described himself as being a radical in the cause of love as well and there is certainly that element of going to the extremes of love in this tradition but the word radical originally meant to go back to the heart of something to go back to the roots of something and that's really the way in which Rumi uses it um his Masterpiece the mass Navi which has often been called the the Quran in the Persian language it's the only text in the whole of Islamic civilization that has ever been um so directly so beautifully compared with the Quran and Rumi begins it by asking each one of us to explore the root of the root of our being uh to see what it is that we are tapped into what is it that grounds us that sustains us that nurtures us and in turn what is that itself grounded in nurtured by um and um so it is in some ways a work of love a path of love that returns us to the root of our being to go back to that tree metaphor so often we think about what are the fruits of my life what is the sweetness that comes out of my life and Rumi reminds us that we also have to be rooted we also have to be anchored that if we want to produce that sweet and succulent fruit of our spiritual life that we also have to be rooted somewhere grounded somewhere and this grounding is not a limitation it's actually the ways that we make sure that when the inevitable storms of life come that we have something that allows us to remain grounded what does roomie tell us about how to cultivate those roots and that ground you know I think in this way um Rumi's language is somewhat counterculture to a lot of the works of spirituality that are quite in Vogue nowadays um you know if you were to go to a bookstore and look into the spirituality section you tend to find sections that have titles like self-realization and self-help and and Rumi in some ways is kind of poking a hole in that balloon because he wants you to really think about what is that self that you're speaking of here um if that self is the way that we conceive of ourselves as this bounded small self of me as an Omid and you as attire then he's gonna say actually that self is too small for you my love you are a far grander self than this um that you do not end at the tips of your fingers and at the top of your hair um and he wants you to be a part of that ultimate self that one self which of course in theistic Traditions we would call the divine and so he wants you to be able to Rise Above This limited self understanding of us being abound itself cut off from other people cut off from nature and ultimately cut off from God and instead it's an invitation to be the drop that returns to the ocean and to see the wholeness and the Oneness that alone exists are there particular practices and paths that he would prescribe or invite to guide us toward being the job being in the Oneness he does and and this tradition does as well so of course in in Rumi's Legacy the great majority of the practices were never written down um it was always understood that what is in the books is more or less um the turn by turn directions that one takes on a journey but of course um you know someone can write for you on a piece of paper travel on this highway for 200 miles and then go right on that road for 40 miles and then go up this dirt road for two miles and that's very different than arriving at a beautiful Vista and climbing a mountain and having a panoramic view or going to the ocean and putting your feet into the water and having the waves wash over you and in the Sufi tradition much like the majority of the spiritual Traditions the idea was that what is in the books always needs to be combined with a living face-to-face Heart to Heart transmission um and so many of the practices themselves were um part of that very intimately personal connection but what we do know is that roomy's path of Love talks about the practice of love not as a kind of sentiment not as a kind of emotion not as a kind of a Feeling we're so accustomed to a context in which people talk about you know I love you today I may not love you tomorrow I loved you before but I fell out of love with you and there's something quite fickle about the way that we speak about love um and then there's that further issue which is the way in which um in speaking about love we've tended to collapse it and to restrict it almost exclusively to a kind of physical romantic maybe even sexual love Rumi is part of a tradition that they're trying to push back against that and to come up with a very expansive notion of love so he is going to be emphasizing the ways in which um there's the love of God the love of spiritual teachers the love of prophets and prophetesses the love of friends in your spiritual Community the love of parents the love of neighbors of friends of yourself certainly the Love of Animals the love of trees the love of the wind um and so it's it's expanding and expanding and expanding until it includes everyone and everything and part of the idea is to move from that isolation of the bound itself to the liberation of an interwoven organic and whole being in touch with all amazing in your book radical love you write love is not merely an emotion but the unleashing of God on Earth this struck me so deeply I'm wondering if you'll say more about this and also tell us about uh what it is what its Essence is yeah thank you so um again remember that you know Rumi's real Legacy is his being right of course he is a Peerless poet probably the most beloved uh poet in the eastern half of of the Muslim majority world but he's not writing a philosophical Treatise on love right she's not writing the platonic dialogues he oftentimes hints at things through stories and through poems and then invites you to be a participant so in that in a radical love book I had a poem of roomies that I've translated which is called say nothing uh and this is one in which you know it's about 10 lines or so uh and I may read that for you if if we may the the rhyming pattern of each of the lines is which is say nothing so that is going to come up again and again so he starts by saying um I serve that moon like Beauty say nothing to me unless it's about her say nothing of Sorrow speak only words of this treasure say nothing last night I became love Christ then he's describing this Visionary experience of seeing and having a dialogue with love itself itself radical love itself last night I became love crazed love saw me and said I've come don't Shout say nothing I think any of us who have ever loved and been hurt can relate to this next line I said Rumi said love I'm afraid of something else love said there is nothing else say nothing right so this is God is all that there is there is nothing other than the Divine and love is speaking in that voice I'm all that there is it's all love it's only ever been love say nothing let me whisper secrets in your ear say nothing and then Ruby says oh wow you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen But I what what are you I said what a beauty are you an angel or a human love said not an angel not a human say nothing and at this point room is like well if you're not an angel if you're not a human said what is this say it love said stay like this burn a little bit more uh say nothing and then Remy says well I've ruled out everything else the only thing that's left is God he said my heart aren't you describing God love said yes my child but hush say nothing um that's more the way he goes about it you know it's this poetic playful invitation of layer by layer unveiling and um where they say nothing it's like okay this is as far as words can take you now if you want to go further deeper higher you gotta taste it you gotta experience it um and in some of the writings of the love tradition that comes around Rumi the analogy that they always use is that you know if somebody were to write on a board um h-o-n-e-y you probably wouldn't go up to it and lick the board um and I tend to hesitate making sharp distinctions between religion and spirituality because that's a very modern division historically all of our spiritual and mystical Traditions were totally immersed in our religious traditions today of course because of all the um trauma and frankly dryness of many of our religious Traditions many of us want to keep exploring the spiritual outside of conventionally religious understandings and that's understandable um and you know what some of these teachers say is that what conventional religiosity is is that somebody a prophet a sage a teacher uh brings a bowl of honey in front of you and holds it up and says look at this look at how golden and Amber this honey is and they might even put their own finger in that bowl of honey and then put it in their own mouth and say um you wouldn't believe how sweet this is and everyone who's watching says I do testify that he tasted the honey and he says that the honey is real sweet but the spiritual path is that we also come to taste God for ourselves and so it would actually be that we discover our own bowl of honey and we lift up that bowl and we put our own finger in our own bowl of honey and put it in our own mouth and then we say I do declare that with my own tongue I have tasted my own honey and it is as sweet as what he said um and of course when the finger with the honey is in your mouth then your mouth is closed so hush say nothing and that point there might not even be the need to speak anymore or to try to persuade anybody else or to post it on Instagram it's just enough to have the mouth closed and the eyes closed and to savor that sweetness yes to savoring the sweetness I'm curious what guidance you have for folks who are familiar with perhaps watching others taste the honey and to be in witness and testimony there but are really seeking and yearning for their own bowl of honey for their own access finding those sweet spots what Guidance Do you have for folks seeking to taste that more thank you um well you know the guidance is not what what I would have it's just beautiful words and teachings that Rumi and the other sages and the prophets and prophetesses have have brought for us um you know towards the end of his life when Rumi is about to pass on from this realm uh of course everybody around him is in tears as they were in tears towards the end of the Prophet Muhammad's life what do we do when this gate to heaven is closed and Rumi offered them one very practical piece of advice which he said um when I'm gone don't look for me in the soil of this place now mind you I have the privilege of taking people to that soil and I've been going there for some 30 years and I've had maybe a thousand people come with me um so we love to go into that place it's a sacred place it's one of those places where the boundary between this world and the Unseen realm becomes thin thin and all but invisible um but Romy says I'm not in the soil if you want to find me if you want to find your own bowl of honey and to have your honey in your own mouth think about my teachings any story any practice any poem open it up and taste the joy that you had when you came across it I am inside of that Joy I am inside of that joy and I think that's really the practice for someone who wants to have their own bowl of honey is approach the teachings of the path of Love or of Islam or of Sufism or whatever tradition it is that draws you closer to God in an interactive model don't look at it purely and simply as receiving the teaching but also keep a journal of your responses to the teachings to the stories and when something touches your heart write that down and write down what it was and what it made you think because sometimes those momentary realizations are like a lightning bolt in a dark sky and for one minute everything is clear and you see your own self clearly and then it may be gone and sometimes keeping a track a journal a diary of our interactions with these teachings reminds us that oh we've had experiences we've been given these tastes of honey and um and we will again inshallah and we will again inshallah I mean there's a practice that I've heard you speak of that is very dear to my heart of kissing the cup I'm wondering if you'll speak to that yeah well you know here I am holding up a glass of water and this is something from molana roomie's tradition that whenever he would go to drink he would take the class and he would kiss it before he would start drinking and um you know people they sort of looked at him funny as they would today why don't you just drink from the glass why are you kissing it and his response was always the same because it has a soul it has a life force it has a John as we say in the Eastern tradition Turkish Persian Urdu uh it would be rude for you and I just to call each other by a first name I am and the audience members are something John and the John is the soul is I don't just see you I aspire to see your soul and your life force and that you are as dear to me as my own life force I live through this connection and in English we speak of um some beings having Souls animals and humans maybe plants and then everything else being inanimate soulless so let's but for the mystics nothing is thoughtless everything is alive everything sings and so Rumi at one point has this line in the masnavi where he says think of the elements right the Earth the soil the water Fire and Air he says to you they appear dead but to God they are alive they are living um so God is the al-hai the living one life itself and that Divine Life is cursing through moving through flowing through all and so the kissing of a little glass um the kissing of each other's hands of cheeks of embracing of the friends kissing of the earth these are all reminders that there's no such thing as an inanimate object that there is a soul that connects us all there's a life force that is derived from God as the living so beautiful thank you for this the life force derived from God as the living it reminds me too of something I read in your work radical love is not in God But as God and that that strikes me so deeply yeah thank you and you know this before the time of mulanarumi and some of these teachers of radical love people used to talk about how you know there's the love that we as mere humans share with each other and this is like the alphabet that we have to master this in order to really get to love of the one and in Rumi's tradition of course you know he's mindful that sometimes we just fall in love with somebody's pretty face and and he says well if you what you fall in love with is just a pretty face the face may not always be pretty and sometimes you know as a young man I used to have hair down to my shoulders and today I don't so if what that person loved in me was the long hair down to the shoulders I don't have that to offer anymore but if they can see the John if they can see the soul then everything else becomes like the seasons um and if you have a garden that's a really great metaphor my wife is a gardener and how beautiful it is that you know in the springtime and we're towards the process of wrapping up Spring here where where we live but there's been lots of blossoms and lots of fruit on some of the trees not quite yet ripe but you see them coming and the green of the leaves is still that very fresh vibrant green and probably in another month or so many of those blossoms are going to turn into fruit and the strawberries and the blueberries that we have in our yard are going to be ripe and sweet for the picking and then when Autumn comes many of the trees around here are going to drop their leaves those vibrant Rich orange and gold and red and brown colors are going to reveal themselves they've always been there they're there right now but sometimes when what we think of as life Falls that's the name of the Season then the vibrant colors beneath get to show themselves and then the life of the plant returns down to the roots of the tree and the plants they're not dead but there's been a time for flourishing for manifesting and there's a time to return to the roots and in the winter season you don't walk up to the trees in your garden and say I hate you it is no this is the season for you to rest for repose for recovery and how beautiful would it be if we could love each other like that right that there's a time for the exuberance of Youth and the freshness of life and then maybe there's a time to be fruitful and at the peak of productivity and then you know maybe someone like me in the awesome season of life where certain colors in the beard and in the hair are starting to show themselves and then maybe even in another few years if we're given that kind of a life you get to the winter season of life where you're a little bit more bent over where your life has returned down to the roots but then you've also seen things and tasted things so when you are sharing your experiences and you're speaking of joy and heartache and patience and Beauty these are not abstract Concepts these are these are Honeys that you have tasted and your words are pregnant with the lessons that you have lived and to love each other through the seasons of life in that same way this is so beautiful I'm curious if you might share a bit for those of us who want to kiss the cup want to perceive the soul and all want to be more unabashed and radical in our loving presence in the world what might roomie offer to encourage us to be bold in that way beautiful you know I think uh one of the we live in such a curious age um on one hand you can turn on your phone or you can open up a laptop and you can be exposed to beautiful spiritual teachings from all over the world from so many centuries um this is kind of a new thing for us humans on the other hand those very same devices can also uh flood us with endless tantalizing Impressions and Sensations um you know you can spend hours just doing this on Instagram you will never get to the bottom right it's there's no point at which Instagram is ever going to say that's it Ty you got me you saw it all you saw all the posts I have nothing it's just gonna keep coming keep coming and you know the nowadays of course like you and I have a conversation and if I haven't changed the privacy setting on my phone the next day I'm gonna start to see advertising of all that stuff on my phone like someone's always listening what else can you buy and the more you buy maybe you'll get closer to happiness right um so we have to really cultivate the wisdom of knowing how to use this extraordinary technology that we have and um one of the things that I that is clear to me and I think anybody who loves romy's tradition is that we have more Technologies to connect with one another than maybe ever before we can write letters we can pick up the phone we can FaceTime we can Instagram they can do Twitter we can do Facebook whatever and at the same time more and more and more people experience their life as being overwhelmed by a kind of cosmic loneliness and depending on where you live and depending on the community that you're a part of many people would be really hard-pressed to tell you anything about the family two or three doors down from them um so it's a strange world where some Facebook friend to you or some Instagram influencer that you follow might feel very intimate to you but you might not really have picked up the phone and talked to your mother or your grandmother or a sibling or a child or a cousin um Beyond The Casual hey how you how are the kids doing what's going on um we have so many ways of connecting to one another and in some ways we have less to say to one another so I think these are the ways in which you know in this tradition yes there are practices for prayer yes there are practices for thicker for chanting and invoking the presence of God but a lot of the most basic things are also being present with one another and um you know one of the simple things that I wrote and some years ago is in traditional Muslim culture we did not ask one another how are you doing um you would ask each other how is the state of your heart in this breath that was the meaning of this word Hall and Hall is that transient state of the heart um it's when you and I would see each other I wouldn't ask you what's on your to-do list how many things do you have in your inbox it was I recognize that the heart is alive that the heart is dynamic and there are as many thoughts and Impressions that go through your heart as there are clouds that pass through the sky how is your heart doing right now my friend [Music] Matt with intention with presence not as a way of prying or forcing a kind of intimacy that is not warranted but as the fruit of our friendship and to ask it to offer it and then to pause to create this opening in which your friend has the space to look within themselves and to say wow how how is my heart doing right now haven't thought about my heart all day um and then they share something and then they say and how's your heart right so in that kind of a dynamic you know you we're not none of us are we're not the guru we're not the Healer we're not the fixer we are mirrors and that's what you know Rumi talks about his own friendship with shams uh his teacher that they're like two mirrors facing each other anytime you have two mirrors and you step between them you see your reflection go out to Infinity and we have that opportunity every time we come across one another um and that's really the gift that this tradition which is based on presence on being present with the whole of what we are you know it's for that reason why of course no one called him Rumi in his lifetime um you know he was usually just called Maulana mevlana in Turkish um our teacher or master or protective friend and his devotees called him hazrat hazrat Maulana just means presence this is someone who is present to himself present to herself and it's that honorific that we put before the name of all the prophets Muhammad hazrat Jesus Moses hazrat Abraham hazrat Maulana and you know roomie writes 60 000 lines of poetry many of them very little in terms of autobiographical detail right he's got this one line that the great great scholar of Sufism and Marie Schimmel says this might be the most autobiographical thing he ever says um and he says I prayed so often that my whole being has become a prayer every time somebody sees me they start to pray right not that they start praying to me they start to pray to God because they see what prayer looks like I think those are the kind of friends we gotta look for in life it's somebody that when you see them you know that love is real beauty is real prayer is real presence Israel and it's not that they make you feel better about yourself or Worse about yourself it's it's kind of like you know that old scene if you're of a certain age from the When Harry Met Sally movie like I'll have what she's having uh I I want to have the presence that he's having I want to figure out how to live like that um that's a gift that beings like Rumi and these sages from this tradition continue to offer us um such a gift to hear you speaking of seeking ones in our life who make presence real make love real make God real as I've heard and read in your teachings I'm curious as you reference the context of mawlana in his life what changes for those who are very familiar with reading roomie out of context perhaps in Translation what changes when we connect with lots if we're if we're studying or um being in connection with Rumi and with mavlana's work um in its context It's a Wonderful question um so I'll give you one example um you know there's that wonderful line of um of roomy's poetry that my dear friend Coleman barks has translated so beautifully um something along the lines of um there's thousands of ways to bow down and kiss the ground right uh it's a beautiful line it's magnificent and I've been with him in poetry and Sufi festivals with like 2 000 people uh and and he starts it and it's like a black church calling response like 2 000 people are speaking the poem back to him because they've based their whole life on thousands of ways to bow down and bend down and kiss the ground and how much more concrete is it if we realize that when Rumi wrote that poem in person the language that he was using was actually about the physical postures of the five times a day prayers right so it's not the generic bow down and kiss the ground it's the prostration of the prayer and the putting your forehead and putting it on the soil from which we all come from and to which we will someday return in prayer and then to think that there's hundreds of ways of Prayer right so I think what it does is that it enriches and deepens and adds that poetic and symbolic level to our religious tradition um so you know I think in terms of a lot of my own teaching um yes on one hand I think these teachings of Love are really meant for the whole of humanity we can all benefit from them regardless of what background we come from and so many of us complain about why is it that the Islam that we see around us today doesn't have the mercy of the Prophet Muhammad or that the Christianity that we see of today doesn't seem like it has the love of Jesus and that the Judaism that we see today doesn't seem to have the Liberation that we saw in Moses and the Hinduism that we see today doesn't seem to have the rich imagination and the mythology of classical Hindu traditions you know part of that is because we have taken the roomies of the world out of our religious tradition when was the last time any of us went to a mosque in which we heard Rumi poetry being a part of Friday sermons it's Anisha that's a problem so I think we try to do in this short few years I have on this Earth is to walk these um with these two feet with these fly with these two wings on one hand explore these love teachings and to share them with people regardless of their faith background their language their their culture because I do think these are gifts for the whole of humanity on one hand with One Wing and on the other hand for those of us who continue to be rooted and grounded and anchored in a particular Faith tradition to enliven it to bring that sweetness back to the roots so that inshallah those after the winter season there can be another spring and another summer uh coming maybe after we're gone it's such a gift to receive this reminder and invitation this call to sweeten the roots and it's such a gift to receive the ways that you've sweetened The Roots through through your teachings and your your honoring of Nevada and the way that you do I'm curious if you'll share another poem with us here oh thank you um yeah I mean let's see um what we might have so um there are um a couple of things that I've translated in this uh in this book and um yeah there's a few poems from that um wonderful wonderful early female Sufi Rabia um I'm the most famous of the Mystic uh female Giants of early Islam and um I've always loved this one very much and this was their prayer that people have prayed for about a thousand years and so she says oh Lord if I worship you for fear of hell burn me in that hell if I worship you hoping for Paradise make it forbidden for me but if I worship you only for your own sake do not withhold from me your Everlasting Beauty do not withhold from me your Everlasting Beauty um and Rumi of course grew up with the teachings of women like Rabia um you know there's a Robbie is walking one day past we're not told if it's a mosque or a church and the guy is offering a sermon uh you know he is paraphrasing the teachings that we see in the gospels from Jesus um knock and it shall be opened onto you ask and it shall be granted unto you so Rabia sticks her head in she goes what are you saying um and you know this preacher is is quite upset that this woman this woman has interrupted his Majestic sermon and so he said a woman I said knock know your place knock and then the door shall be open unto you and she says fool the doors never been closed the door to God has never been closed and Rumi grows up with this and of course in this tradition if you receive Something Beautiful from someone you receive it and then you give it back so there's this playfulness of a back and forth and so Rumi comes up with a poem as a response to Rabia and he says my friend you have been knocking and knocking and knocking at God's door for your whole life friend you're knocking from the inside right you're already within God and you keep knocking and knocking asking why the door doesn't open I think these are really just Eternal gifts from Rabia from Rumi from all of these sages and sometimes one poem can save a life and you go from that sense of loneliness and isolation and meaninglessness to all of a sudden realizing that you are the fish in the ocean of God and the reason that you have not seen the ocean is because there is nothing other than the ocean and you've been in the ocean all along and when we get it and when through the grace of God and the prophet and these Sages we say right I have gills because I'm a creature of the ocean [Music] I don't see the ocean because I'm in the ocean um that's when love becomes real and friendship becomes real and God becomes real and that's what we're all striving for Matt is what we're all striving for thank you so much for the blessing of this teaching omijan for the folks tuning in who would love to connect more deeply with your work where can they find you tell us about your offerings um well um the the most helpful thing I can tell them is go to a forest go to a Mountaintop go to the beach put your feet in a stream uh sense the joy that washes over you and Savor that taste and return to it whatever it is if it's yoga if it's prayer if it's journaling if it's Salat and Namaz find out what it is that feeds your soul and do it and do it and do it again until it becomes you and until when everybody who sees you starts to pray and starts to look for their own Mountain that honestly is the most helpful thing I can tell them if they're looking for more concrete things there's that book radical love that you kindly mentioned um and we have some online courses and Community Gatherings through illuminated courses which is online and every year we're blessed to take some friends to Turkey to Morocco and for some friends to Mecca and Medina and they would be welcome to join us on those as well amazing thank you so much for these invitations and all that you've shared will you close us with a blessing a prayer or a poem yes inshallah with me um get this text because this is very very dear to my heart so this is the um the poem of blessing from an Indian Sufi Hazard denied Han who is really in many ways the um continuation of Rumi's teachings for today uh he is the first Sufi that we know of to have come to Europe and North America there were ones before him uh on slave ships but um their record has been largely wiped away um but is the first one that that we know of so um and and he wrote his writings in English so I'll read this um praise be to thee most supreme god omnipotent omnipresent all pervading the only being take us in thy parental arms raise us from the denseness of the Earth thy Beauty do we worship to thee do we give willing surrender most merciful and compassionate God the idealized Lord of the whole Humanity the only do we worship and towards thee alone we aspire open our hearts towards thy Beauty illuminate our souls with Divine Light oh thou the Perfection of love Harmony and beauty all powerful creator sustainer judge and forgiver of our shortcomings Lord God of the East and the West of the worlds above and below of the scene and unseen beings poor Upon Us by love and thy light give sustenance to our bodies hearts and souls use us for the purpose that thy wisdom chooseth and guide us on the path of thine own goodness draws closer to thee every moment of our life until in US be reflected thy Grace thy Glory thy wisdom thy Joy and thy peace Army I mean oh beautiful thank you so much for this all all that you've shared here on me thank you for the journey and the companionship my friend [Music]

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 3,146

Keywords: rumi, rumi poetry, sufi poetry, omid safi, sufi heart, sufi heart podcast, sufi podcast, bhnn, bhnn podcast, bhnn podcasts, podcast, sufism, kabir

Id: lddhzO9mXYY

Length: 56min 48sec (3408 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023