A number of years ago Coldplay’s Chris Martin was in a depressing divorce from Gwyneth Paltrow. This kind of suffering is one that many go through. A dear friend introduced him to the poems by Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian Sufi. The poems changed his life. A track from a Coldplay album features Coleman Barks reciting one of the poems: ‘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.’ Rumi has aided the spiritual journeys of Madonna and Tilda Swinton who have incorporated Ruminesqued aphorisms into their lyrics. ‘If you are irritated by every rub, how will you ever get polished,’ or, ‘Every moment I shape my destiny with a chisel. I am a carpenter of my own soul.’ The words that Martin featured on his album come from Rumi’s ‘Masnavi,’ a six-book epic poem. Its fifty thousand lines are mostly in Persian, but they are riddled with Arabic excerpts from Muslim scriptural texts that allude to Koranic anecdotes that offer moral lessons. The work remains unfinished. Rumi was born in Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, present-day Turkey. Rumi’s theological education was in Syria where he studied Sunni jurisprudence and later returned to Konya as a seminarian. It was there that he met his mentor- Shams-i-Tabriz. Shams pushed Rumi to question his scriptural education, debating Koranic passages with him and emphasizing the idea of devotion as finding oneness with God. Rumi would come to blend the intuitive love for God that he found in Sufism with the legal codes of Sunni Islam and the mysticism of Shams. The tapestry he wove built a large following in cosmopolitan Konya, incorporating Sufis, Muslim literalists and theologians, Christians, Jews and local Sunni Seljuk rulers. Rumi's longing and desire to attain the ultimate reality is evident in the following poem from his book the Masnavi: I died to the mineral state and became a plant, I died to the vegetal state and reached animality, I died to the animal state and became a man, Then what should I fear? I have never become less from dying. At the next charge (forward) I will die to human nature, So that I may lift up (my) head and wings (and soar) among the angels, And I must (also) jump from the river of (the state of) the angel, Everything perishes except His Face, Once again I will become sacrificed from (the state of) the angel, I will become that which cannot come into the imagination, Then I will become non-existent; non-existence says to me (in tones) like an organ, Truly, to Him is our return. - Rumi
The Emily Dahl Foundation
