Rumi

Last summer, a friend who was moving lent me (and eventually told me to keep) his copy of The Essential Rumi. I was interested enough to figure I would read it one day. There's a pattern in my relationship with books: I acquire or become aware of one, and let it sit. One day it occurs to me to read the book.

The longest time between purchase and reading, so far, is about 10 years. I had bought Beat Not the Bones, by Charlotte Jay, from the Quality Paperback Book club. It had the combined lure of being a mystery, and being about an anthrolopologist. My first attempt found it too dry, and it survived four home moves in a box before I rediscovered it. And loved it.

Wise, interesting friends have posted snippets of Rumi, on Twitter and on other sites that I frequent. Finally, today, I pulled the book off the shelf and began to read. As is so often the case, the book came into my hand precisely when I was ready for it. Rumi wrote on "the howling necessity" and finally I understand, this tendency to do what needs to be done but to bitch and moan the whole way (as a very loving friend has put it).

Cry out! Don't be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of loving flow into you.

This year, the past few years, I have been on a journey of loving. Committed to one form of love, in which I have worked at a friendship with my exhusband, for the benefit of our children and for his growth as well as my own. I have loved someone else, too, who is not part of my life - loved enough to be willing to learn to love myself better. I have changed because of this love, regardless of its outcome, so it is real. That simple statement comes of many months of struggling with blaming myself for things not going as I'd hoped, living with the tendency I've had all my life to mock myself for imagining something good would come. I am come through that darkness to a place where I can see how much I have grown.

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming
through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.
Be your note.
I'll show you how it's enough.

[Rumi, from "Each Note"]

It happens far too often to be a coincidence, that a book I finally read is exactly on topic for the personal journey I have been taking. I don't know if some phrase from the cover blurb hides out in the subconscious and prompts the mind at just the right time, or if it is a prompting of the Holy Spirit (reading Marianne Williamson's reflections on A Course in Miracles has given me a much higher comfort level with speaking of the Spirit). The Tao puts it simply, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."

E.M. Forster wrote, "I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves." Rumi seems to have taken my paths much further, but comes back along them through his writing, to renew my hope and to point me to joy.

Station - a poem. Finally.

Station

I.
Pitted blue glass windows
line the church aisles.
Centered in each window
a square panel depicts
one Station of the Cross:
gilt figures on black slate.

Sundays after Mass, her
Grandmother walked through
the Stations, rosary
looped over her hands,
the skin silk-smooth, loose
on the bones. The kids
would all wait in the car,
impatient for the ritual’s end.

One station: Jesus carries His Cross.
Another, He falls the first time.
He meets His mother. A murmur
accompanied the beads’ clicking.

II.
On Fridays in Lent the upper
grades attended observance
of the Stations together.
The censer would swing gently
on its chain. Wisps of incense rose
with the priest’s thin voice:
eloi, eloi, lama sabachtani

Someone might faint
or pretend to in
the close hungry afternoon.

The priest and the altar boy attendants
moved on to the next one: Jesus dies.
He is laid in the tomb.

Between panels, the light streams in.

III.
She tries again to repent

wonders whether peace
would come if she made
confession, if she knelt down on
marble at the communion rail
or shed penitent’s tears.
She waits in the shadow of
the great crucifix above her.

She would pray: Jesus
how You suffered,
make me good.
With thorns or a whip
or with nails
make me forget
this longing.

The Painted Veil (John Curran film, 2006)

Watching TV is spontaneous for me. When I am really tired, or feel justified in taking time to do nothing, I turn it on and scroll through the guide to see if there is anything worth watching. The result is that I often see bits and pieces of movies rather than being able to enjoy them in their entireties.

Recently, I looked to see what was airing and found that The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts had just started. I have seen most of it at least three times, but I have always missed the beginning. Naturally, I thought I would see what I had missed. I love the time period, its fashions for women, the contrast with the earlier Victorian lifestyle, the instability of the British empire at that time. I love the cinematography, the misted Chinese landscape, and I love the story.

The film is based on the book by W. Somerset Maugham. Before seeing it, I had heard of Maugham and knew that I loved the occasional quotation that I would find attributed to him (“Writing is the supreme solace.” – on the masthead, here) but had never read any of his stories. After I first saw TPV, I ordered my first collection of Maugham’s short stories from my bookswap. I have been ever since an admirer of his work.

For each subsequent viewing of the movie, I have told myself that I will turn it off when I get to the part that I know will break my heart. The strategy works very well for watching Titanic: once the water gets up to the ankles it’s time to go, before the children are being put to bed, before the old couple lies down with their hands entwined to wait, before the life boats are boarded. Rose and Jack can continue their romance behind the scenes without the ending.

Every time I see The Painted Veil, I get to that moment, when Waddington (Toby Jones) calls to Mrs. Fane (Naomi Watts), “It’s your husband.” Every time, I am seduced by the story into watching more, watching what can happen when love overcomes human failings and transforms us. Then it is too late. Someone invariably walks in on me, nose stopped up completely and eyes red and running with their excess of saline. This frightens the my younger son; the older one shrugs and asks, again, “why do you watch this movie? It always makes you cry.”

I have given up trying to explain that I watch it for the same reason Kitty Fane picks up the roses in the florist's shop, though, as she points out, they’re hardly worth the expense: “They will only be dead in a week.” The beauty is worth the cost, for the roses, for the Fanes and for the story.

Confession

Yesterday I quoted unfashionably from the Bible. In college I'd taken a course on the Bible as Literature, but didn't do very well in it, in part because at that time I was not able to separate the writing from the religious aspects of it with which I was raised. I am Christian, and I'm certainly not embarrassed about God but would be very embarrassed to be associated with a great number of people who call themselves Christian.

I remember finding it a little shocking that one of the songs on a Bible Song tape I used to play with the kids included the chorus, "Everybody talking about heaven ain't going there." It plays through my head though, when I am around certain self-proclaimed Christians who attempt to enlighten everyone around them. That makes about as much sense to me as going to another country and quoting the Constitution to its citizens. The general response would be a blank look that clearly asks "And...?"

There are people in the Church who realize this isn't Christlike behavior. I once heard Paul Sheppard teach on the idea that people are out there in the world trying to correct people according to biblical lights who are not believers in them. It doesn't make sense and is frankly offensive. Gandhi once said that after reading the Bible, he would have considered becoming Christian "if I didn't know so many Christians." I don't want to be one of those.

One of the problems I observe in promoting a dogmatic Christian religion to the world is that the promoters aren't even free to love because they are too busy trying to determine whether the people who need it, deserve it. It becomes much simpler when we remember all of us need it, while none of us really deserve it. I don't mean that I think we are all worthless, but only that we all have in us the pettiness, spite and even violence that are part of human nature. We all deserve love from each other, or don't deserve it, pretty equally.

Tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God's love, a love we don't even have to earn. --Madeleine L'Engle

I have no skill with Christian Apologetics. I can't argue anyone into faith in God, let alone God as I understand Him. I am no better able to understand or explain how electricity is generated and shared through power lines. The inability doesn't stop me from using electricity, though. I don't pretend to be a model follower of my God, but I have a relationship with God as I understand Him that underlies everything in my life. I respect every other person's search to know God, a higher power, the Source of light and of life - under whatever name - according to your own experience, trusting that truth will be revealed according to its own purpose and not mine.

Do you need proof of God? Does one light a torch to see the sun? --Chinese proverb

What's Love Got to Do?

There's a tacit assumption in our modern life that romantic interest must not be allowed to influence much outside its own sphere. Falling for someone at work is almost taboo, though it happens all the time. It is frowned on to put a relationship at the forefront of making any major decision - after all, the relationship could always go south. Of course, so could a job, but no one likes to consider that possibility. Even with current divorce rates and short-lived romances, a relationship stands a pretty good chance of outliving a job.

Lives are so compartmentalized, and even the desire to be significantly close to another person is downplayed, until there is no place for attachment to occur; the result is a lot of lonely people with no idea how to relate to someone within the very narrow context that has been allotted. Individual career and pursuits rule, but every day on msn.com and Yahoo!, there are articles on why being alone doesn't mean there's something wrong with you, what to eat or what not to eat on a first date, how to find someone with whom to go on a first date. There is no time, and certainly no energy left in which to find or to maintain relationship. We are reduced to an impotent longing that manifests itself in endless, inapplicable advice on what to do with your relationship, in a vacuum where the relationship cannot exist. We might as well write articles on how to enjoy the retirements that most of us will never be able to afford, without making major changes.

We work and work out, nurture the kids with whatever we have left, and take notes on how to act if we were ever to spend time with someone we will never actually meet because so many of us aren't even present in our own lives. In other words, "In a modern setting where even the satire is satirized, love becomes weakness, tears become a punch line, real laughter a vulnerability, marriage a surrender." (http://www.theavettbrothers.com/, a review of the Avett Brothers CD Emotionalism).

There is, of course, the other extreme, still very present among the species, of looking for one's soulmate around every corner and behind every latte counter. Expectations of a smoothly running relationship, perpetual bliss, perfect sex and perfect agreement make connection impossible, just as much as reducing relationship to an item on the chore list (equal to taking out the trash or cleaning the fridge). Still, the perfect romance is sought by many. Recently it was noted (msn.com, under Money) that the romance novel industry is booming in this economy. It's an escape, just like drinking and pornography. Love, some think, will make everything better.

"L'amour! These ladies come and dance and excite themselves and want love and think it is happiness. And they tell me about their sorrows - me - and they have no sorrows at all, only that they are silly and selfish and lazy. Their husbands are unfaithful and their lovers run away and what do they say? Do they say, I have two hands, two feet, all my faculties, I will make a life for myself? No, they say, Give me the cocaine, give me the cocktail, give me the thrill, give me my gigolo, give me l'amo-o-our. Like a mouton bleating in a field." --Antoine the gigolo in Have His Carcase, by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1932.

That passage can be haunting. We can use it, and certainly other statements like it, to dissuade ourselves from ever looking for a valid connection with another human being. We can say that romantic love is not important, which was not my intent. The need for love is real, as is hunger and the need for a purpose to one's work. Good meals don't answer for all the other needs in a fulfilled life; love alone can't do it either.

"But understand me, " said Antoine, who, like most Frenchmen, was fundamentally serious and domestic, "I do not say that love is not important." -- Ibid.

So, where is all this going? This semi-detached musing on looking for love, or avoiding love, or finding the difference between love that is important and love that is unimportant takes wing whenever I observe the inconsistency in current thinking. Go the eHarmony or Match.com! Find your perfect match! No, don't do that, you don't have time, and half of all marriages end in divorce, anyway.

It's no wonder we're confused. So far, the truest observation I think I've heard, is that important love often shows up when you're not looking for it. Even then, it may be impossible to work out, so it may not be the answer one sought. One might conclude, in the words of Ghalib, "No, I wasn't meant to love and be loved." Maybe it is easier to abandon hope. Or, take your two hands and two feet, and your faculties and make a life for yourself, and see what happens.