Dancing into the Heart of God
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Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in 1207 in Afghanistan, which was then within the Persian empire. While still a child he fled to Turkey, along with his whole family, when the Mongols invaded their land. He became a scholar and a mystic in the community of dervishes, and a poet whose words speak to people around the world and across the centuries. He died in 1273, and the anniversary of his death is celebrated in his country as “Rumi’s Wedding Day,” the day he melted into union with everything. That communion—with beloved friends, with God, with the world—is expressed throughout his poetry.
And like mystics of every tradition, he resolved the searcher’s question, Should we look outside our experience, or deep within it? Should we be seeking another world or delving into this one? by saying: neither, and both. Yes, we are on a journey, we are headed elsewhere—but when we truly get there we will understand that we were there all along. We already live where everything is music. We search outside ourselves for truth and happiness. We are right that we need to search, because we haven’t found that truth or happiness yet. But the search begins and ends where we are right now.
I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside! (all translations by Coleman Barks)
And so he counsels us:
Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. The body itself is a screen to shield and partially reveal the light that’s blazing inside your presence. . . all the things we do, are mediums that hide and show what’s hidden. Study them, and enjoy this being washed with a secret we sometimes know, and then not.
Rumi’s writing, however, is not all about bliss; he also sings of the pain that precedes ecstasy, or is even a part of it. Sometimes the things we treasure, our very selves, have to be dismantled in order for new life to have room to emerge. We may have to endure destruction before our new selves can be created. “Many demolitions are renovations,” says Rumi.
He writes often about the relationship between a teacher and a student, which is a story of renovations that feel like demolitions. They are demolitions, tearing down what the student used to be. The student longs to be changed, but the change is not easy. A good teacher who truly loves the student presses on, doing things that may hurt very much. And so Rumi says,
Many actions which seem cruel are from a deep friendship.
Spiritual transformation is a death as well as a birth. The teachers who help us to grow know that it can’t happen without this pain. They don’t save us from it—in fact, what they do usually intensifies it.
I had a teacher like that once—probably the best teacher I ever had. He was my English and philosophy teacher in high school, but he was also a spiritual teacher. I was a bright little abstract thinker, a natural philosopher; I loved the play of ideas and intellectual games. And one day Greg really challenged me, right there in front of everyone: could I connect these bright sparkling ideas to my own life? What he was really asking me, I realized years later—I don’t think he used these words at the time—was, could I connect my mind and my heart? Or was it all just a game?
Years later, he and I talked about my time “on the hot seat,” as Greg put it, and he confessed that he hadn’t been sure if I would come back. Maybe he had pushed too hard. But I was a stubborn kid as well as a bright one, and I did come back. And I was grateful, not only years later but also right there on the hot seat, for his pushing me. I’ve returned to that teaching many times. I even hung a little sign up over my bed, “What about you?” to remind myself to consider how the thoughts and ideas are connected to what is most important in my life.
Rumi tells about the spiritual teacher and student like this:
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot where it’s being boiled. “Why are you doing this to me?” The cook knocks him down with the ladle. “Don’t you try to jump out. You think I’m torturing you. I’m giving you flavor, so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of a human being” . . . Eventually the chickpea will say to the cook, “Oil me some more. Hit me with the skimming spoon. I can’t do this by myself.”
The spiritual teacher demands so much, not out of cruelty, but out of love and necessity, because the spiritual life is demanding. The transformations we seek aren’t trivial.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of the Chronicles of Narnia, the author, C. S. Lewis, suggests a different metaphor for spiritual transformation. The character Eustace, who is a complete brat up to this point, runs into the kind of misfortune that might happen to anyone on a magical island: He turns into a dragon. He is selfish and destructive and so he takes on the form that suits him. When he realizes what’s happened, he tries to take off his skin and become a boy again. As one might imagine a dragon can do, he molts quite easily, like a snake. But underneath he is still a dragon. All he’s done is peel off his outer layer.
It hasn’t hurt, and it hasn’t made any real difference to his nature. He does this three times, but each time the change is superficial—skin deep. Only when the lion Aslan tears deep into his skin does he really shed his dragon nature and transform into a human being again, and a much better and happier human than he’s ever been before. It takes the worst pain he’s ever experienced to get there. “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart” —and of course that’s exactly what it had done.
Something, something holy, is buried deep under our lives. Will we do the demolition necessary to dig it out? Allah says, “I was a hidden treasure, and I desired to be known.” As a commentary on that passage, Rumi writes this poem called “The Pickaxe.”
Tear down this house. A hundred thousand new houses can be built from the transparent yellow carnelian buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that is to do the work of demolishing and then digging under the foundations. With that value in hand all the new construction will be done without effort. And anyway, sooner or later this house will fall on its own. The jewel treasure will be uncovered, but it won’t be yours then. The buried wealth is your pay for doing the demolition, the pick and shovel work. If you wait and just let it happen, you’d bite your hand and say, “I didn’t do as I knew I should have.” This is a rented house. You don’t own the deed You have a lease, and you’ve set up a little shop, where you barely make a living sewing patches on torn clothing. Yet only a few feet underneath are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian. Quick! Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation. You’ve got to quit this seamstress work. What does the patch-sewing mean, you ask. Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food, and other restless ego-satisfactions. Rip up one board from the shop floor and look into the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.
Tear down this house. Somewhere, buried under all you know, there is a new life waiting.
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