|
A Christian goes to his priest and tells a year’s worth of
sin: fornication, meanness,
hypocrisy. He wants to be forgiven, and he hears the
priest’s absolving as grace.
The priest himself may have no experience of that mercy,
but the Christian’s imagination
gives it to him. Love and imagination do many things. They
conjure up a sweetheart’s form,
so that you can speak to it. “Do you love me?” Yes, yes. A
mother beside the new grave
of her son says things she never said when he was alive. The
ground there seems to have
intelligence. She lays her face on the fresh earth, giving
her love as never before.
Days and weeks go by. Grief for the dead diminishes. Soon
there is nothing but
oblivion at the grave site. Let your teacher be love itself,
not someone with a white
beard. In the state of fana, love without form says, I am
the source of sober clarity
and drunken excitement. You have loved my reflection in forms
so well that now there’s
no mediating. When a Christian longs to be forgiven,
the priest disappears
in that longing. Water flows out of the ground over a stone.
No one calls it a stone
anymore. It’s the pure substance pouring over it, a
spring. These forms we’re
in are like bowls. They acquire value from what pours
through to serve as nourishment;
then they’re washed and put away for the next use.
-- Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
|
