The son of Mary, Jesus, hurries up a slope
as though a wild animal were chasing him ...
"I say the Great Name over the deaf and the blind,
they are healed. Over a stony mountainside,
and it tears its mantle down to the navel.
Over non-existence, it comes into existence.
But when I speak lovingly for hours, for days
with those who take human warmth
and mock it, when I say the Name to them, nothing
happens. They remain rock, or turn to sand,
where no plants can grow. Other diseases are ways
for mercy to enter, but this non-responding
breeds violence and coldness toward God.
I am fleeing from that. As little by little air
steals water, so praise dries up and
evaporates with foolish people who refuse
to change. Like cold stone you sit on
a cynic who steals body heat. He doesn't feel
the sun."
Jesus wasn't running from actual people.
He was teaching in a new way.
Jalal al-Din Rumi, 13th century Muslim Mystic from
his poem "What Jesus Runs Away From."
I do not pretend to know much about Islam, or the Koran, but I do know when I like a piece of poetry or other writing. I do not suppose that I would need to know that in the Koran, Jesus is called a Prophet, Messiah, the son of Mary, Spirit of Truth, and unique among Koranic prophets, he is regarded as still being alive (although I cannot tell you precisely what that means, except to say that I presume it bestows some amount of prestige upon him) to make use of such writings. It strikes me as no small irony that there are likely Unitarian and Universalist Christians whose Christology does not rise to the Koranic view of Jesus. I have this dim idea about Islam that Muslims believe, at a minimum, that their God is the God of Abraham, and that monotheism is what Jews, Muslims and Christians share, amongst an assortment of overlapping prophets.
So when I stumbled upon Rumi, a 13th century Sufi poet, part of the contemplative tradition in Islam, born in what is now Afghanistan, writing originally in Persian, I could not help myself but "borrow" from him for our worship services. At first I borrowed from him without mentioning it in our services. Then I incorporated references in some way, either in the announcements, or prior to reading his works (although these have never been proper "readings" as such, only opening sentences, invocations, and the like). I figured the congregation deserved to know whence came these materials. There have been folks who have asked about his poetry, given its beauty, but there have no complaints, so my presumption is that no one has been particularly offended by it. In fact, the following piece from Rumi began the Ash Wednesday service, duly noted in the Order of Worship:
Beware! Beware!
Do not mistake me for this human form.
The soul is not obscured by forms.
Even if it were wrapped in a hundred folds of felt
the rays of the soul's light
would still shine through.
Nonetheless, to use a less friendly word for what I have been doing, I have been "appropriating" from Rumi and his tradition. Now in UU circles, particularly in UU Christian circles, the idea of "appropriation" has taken on a nasty tone. It has become a battering ram against our more pluralist brethren, those who seek to turn Sundays into a festival of world religions, with prayers and readings from around the globe and many faiths, addressed to gods and goddesses of many lands. The Rev. Thomas D. Wintle, in the most recent edition of the Unitarian Universalist Christian, (Vol. 58, 2003), writes that there is danger in our arrogance of taking "the best" of different religions while we skim the surface of the world's faiths. At worst we will "mix-and-match" to create a pseudo-faith to suit our needs of the moment, paying little heed to the sensibilities of those from whom we borrow, and paying little heed to our own history. In doing so, we trivialize our own traditions and those from whom we borrow when we engage in such practices, he argues. In his article, entitled "World Religion and Us," he rightly points out that there is a difference between learning about our traditions and learning other traditions (as if these were our own).
I am mindful that I am a liturgist in a Universalist Christian church, and when I am writing and composing liturgical elements for worship on Sunday and special services, it is with both the Christian and Universalist elements firmly in mind. If a piece in the liturgy does not further "Christian" worship in some way-- that is, if it is not compatible with monotheist worship of the God of Abraham-- it probably ought not be in the service in my view. That having been said, Christian worship has been from its first moment an exercise in appropriation, borrowing from those around the early members of the Jesus movement. This meant primarily, but not exclusively, borrowing Jewish forms of worship. Indeed the Hebrew Bible to this day remains a vital fixture in Christian churches, precisely because it furthers worship of the monotheistic God of Abraham.
But as the works of Rumi show, the God of Abraham, indeed the Jesus of Christianity, we might find as objects of praise outside both the Christian and the Jewish traditions. The Rev. Wintle may be right to suggest that reckless appropriation is sometimes inappropriate. But when non-Christian, non-Jewish sources are still in some broad way part of the general Abrahamic tradition, or otherwise touch on subjects, personages and topics that are more than a bit familiar, such sources often can be "fair game" for a Christian worship service. As the first Rumi example above betrays, "What Jesus Runs Away From," with its breathtaking reexamination of the healing work Jesus performed, I would feel not ill at ease using this in a service at Universalist National Memorial Church. In fact, I would expect to hear it soon in a worship service. As a liturgist, I am not seeking to instruct us on Islam or Sufism by using such a work from beyond the Christian tradition any more than I would be seeking to teach the congregation about Judaism when using the Psalms for a responsive reading.
I will admit that I am much more reticent about using actual material from the Koran itself, a book about which I know very little, and have done so only sparingly, at the absolute margins of our services. But recently, in Jennifer Sandberg's service about the DaVinci Code and the Feminine Divine, I found myself thinking about classic male/female images-- the sun and moon. I stumbled across something from the Koran on the Internet quite by accident that seemed oddly appropriate in evoking those ancient images of divinity, now replaced by our monotheistic God. It seemed so lovely that I thought no one could object to these words finding their way into an invocation, based on Surah 71:15-18:
O God we see the seven heavens one above the other, and we see the moon you made therein a light, and the sun therein a lamp. You have made us grow out of your earth and you will return us to it; then you will bring forth a new bringing forth.
I can but hope none of the Peoples of the Book are offended when I seek to share the words the Prophet sought to record.
Posted by Kimberly Durham Bates at March 31, 2004 05:44 AM