Rumi, the mystic of the heart
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Jalal ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273), the greatest of the Islamic mystics, an extraordinary poet of love. He was born in Afghanistan, passed through Iran and lived and died in Konia, Turkey. He was a learned professor of theology. Everything changed in his life when he met the fascinating monk Shams of Tabriz. As it is said in the Sufi tradition, it was “a meeting between two oceans”. This mysterious master initiated Rumi into the mystical experience of love. His thanks were so great that he dedicated a whole book of 3,239 verses, the Divan of Shams of Tabriz.
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
The outpouring of love in Rumi is so overwhelming that it embraces everything: the universe, nature, people and above all God. It is basically the only movement of love, which knows no divisions, but links all things together in a final and radical unity so well expressed in the poem I am You: “You, who know Jalar ud-Din (name Of Rumi), You, the One in everything, I know who I am. Say: I am You. Or that other: “Of me only the name remains; All the rest is Him. ” That experience of loving union was so inspiring that it made Rumi produce a work of 40,000 verses. Famous are the Masnavi (reflexive-theological poems), the Rubal-yat (song of love to God) and the already mentioned Divan of Tabriz. This mystical experience is similar to that of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Xenia of Russia and also Rumi. As an expression of this divine madness he invented the sama, the ecstatic dance. It consists of dancing spinning about itself and around an axis that represents the sun. Every dervish-so called dancers-feels like a planet revolving around the sun that is God.
Hardly in the history of universal mysticism do we find poems of love with the immediacy, sensitivity and passion of the poems written by Rumi. In a poem of the Rubai’yat he sings: “You, the only sun, come! Without You the flowers wither, come! Without Thee the world is but dust and ashes. This banquet and this joy, without You are totally empty, come! One of the most beautiful poems, because of his love density, seems to me to be this one, taken from the Rubai’yat: “Your love came to my heart, and he left happily. Then he returned, put on the garments of love, but, once more, he left. I timidly begged him to stay with me for at least a few days. He sat next to me and forgot to leave » Mystique challenges analytic reason. It surpasses it, because it expresses the dimension of the spirit, that moment in which the human being discovers itself as part of an All, as an infinite project and abysmal, inexpressible mystery. Philosopher and mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein noted in Proposition VI of his Tractatus logico-pilosophicus: “the inexpressible is shown, it is the mystic.” And it ends in proposition VII with this lapidary phrase: “On what we can not speak, we must be silent”. It is what the mystics do. They keep a noble silence, or sing, as did Rumi, but in such a way that the word leads us to reverent silence. (Texts of the biography of Leonardo Boff)