Sohbet April 13, 2025: Rumi Poem; & Living in Troubling Times

Sohbet  April 13, 2025:

Rumi Poem: Moses and the Shepherd

Living In Troubled Times

Moses and the Shepherd

Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying, “God,
 Where are You? I want to help You, to fix Your shoes
 and comb Your hair. I want to wash Your clothes
 and pick the lice off. I want to bring You milk,
 to kiss Your little hands and feet when it’s time
 for You to go to bed. I want to sweep Your room
 and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats
 are Yours. All I can say, remembering You,
 is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhhh.”

Moses could stand it no longer.
 “Who are you talking to?
 The One who made us,
 and made the earth and made the sky.
 Don’t talk about shoes
 and socks with God! And what’s this with ‘Your little hands
 and feet?’ Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
 you’re chatting with your uncles.
 Only something that grows
 needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God!
 Even if you meant God’s human representatives
 as when God said, I was sick, and you did not visit me,
 even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent.

“Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name
 for a woman, but if you call a man Fatima,
 it’s an insult. Body-and-birth language
 are right for us on this side of the river,
 but not for addressing the Origin,
 not for Allah.”

The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed
 and wandered out into the desert.
 A sudden revelation
 came then to Moses. God’s voice:

“You have separated Me
 from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite,
 or to sever?
 I have given each being a separate and unique way
 of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.

It’s all praise, and it’s all
 right.
 It’s not Me that’s glorified in acts of worship.
 It’s the worshipers! I don’t hear the words
 they say. I look at the humility.
 That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
 not the language! Forget phraseology.
 I want burning,
 burning.
 Be friends
 with your burning. Burn up your thinking
 and your forms of expression!
 Moses,
 those who pay attention to ways of behaving
 and speaking are one sort.
 Lovers who burn
 are another.

Don’t impose a property tax
 on a burned out village. Don’t scold the Lover.
 The wrong way he talks is better than a hundred
 right ways of others.

Inside the Kaaba
 it doesn’t matter which direction you point
 your prayer rug!
 The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes!
 The Love-Religion has no code or doctrine.
 Only God.
 So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
 It doesn’t need markings.”

God began speaking deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words,
 which cannot be recorded here

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

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