Maybe it’s my advancing age or the passing of a dear friend and my brother this year, but I’ve been reconsidering my hazy idea of God. Long ago I ruled out the God on a cloud from my childhood or a place called heaven or the opposite. Whatever the cause, I felt a need to make a spiritual connection to God in what often feels like a godless world of callous wars and dark human forces that I believe fit the definition of evil.
I didn’t know where to start but happened upon a book by Reza Aslan that truly spoke to me in several ways. God: A Human History traces the beginnings of the human need for a creator, someone with human characteristics, but a force greater than us. This quest is represented in the earliest drawings and artifacts found scattered about the globe. From the very beginning of “human time” of 2.5 million years ago, Aslan shows how regardless of the religion, we are hardwired into thinking of God in human terms. God is often described as good and loving or jealous and wrathful depending on the situation, the faith, and the follower.
God: A Human History begins with early writings/drawings about the soul and how that understanding led us to a God or gods. After several chapters outlining the history of worshipping multiple gods, as in the Greek pantheon of deities, Aslan moves the narrative up to what we think of as “modern religions,” even though all of them are ancient and well known depending on where we live and our earliest exposure to an established religious faith.
I was surprised by Aslan’s section on Sufism. In the Chapter “God Is All,” he describes the first meeting between Sufi poet of love, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, and his spiritual mentor, Shams-I Tabrizi. Rumi lived from 1207 to 1273 A.D. in the city of Konya, Turkey.
Rumi wrote, “The pen would smoothly write the things it knew, but when it came to love it split in two, a donkey stuck in mud is logic’s fate – Love’s nature only love can demonstrate.” He is one of the most important contributors to Islamic literature and Sufism, the spiritual and mystic element of Islam.
According to Aslan, “Sufism defies categorization. Its chief concern is with seeking direct access to God, which is why Sufis tend to rebuff the traditional concerns of Islamic law and theology in favor of an unmediated experience of the divine.”
Rumi’s Tomb
Described by the Ethics Centre (https://ethics.org.au/big-thinker-rumi/) “Sufism is characterized by its focus on moral cultivation and establishing a personal connection to God through reforming, disciplining, and purifying the ego. It seeks to attain this intuition of God through disciplines that practice an austere lifestyle known as ascetism. One example of this is dhikr, a form of worship where you become absorbed in rhythmic repetitions of God’s name. Sufism seeks a type of knowledge outside worldly intellect – one that is intuitive and is inextricably tied to the Divine.”
“Rumi’s death is commemorated annually in Konya,” according to the website, “attracting pilgrims from all corners of the globe and every religion. The popularity of his poetry has risen so much in the last couple of decades that the Christian Science Monitor identified him as the most published poet in America in 1997 and UNESCO declared 2007 to be the Year of Rumi.”
And finally, according to the Ethics Centre’s explication of Rumi, there is this: “Rumi was of the view that seeking essential knowledge – knowledge about the essence of humanity – was a way one might be granted divine love. It was the best type of knowledge, because it was tied to questions of meaning, purpose, and death. In other words, knowing yourself was a means of knowing God.”
It turns out that while Reza Aslan was writing his book God, he was also on a personal search for a way to strip away the doctrine of organized religions that he and I have sampled through the years. His search resonated with me. He wanted to find something more basic in order to make a stronger personal connection with God. He journeyed from his childhood’s Christian stories about the relationship of God and humans. Asland then returned to his Muslim faith, but with Sufism as his final choice.
It won’t spoil your reading of this amazing book by letting Aslan describe where his journey has taken him to what is called pantheism. “For me, and for countless others, ‘the One’ is what I call God. But the God I believe in is not a personalized God. It is a dehumanized God: a God with no material form; a God who is pure existence, without name, essence, or personality. As a pantheist, I worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe—for the universe is God. I recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices.”
Recently, after finishing Aslan’s book, I took a walk on our interurban forested trail, alone with only the sound of birds and a light breeze. I stopped and felt the full force of Aslan’s “awe and wonder” in that moment. And committed myself to more of these moments when my ego is out of the way and I am free to appreciate the wonder of God, and the how, and the why of my being so briefly in the world and then departing.
Of all the books I’ve sold and donated with my many moves around the country, I kept and treasure The Illuminated Rumi and loved hearing Coleman Barks read his translations of Rumi’s poetry. One of my favorites, because of its layered simplicity, is this one:
“Out beyond ideas of
wrong-doing & right-doing
there is a field
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that
grass
the world is too full to talk about
Ideas, language, even the phrase,
each other
doesn’t make any sense.”
I highly recommend this video of an interview with Reza Aslan at the Harvard Divinity School. You will get a sense of him, what he believes, and why his books are important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r54DU8BSPM
Photo Credits: Rumi – the Ethics Centre, Nature trail – Anna Saveleva, Stars at night – Adrian-mag.
The photos of the Sufi dancers and Sufi’s tomb were provided by Molly McCormick from her recent trip to Konya, Turkey.
You can find out more about Molly at www.mollymccormick.org.
Molly McCormick has a master’s in counseling and is a pioneer of the coaching industry, adventurer, athlete, continuous learner, champion of women and avid believer in the power of positivity. She has helped many clients to shut down those saboteurs, empathize with yourself, and embrace new habits that alter your life for the better.