Dear Folks,
I made a new friend this week whose name means “radiance.” “Tell me about the journey you are on,” he asked me in his first question, which may be the best opening line I’ve ever heard. He was born in the Middle East to Sufi parents, has lived in the United States for almost six decades, and develops software for journalists. The network that employs him largely does not reflect his own personal views, but that does not seem to matter. The people are good, and there is common ground to discover, he said. Perhaps they bear light for each other. “Our differences teach me something,” he offered. And more: the way opens for him through the challenges he encounters. The Sufi poet Rumi writes, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
My new friend reminded me of a series of conversations from Bible study. We’ve been reading the book of Exodus and talking about the pharaohs we know and suffer under, and the ones we sometimes embody. “It no longer serves me to only locate the enemy out there,” one participant said. “I have to admit that I have held others and myself in bondage.” Quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest, another person said, “This thing of darkness I claim as my own.” And going further, a third participant confessed to letting her friend off the hook. “She definitely wields power like the pharaoh, but I realize now that that’s a sign of weakness, not strength. I think she is scared, and that helps me love her.”
More from the poet Rumi:
“Love isn’t the work of the tender and the gentle; Love is the work of wrestlers.
The one who becomes a servant of lovers is really a fortunate sovereign.
Don’t ask anyone about Love; ask Love about Love. Love is a cloud that scatters pearls.”
“If I love myself, I love you. If I love you, I love myself.”
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and 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.”
The gift of Redeemer is that we are a people committed to learning how to love. Like the table that gathers us every week, we are a place that has a place for everybody. Maybe the only requirement is to come with your heart broken, open to how your light and the light of others can finally shine.
Love,
David