The Sufi Vision

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He [Rumi] also wrote, " You must be alive in love for a dead man can do nothing.

Who is alive? He to whom love gives birth. "

 

One of the greatest strengths of the Sufi vision is its unsentimental

understanding of what such a birth of love into its truth really entails. It

entails nothing less than a surrender to every necessary ordeal, every ordained

devastation, the commitment - which can be called feminine - never to evade

suffering in the pursuit of truth. Listen to Rumi and his " feminine " awareness

of the process and price of this birth:

 

" As long as Mary did not feel the pain of childbirth, she did not go toward the

tree of blessing. The pangs of childbirth drew her to the trunk of the palm

tree. Pain took her to the tree and the barren tree bore fruit. This body is

like Mary, and each of us has a Jesus inside us. If the pain appears, our Jesus

will be born. If no pain arrives, Jesus will return to origin by the same secret

way that He came, and we will be deprived of Him and reap no joy. "

 

Such a realistic embrace of the necessity of suffering in the process of birth

brings us into the heart of the mystery of the Divine Feminine. The price of

living and embodying the Divine, of entering and radiating love, of living with

no fear or barrier the human divine life, aware at once of its transcendent and

immanent aspects, is a very high one; it involves the acceptance, as the

greatest Sufi mystics remind us again and again, of death after death, the brave

acceptance of pain as essential to purification and as essential to the

alchemical transformation of the dull human mind and heart into their secret

gold. As Rumi wrote:

 

How much the Beloved made me suffer before the Work

Grew entwined inseparably with blood and eyes!

A thousand grim fires and heartbreaks -

And its name is " Love " -

A thousand pains and regrets and attacks

And its name is " Beloved " ...

Heartbreak is a treasure because it contains mercies

The kernel is soft when the rind is scraped off;

O Brother, the place of darkness and cold

Is the fountain of life and the cup of ecstasy.

 

There is nothing morbid or masochistic about such a vision; the Sufi does not

run to suffering out of a neurotic self-hatred or secret hunger for punishment,

but neither does he or she run from it. A Sufi knows, in Attar's words, " There

is no Resurrection without the Crucifixion, " that there is no 'baqa'

(subsistence in the Divine Ground) without 'fana' (the annihilation of the false

self and its fantasies). One of the greatest, most transforming, of all the

gifts of the Divine Feminine is the knowledge of how to open to suffering

without masochism but also without fear, with a deep, blind, dark, fertile trust

in its ordained necessity and in the hand of mercy that is always - even in the

most extreme circumstances - dispensing it. Only an acceptance of its terms can

help love to give birth to the new divine human child " at the feet of the

Mothers. "

 

The Divine Feminine

Andrew Harvey & Anne Baring - Conari Press

Berkeley, CA

ISBN 1-57324-035-4 (hardcover)

Pgs. 123-125.