Tears Of Love

Sufism says, “God is your lover, not your jailer“ - and means it and practices it. Islam has proven time and again to prefer it the other way around. Religion is in every other case I know of - more or less, yet quite frankly when you look at its core: about freedom, not dictatorship. The Muslim mentality tends strongly toward subjection to the latter, coupled most unfortunately with that peculiar combination of projected victim-status with delusions-of-supremacy, and with subterfuge to boot, such as was exceptionally witnessed in the Germany of the '30s and '40s. It pains me most severely to even put this into so many words, but it has to be done, come what may. Is there another religion I haven't heard of in our generation, in this century, where you can be murdered with impunity for merely leaving it, or converting to another, or satirizing or exercising critical analysis of it?

The darkness of so much Church history had entirely inhibited my early life from trustingly approaching the New Testament. The light of Swamis had made it not only approachable but readable, sparklingly clear. I cannot open the Gospels or the Epistles without being choked with tears of rejoicing at the clarity of what I see presented. How that escapes others I no longer know, I guess they were out when the Swamis came by. When Suras from the Qur'an were recited during ceremonies of those lovers of God and of Hu-man-kind, the same tug at my chest occurred, the same tears flowed, the mind became also still. I guess the Sufis know something Muslims don't – it causes them to sing, it moves them to turn about, it makes them wild with a fiercely fine light in their eyes, their hearts soaked with love, not dried up with clichéed theo-ideology.

Tears of Love

There is a movement, and a rest -
something like a cough suppressed,
a wringing, wrenching sensation in my chest.

Old tissue proves all too worn,
a breaking through this, and it's torn,
breaking forth from the heart, and born

like a dervish in the Sema room -
this itself so like a rose in bloom -
opening into the Turn, consumed

by that which words cannot express:
but tears which on these cheeks so press
like water in the wilderness

do Love justice as no other.
Sovereign love for one another
draws warmest smile from that Divine Mother.