as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, May 3, 2026
Reflection: Ancient and Modern
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, 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. (Barks 36)
The words come from the Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. Born in 1207, he died in 1273. More than seven hundred and fifty years after his death, he is probably the most popular poet in the world.1
He is certainly beloved by some members of this congregation. Over the last few weeks several of you have shared how much his words mean to you. In my book group, one person lifted up their battered and beautifully loved copy of translations of Rumi’s verse by Coleman Barks, the best-known English variations. Yesterday another person texted me one of their favorite Rumi poems.
It is a profound tribute to a man who was born over eight hundred years ago and wrote in a language that few, if any of us, know. His tongue, you might recall, was Persian. It is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, all places where he is well loved.
His family was from what is now Tajikistan. They ranged across Uzbekistan and Iran before settling in what we now call Turkey, in the city of Konya. Rumi studied to be a Muslim preacher and scholar–like his father and grandfather before him–in the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus.
It might be that Rumi’s cosmopolitanism that makes his verse so appealing to the world’s peoples. It is almost certain that just this week words attributed to him have been cited in mosques in Iran, Christian churches in Europe, and synagogues in North America. I doubt that I am the only Unitarian Universalist minister who will quote him today.
Not a Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being. (Barks 32)
A legend exists about Rumi’s final breaths. It is said that he knew his time was coming. Konya, where he lived, had been hammered by earthquakes for forty days and forty nights. The city’s residents came to Rumi. They were afraid that the trembling earth was a harbinger of catastrophe. He told them not to worry. The ground was hungry. It would soon have a tasty morsel and be satisfied.
Rumi fell ill. Doctors were called. Examining their patient, they could not discover a diagnosis. They consulted medical books, medical libraries, other wise men. No knowledge came to them. Finally, despairing, they asked the patient himself. He simply told them that the time had come for him to die. He shared that his light would be extinguished with the setting of the sun. It was.
Sometimes, Rumi’s death is referred to as his wedding. He believed, as some Muslims do, that death was the moment when the individual soul is reunited with the infinite divine. Rejecting theologies of original sin, he believed in something we might call original forgetting. We are born of heavenly blessing. But our birth marks a moment of separation from the sacred. From our first breaths we are troubled with the possibility of being unable to recall who we truly are, beings of connected to the infinite spirit. Our life long task, the task religion is supposed to attune us to, is to purify and sanctify our souls such that we might experience reunification with the heavenly hosts.
It is a theological position not all that distinctive from what I call the resurrection of the living. The resurrection of the living is that teaching found in many traditions which suggests that the true task of religion is to help us wake up to the world as it truly is.
The world is infused with the possibility of beauty. It is burdened with the opportunity to love. It is a place where infinite connection–to the stars, to the sunflowers, to finches and thrushes, to paving stones, to the bread and salt that give life, and to each other–is always available if we just open ourselves.
To open ourselves, to each other, it is said that after Rumi died his body was carried on a bier throughout Konya. The streets were thronged. It was the middle of the Crusades. Holy war raged, instigated by Christians, across what we now call the Middle East. Yet the streets thronged with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Armenians, children and elders, warriors and peace makers, poets and princes, the powerful and the powerless, the unjust and just, the musical and the tone deaf, the beloved and despised, all, the myth runs, came to give tribute to Rumi.
His funeral, a parliament of the world’s religions.
Words came from the Christian New Testament, the Psalms, the Torah, and the Quran. Muslims proclaimed that he was the Muhammed of the age. Christians said that he had been as Jesus. Jews likened him to Moses. In my wild imaginings I picture, somehow present, representatives of all the spiritual paths available to humanity. I envision not just Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but the diversity of teachings originating in India–Buddhists, those we call Hindus, and Jains–alongside the smaller religions of the Levant–Samaritans, Druze, and maybe Kararite Jews–and rich traditions from Africa and those named indigenous. At the front maybe a priest of Shango, the Yoruba Orisha of fire, and at the back, perhaps, a Sami shaman.
There is a community of the spirit. Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street, and being the noise Drink all your passion, and be a disgrace. Close both eyes to see with the other eye. Open your hands, if you want to be held. Sit down in this circle. (Barks 3)
Sit down in this circle, it is an invitation that we extend to each other and all who wish to join us, in the ongoing story that we call the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. Sit down in this circle, a sentiment caught in our congregation vision of widening love’s circle. Sit down in this circle, a theological position echoed in our Unitarian Universalist Association’s commitment to put love at the center.
Love at the center, Rumi’s teaching and ours, is part of the legacy of religious dissent that we share. For while Rumi cannot be placed in the spectrum of orthodoxy and dissent, he is as much beloved by religious reactionaries as he is by spiritual rebels, his own Sufi tradition often clashed with the powers and principalities of the day. Mansour al-Hallaj, one of his spiritual antecedents, has executed for his teachings. The Mevlevi Order, the religious order Rumi founded, was outlawed by the Turkish Republic more than a hundred years ago. It is still technically illegal there. Its ceremonies are offered as cultural events of historical note, sometimes for tourists, rather than religious rituals.
Love at the center, theological pluralism, the belief that there is truth to be found across the world’s religions, the central teachings we offer in our congregation have long been practices of religious dissent. They came not from Rumi but the mystical tradition of Sufism and the teachers that proceeded him. One of these, a man he so loved he called the beloved, was Shams Tabrīzī.
There’s no more wine; my bowl is broken; I am terribly sick, and only Shams can cure me, Do you know Shams, the prince of seeing, who lifts the utterly drowning up out of the ocean and revives them, so that the shore looks like multiple marriages are going on at once, easy laughing here, a formal toast, a procession with music. Shams is a trumpet note of light that starts the atoms spinning, a wind that comes at dawn tasting of bread and salt. Move to the edge and over. Fly with the wings he gives, and if you get tired, lie, but keep opening your soul. (Barks 294-295)
I invoke Shams because it is impossible to talk about Rumi without him. The moment that they met appears to some to have been the event that marked Rumi’s passage from ordinary preacher to extraordinary teacher. Their relationship opens for us important questions found throughout Rumi’s poetry. How much are we truly individuals? How much are collective creations? How much of the you, or the me, that exists is due to our own efforts? What parts of you belong to others? Who do we owe and why?
With Rumi the question exists as to which of his teachings belong to him and which of them originated with Shams or his father, Bahá al-Din Valad, or his grandfather, or the lineage of Sufi teachers that proceeded them? With Rumi the question also exists as to which his texts belong to him and which were collective creations. Many of his text come to us as they were recorded by Husuam Chelebi. Rumi’s scribe, Rumi claimed Husuam was the source of his words and that the poet himself was only the instrument from which the words emerged.
Then draw the words out
as I do this poem with Husam,
the radiance of God.
I try to stop talking,
but he makes me continue. Husam, if you are in
the vision, why do you want me to say words? (Barks 198)
More recently, the version of Rumi’s text beloved by so many English speakers comes from the poet Coleman Barks. Barks neither read nor spoke Persian. His translations of Rumi are largely reworkings of other English translations. Scholars often criticize them for stripping out the cultural context and theological tradition from which they emerged. It is possible to read Barks and forget Rumi was a devote Muslim. It is possible to read selections from Barks and imagine Rumi as modern, rather than an ancient, and perhaps be untroubled from the profoundly misogynistic community from which he emerged. None of his significant teachers or disciples were women. Usually women appear as objects, without much agency, in his verse. The poem we are about to hear, though it comes from Barks, might be a reminder of both Rumi’s beautiful teachings and the trouble that should be taken in approaching them. Fatima was the Prophet Muhammed’s daughter, praise be to him, and the poem cannot be understood without that morsel. For Fatima is a great moral exemplar within Islam, someone to whom women should aspire, and yet, as you will here, it is degrading to compare a man to her.
Reading: “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
then came 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 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 worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
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 inside 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, poured into
and through him. He left himself and came back.
He went to eternity and came back here.
Many times this happened.
It’s foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot our human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.
Moses ran after the shepherd.
He followed the bewildered footprints,
in one place moving straight like a castle
across a chessboard. In another, sideways,
like a bishop.
Now surging like a wave cresting,
now sliding down like a fish,
with always his feet
making geomancy symbols in the sand,
recording
his wandering state.
Moses finally caught up
with him.
“I was wrong. God has revealed to me
that there are no rules for worship.
Say whatever
and however your loving tells you to. Your sweet blasphemy
is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world
is freed.
Loosen your tongue and don’t worry what comes out.
It’s all the light of the spirit.”
The shepherd replied,
“Moses, Moses,
I’ve gone beyond even that.
You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped
out of itself. The divine nature and my human nature
came together.
Bless your scolding hand and your arm.
I can’t say what’s happened.
What I’m saying now
is not my real condition. It can’t be said.”
The shepherd grew quiet.
When you look in a mirror,
you see yourself, not the state of the mirror.
The flute player puts breath into a flute,
and who makes the music? Not the flute.
The flute player!
Whenever you speak praise
or thanksgiving to God, it’s always like
this dear shepherd’s simplicity.
When you eventually see
through the veils to how things really are,
you will keep saying again
and again,
“This is certainly not like
we thought it was!” (Barks 165-168)
Reflection: Like a Wave Cresting
The poem is very beautiful. I love that line, “like a wave cresting.” It encapsulates Rumi’s theology that we are but instances of the infinite caught in the particular. Here is another one in which we are reminded that our individual beings are but like fragments of water making their way back to the ocean. The love we offer each other, Rumi tells us, is a reflection, a sample, a part, of the love the divine offers us.
God is pleased when your love realizes it is part of something oceanic and begins to move with the whole, The larger love is more real, being itself reality. These forms, a mix of earth and water. Yes, you say, but I already have a deep love. Not deep or vast enough. More like riverwater filled with silt. Don’t wash your hands there. (Barks 346)
The sentiment is provided elsewhere:
Likewise, sunlight and rain enter us and become this human consciousness that is returning to God. (Barks 340)
This human consciousness, Rumi teaches that we are always bound up in our own location, our specific identities. But those identities are never separate from the larger world of which we are a part. I am shaped by the religious traditions of which I have been a part and which I practice. The same is true for you.
The same was also true for Coleman Barks who, despite his lack of Persian, was a practicing Sufi for most of his adult life. How much of the spirit found in the poetry we call Rumi’s is his and how much belongs to the ancient poet? I cannot answer such questions. But I invite you to compare his a refrain from his translation of “Moses and the Shepherd” with one by the more scholarly Franklin Lewis.
Barks:
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 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 worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things. (Barks 166)
Lewis:
Revelation came from God to Moses: You’ve torn My servant from My presence Were you sent in order to unite or to distinguish and divide? Avoid if you can separation “More hateful still to Me, estrangement” I to all their qualities assign and give a form to their expression What to some is praise, to you is blame What’s honey to his taste, your poison Above pure/impure I’m sanctified far above all suave- and boorish-ness I command My servants worship Me not for My profit, but to bless them: Hindus praise Me in the Hindu tongue (Lewis 373)
In both texts we hear that invocation of the vision that spirit is universal. I suspect that words that come from Lewis are more faithful to Rumi’s own self-understanding for they come with the imprint of someone who immersed himself in the great debates, ancient and modern, English and Persian, about who the poet was, what he taught, and how he is nestled inside Islam. Again, a bit of Lewis’s translation of “Moses and the Shepherd”:
I’m not made pure by their remembrance but pure, full of pearls, do they become We’ve no regard for words or language We look for spirit and behavior We see the heart and if that’s humble ignore the words used, brash or mumbled but pure, full of pearls, do they become (Lewis 373)
The Islamic nature of Rumi’s theology is expressed much more strongly in scholarly translations like this next one, again from Lewis, that uses phrase “There is no God but God!” as a refrain. Known as the Shahada, it is one of the five pillars of Islam and is used as a meditative text by some Sufis. They repeat it over and over and over and over until an experience of unification with the divine comes.
What a banner, what a standard: There is no God but God! raised on the pinnacle of pre-existence There is no God but God! How the King, like Moses, raises dust from the sea of being and the void! There is no God but God! The quality of purity’s a product of humility that he showed Him in pre-eternity There is no God but God! One wrong from him bests a billion rights What wondrous, pleasant tyranny! There is no God but God! Every spot he casts his glance a million Eden-gardens grow There is no God but God! One fine day from sorrow’s sea I’ll reach the shore by waves of grace and bounty buoyed There is no God but God! Any one you see in sorrow’s grip has caught no scent of spirit from my King There is no God but God! All eyes that reject collyrium from the King of Tabriz What wondrous loss and lamentation! There is no God but God! My heart and soul surge with the shout: “Are you not?” The King hears a thousand voices: Yes! There is no God but God! The paradise of grace the greatness of the prince Shams al-Din What a wondrous cure of suffering: There is no God but God! My heart circles like an intimate around Tabriz, the sanctum sanctorum of There is no God but God! How pleasant would it be to say: Who is at the door? and hear him say: It’s me. There is no God but God! (Lewis 368-369)
There is no God but God! Historical Unitarianism in Transylvania, in the sixteenth century, appears to have been inspired by this sentiment to attempt to achieve theological reconciliation between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I have been told that ancient European churches in our tradition have often inscribed on their walls the phrase “God is One.” Some scholars have interpreted this as a nod to the Islam of the Ottoman Empire, under whose sovereignty those early Unitarians sometimes found themselves.
I called through your door, “The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!” “Leave me alone. I’m sick.” “I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect somebody!” (Barks 201-202)
I do not know if early Unitarians read Rumi. But I am sure that they would have appreciated his reverence for Jesus. There is a question in the passages that sometimes get lifted up from Barks invoking Jesus about how much Rumi has been sanitized for audiences in the United States. How close is the Jesus of Rumi to the Christian Jesus or the Muslim Jesus of the secular Jesus? Such questions are ones that confront us every time we engage with theological pluralism.
Imagine a man selling his donkey to be with Jesus. Now imagine him selling Jesus to get a ride on a donkey. This does happen. (Barks 314)
What comes next needs little introduction. The hymn we will sing is one of the most popular in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. The words are translations from Rumi. The arrangement, as befitting the question of what belongs to who, has been put together by our own Dr. Battiste.
This is not the version we sang at First Unitarian Universalist. But the lyrics are the same and it is nice video.
Reflection: There is a Field
Christ is the population of the world, and every object as well. There is no room for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing when sweet water is everywhere? (Barks 204)
I let that poem stand with little commentary other than to observe that Rumi distinguished two kinds of knowledge, both of which we have been attempting to weave through this service. The first, the knowledge that we are called to remember, is the knowledge of our own divine beings. It is the knowledge that religion is supposed to help us wake up to. Any spiritual practice which does not center that knowledge, Rumi taught, is false knowledge.
We might call this first variety of knowledge love. The second kind of knowledge we might name reason. Rumi believed in the importance of both. Though he was a mystic poet, he immersed himself in book learning and careful textual study. Reason was a key that applied right could unlock love. Exactly how, well, he wrote all his theological treatises in verse:
A gnostic says little, but inside he is full of mysteries, and crowded with voices. Whoever is served that cup keeps quiet. (Barks 162)
In Rumi we simultaneously encounter a belief that the spirit is universal and that spirituality is what some Buddhists call the narrow path. The opening, the waking up, is something that comes only with great effort, great dedication, and will be different for everyone. What appears mundane to one might be deeply spiritual to another. Spirit being infinite is found through infinite variations. There is no one spirituality, no single path to point towards. The end goal though always remains the same, to help each other wake up.
Don’t give advice to someone who’s groggy and falling asleep. Don’t throw seeds on the sand. Some torn places cannot be patched. (Barks 197)
There is a story about the difficulty of finding one’s narrow path that comes from Rumi’s tradition. It is said that a man in prison was sent a prayer rug by a friend. The man was upset. He did not want a prayer rug. He wanted a file or a crowbar so he could escape! Nonetheless, he dutifully used the prayer rug five times a day. Soon he noticed an odd pattern in the rug, just at the point where his head touched the weave. He began to meditate on it. Gradually he realized that the pattern was a diagram of the lock to his cell. Studying it he could open the lock and escape. The knowledge of what we need to wake to the world as it is sits always in front of us.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep. (Barks 36)
Rumi was inspired by a woman named Rabia. She lived some four centuries before he did and taught that the divine should not be loved out of fear. Nor should the divine be loved out of hope. Instead, the divine should be loved for the beauty that is in the world and inside each of us. It said that she once sat inside on a perfect spring day with her eyes closed to prompt the recollection that the glory of the external world is but a reflection of the magnificence of the divine, which we can find when we gaze within.
As is befitting a teacher who taught that religion is about waking up to who we already are, we return where we began, with some of Rumi’s most famous words. But, at first, we approach them not quite in the same way we first encountered them for our hope is, always, that our time together might help each other wake up. And so, hear first, a more scholarly translation that comes from the Muslim poet Muhammad Ali Mojaradi:
Beyond heresy and faith, there’s another place, we yearn for what’s in the midst of that desert plain. When the gnostic arrives there, he prostrates his face, there’s no heresy, faith, or place in that domain.
And now:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense. doesn’t make any sense.
May it be so and Amen.
