Rumiatic Fervor

I don't know what it is about the Unitarians that irks me so. I have thought about it considerably, especially since my sister is in the process of becoming an ordained minister of the Unitarian faith. I've been thinking about it additionally since Mady and I went to visit the Unitarians up in Boulder last week. I've been thinking about it and feeling additionally disturbed.

It all seems so pointless and self-important. Self-congratulatory, really, a roomful of white people come together ostensibly to celebrate a sense of community, a community of the perfectly well-intentioned and generally well-heeled. There are hardly any poor Unitarians, I have noticed over the years, except for an occasional student in temporary poverty or once in a while a stray artist whose art is obviously not sufficient to create meaning in his or her universe. In the congregation we just visited, the ease and affluence of the members was readily apparent in their proclamation of "Joys and Sorrows," wherein the joys were all trite and the sorrows mundane. Those left gasping by the blows of cruel fate are not gathered here nor are the ecstatic creatives.

Like Rumi. Whom I think of because he was the subject of the sermon: "Rumi: A Poet Philosopher for Our Time." More aptly, the title might have been "Rumi: Mystic Sufi as Utmost UU," for that was what the reverend seemed mightily to be implying. I have never heard anyone so grievously misrepresent Mawlana, as he is more rightfully called. The centrality of Islamic belief to his poetry and world view and passion was totally ignored by the Reverend Gunn. I'm not even sure she ever bothered to mention that he is probably second only to Muhammad in the prominence, prevalence and proliferation of the precepts and practices of the Islamic religion. Rumi, as we choose to call him in the West, like he is a lapdog poodle, craved reunion with the Qu'ranic god in a passionate and poetic life that spread Islam not only through the Middle East but which eventually made Islam appeal to Europeans and then Americans, and not least of all, to Unitarians. He does not talk of killing or fatwahs or the right to tear the membranes of posthumous virgins; no, Mawlana talks of love, the Beloved, his long lost friend, with whom I cannot help but believe he was truly, deeply, and ultimately inconsolably in love, and whom was probably killed by the order if not the sword of Rumi's son. And the Unitarian minister smiles benignly and crashes through a stanza of Rumi's poetry as if it was forged of iron and not the liquid of wine. It is the liquidity of Rumi which allows his words to endure; his words are molten fire; they lick your thighs even as they burn you.

But the reverend seems to miss all this, or perhaps she just doesn't want to disturb the bland faces upturned to her. We sing half-hearted and simplistic songs throughout the service, songs someone must have been paid a hefty $5 to create on demand, especially for the UU's liberated hymnal. But there is one song everyone seems to like, and lo and behold, it's ascribed to no one but RUMI! "Come, come whomever you are/Wanderer, worshipper, lover of living, it doesn't matter./Ours is not a caravan of despair/Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times/Come, yet again, come, come." Only problem is: this isn't Rumi, but a verse falsely assigned him. The minister likes it so well, though, she quotes it in her sermon as well.

I've read what Mady wrote in response to our Unitarian visit. What would Rumi say to these people gathered here; would he be pleased? Here are his own words. "If anyone interprets my words in any other way, I deplore that person and I deplore his words."(Rumi and His Sufi Path of Love, M. Fatih Citlak, ed., 2007). He was speaking of those who distill his poems of their praise for Allah, who distort his meaning to create an earthly and un-Islamic impact. Rumi was a mystic, an esoteric mystic who cannot help but remind me of Jesus, both of them craving reunion with god, both of them full of proverbs and tales and love, love, love.

It's something you just don't sense in the community of the UUs. Passion of any kind seems entirely absent, replaced by its dull and glazed cousin, self-love. At the end of the service, all those gathered rise and form around the periphery of the church, a single circle. There are no whirling dervishes, no dancers, there is only the smug certainty that once again god has been served by the chosen ones, the nearly perfect already. Or could it be something different, that god has served these chosen ones...

I've been reading Christopher Hitchens, in addition to Rumi this week, and I underlined the following sentence from the first chapter of his latest book God Is Not Great: "There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness." The former case seems exemplary of the Unitarians' Sunday gathering. The latter is more closely aligned with the stricter and monotheistic religions of the world. I'll be reading Hitchens next Sunday. He's more interesting, by far.