You are Joy!

I was at a wonderful spiritual retreat this weekend with about 30 other people and four speakers. The theme included joy, an aspect of Islam that is too rarely spoken of. Shaykh Kabir Helminski addressed the topic directly in our last session of the day, with his wife Camille reciting the beautiful poem below.

God is beautiful & loves beauty, and the Prophet was always laughing, smiling and full of love. We need to remember and cultivate those aspects more deeply within ourselves and in service to all.

You are Joy!

Oh my God, our intoxicated eyes
Have blurred our vision
Our burdens have been made heavy,
Forgive us.

You are hidden and yet
From east to west you have filled the world with Your radiance
Your Light is more magnificent
Than sunrise or sunset
And you are the inmost ground of consciousness
Revealing the secrets we hold.

You are an explosive force
causing our dammed up rivers to burst forth.

You whose essence is hidden
While Your gifts are manifest
You are like water
and we are like millstones
You are like wind and we are like dust;
The wind is hidden while the dust is plainly seen.
You are the invisible spring
and we are your lush garden
You are the spirit of life,
And we are like hand and foot;
Spirit causes the hand to close and open.

You are intelligence,
And we are your voice
Your intelligence causes this tongue to speak.
You are joy and we are laughter,
For we are the result
of the blessing of Your joy
All our movement is really
A continual profession of faith
Bearing witness to Your eternal power
Just as the powerful turning of the millstone
professes faith in the river’s existence.

Dust settles upon my head and upon my metaphors
For You are beyond anything we could ever think or say
And yet this servant cannot stop trying
to express Your beauty.

In every moment,
let my soul be Your carpet.

- Mevlana Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, Mathnawi V:3307-3319
Translated by Kabir and Camille Helminski

You who break the dark all night

An Introduction

You who break the dark all night, whisper and shout,
who travel in and out of all the rooms,
who come with pill or needle, vial or chart,
with bedding, mop and bucket, tray of food;
who turn, clean, pull, read, record, pat, and go;
who see her hair matted by the pillow, greasy white
wild short hair that will shock
anyone from home who hasn’t seen her for a while—
shocking like her bones, showing now;
like the plumcolored bruises on her arms; like her face
when she first comes to and what it says; like her mouth
and the anything it says: Call the dogs, or
I’ve got to go to school, or Tonight y’all roll
that wagon wheel all the way to Mexico; you
who have seen three children—unbelieving, unresigned—
in all these rooms, full of anger and of prayer;
you who change her diaper, empty pans
of green and gold bile she has puked up; you
who cannot help breathing her decay,

I would like to introduce you to our mother,
who was beautiful, her eyes like nightshade,
her wavy brown hair with a trace of gold; Myrtle,
whose alto flowed through the smooth
baritone our father used to sing;
our mother, who would make us cut a switch,
but who rocked us and who held us and who kissed us;
Myrtle, wizard typist, sharp with figures,
masterful with roses and with roast beef;
who worked for the New Deal Seed Loan Program,
for the school, local paper, county agent, and the church;
who cared long years for her own failing mother
(whom she worries for now; you may have heard her);
who was tender to a fault, maybe gullible,
as the truly good and trusting often are; and even so,
who could move beyond fools, though foolishness itself
delighted her—a doubletake, words turned around,

a silly dance—and when our mother laughed
(I tell you this because you haven’t heard it),
the world could change, as though the sun could shine
inside our very bones.
And where it’s written in Isaiah
that the brier won’t rise, but the myrtle tree,
there’s a promise unfulfilled:
she will not go out with joy.
Still, if you had known her, you yourselves,
like Isaiah’s hills, would sing. You’d understand
why it says that all the trees
of the field shall clap their hands.

By Judson Mitcham

[HT: Shabana]