Mystic Musings: Lent 3/27
“With passion pray. With passion work. With passion make love. With passion eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?”
Rumi, 13th century Sufi mystic and poet
I am attracted to passion—largely because I grew up in passionless family. Too much joy or too much anger often got immediately squelched. But the funny thing was we had a comfortable home. The house was clean, ordered and well-maintained. I never suffered from a lack of food. In fact, both my mom and dad were pretty good cooks. We were financially stable-not rich, but had all our basic needs met. I was a good student, Eagle Scout and winner of a Youth Optimist Award for Citizenship and Leadership in the Community. And yet I yearned for more. I had it pretty good, but apparently not good enough.
Photo by Noah Silliman @noahsilliman
Today I would describe my childhood as the difference between surviving and thriving. We survived on almost every level. But for some reason there was a barrier to truly thriving, to living with delight, and to unleashing the passions of the heart.
Once I left our household in my late teens I started concentrating on personally thriving. I was drawn to bike racing, to music, to theater, and the study of religion (remember, Jesus said, “I have come to give you life and give it abundantly.” I liked that!)
One of my favorite movies is Dead Poet’s Societystarring Robin Williams as a boarding school English teacher. In one of the famous scenes he tells his students to tear out pages of their text book that had dry, clinical, scholarly descriptions of poetry. Then he went on to say this:
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
I don’t know if this is true for everyone. But I do know it is true for me. Without honoring my passions, I feel like “a dead fish in this ocean of God.”
Sit quietly. Breathe deeply. Ponder these questions:
What things do you do to survive day to day?
What things do you do to thrive and experience the joy of life?
Do you have the right balance between the two in your life? Too much of one and not enough or the other?
Are you one of the lucky ones where your passions and your livelihood are the same?