Although he had been given training in mystical practices, Jelaluddin Rumi was a traditional Islamic scholar and teacher in Konya, Turkey, until the day that he met a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz. The two men were soon inseparable, engaging in an intense spiritual friendship that involved long hours of mystical conversation known as sohbet. Rumi's students were alarmed by the changes that had come over him, and according to tradition, they forced Shams into exile and may have been involved in his murder. Separated from his companion, Rumi began reciting rivers of poetry, including some 1000 odes which end with a reference to Shams. The collection of them is called the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, the Works of Shams of Tabriz.
Coleman Barks, who based these versions of 43 odes on English language translations by Persian scholar A. J. Arberry, explains the theme that runs through them: "There is a powerful stage of spiritual growth where longing for the Friend, the Beloved, is a consuming passion, a burning. And there is another place where that personal longing for God gets pushed over into a vast Silence. These poems come from both places."
At a reading from this book that we attended, Barks highlighted four of the odes. On his deathbed, the famed conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein asked to have three of them read to him: "There is a community of the Spirit" has these lines:
- Be empty of worrying,
Think of Who Created Thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
- The human seed goes down in the ground
like a bucket into the well where Joseph is.
It grows and comes up full
of some unimagined beauty.
Your mouth closes here
and immediately opens
with a shout of joy there.
- Last night in a dream I saw an old man
standing in a garden.
It was all Love.
He held out his hand and said,
Come toward me.
If there is a dragon on this path,
that old man has the emerald face
that can deflect it.
