Letter to and from my saint

This is from an exercise I was asked to do this week in a class I am taking. We were asked to identify someone we saw as a saint or spiritual role model in our lives, to ask them a question that we'd love to have answered and then to ask them how they stayed alive spiritually.

Then we were asked to write a response from our saint.

Here is my attempt:

Dear Molana Jalal-e-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi, Konya, Turkey,

I have been much inspired by your work - even translated into English it is so beautiful and moving. It has helped me a great deal in my recent spiritual journey as I am sure it will for much of my life. I find as I grow and develop, I read your work again and am able to see more depth.

It would be a great honour to write one day with even a fraction of the beauty and insight you have shown in your work.
However, I write to you with two simple but more urgent requests.

First, although I have generally always suffered from some kind of depression - that has changed somewhat in the last two years since I have begun to study Zen and have begun a practice of regular meditation. While what I (and my doctors) have always called depression has lifted for more than a year now - something else seems to have replaced it. It manifests as a kind of ennui, inertia and feels almost like heartbreak. The most direct symptom of this state is a sharp decrease in my ability to be productive and support myself through work.

I know you suffered great loss during your life - and I know that at least one of those losses, that of your beloved Shams-e-Tabrīzī, seems to have haunted your work for the rest of your life. And yet if anything you became more prodigious and prolific in spite of this loss, perhaps even because of it.

How did you do it?

And secondly, what do you recommend I do in order to become more productive in this fleshly world and to shake off this affliction?

With great affection and respect,
Teofilo Maxim, Toronto, Canada

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Dearest Teofilo,

Thank you for your kind and gracious words.

You are not unlike me, although sometimes you might feel so. I know you know this to be true. I also know why you think you chose me as the recipient of your letter. However, even as your wrote your letter, I am convinced that you could see the deeper reason.

At what was for my time an old age, thirty-seven years old, I fell in love and my life was changed. I cannot tell you that my love for Shams was exactly like that you feel for men in your day. Our times are too different for such a simple equation.

However, both meeting and then later losing Shams shocked me out of a complacent comfort that I might not have left were I not to have met and lost that great friend. When he left the first time, my heart was truly broken. When he left forever, the future in which I had such faith was destroyed. I thought that I might die, and sometimes I wanted to do so. But Shams had brought more into my life than the physical and mental comforts of companionship. His burning presence had set my own heart ablaze with his love and understanding of Spirit.

And so it was that in this heartbreak, not so unlike that which you describe, that my writing truly began. I allowed that spark that Shams had awoken in me to settle into the ruin of my own broken heart. And there it grew into something beautiful.

You are correct to see, in my writing, a blurring of the desire to be united or reunited with a love, and the desire to be united with the divine. These longings are not dissimilar. What I learned first was that, in fact, we are never separated from God, that our longing to be reunited stems from a delusion which is an unfortunate, but curable, part of the natural human condition. Even after dispelling this delusion, as you have recently accomplished, you will still feel the longing, as you sometimes might feel a similar longing for a lover as he lay asleep in your arms - as though he were a million miles away. Our conviction of separateness is nothing if not persistent.

For a while I travelled in search of Shams, hoping to bring him home. And then, gradually, I learned this as well: we are never truly separated from the object of our love even if we are denied the physical gratifications of that relationship or the pleasure or indulgences of companionship with our love. And then I realized, Why should I seek? I am the same as He. His essence speaks through me. I had been looking for myself!

During Sham's third and permanent absence from my life, I eventually came to believe that he must be dead. But even death cannot separate two people. In fact, in a sense, it does the opposite. Separateness, remember, is a delusion of our present existence. You know this: there is only one soul. Shams and I, you and I, dear friend, are one in God. How many times can these words be spoken without being heard? Let those who have ears hear this!

And here is a harder lesson that you must learn too. Love, even when not returned, is never lost. Do remember to love yourself as well and that may affect the way you express an unrequited love, but all acts of love and kindness - when done selflessly - are done to the One. Jesus said, "Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me." I hope you can hear what he was truly saying.

Now, let us quickly write a prayer for you together for you to say in the mornings which will help you remember who you truly are. We will base it on one of my poems that has touched you, add a little of your Saint Patrick (who borrowed it from the Irish before him) and a little of your own work.

I hope that it will serve you in your journey.

Go with God my child,
Molana Jalal-e-Din Muhammad Balkhi

Morning Prayer
I rise in God this day and cannot be defeated

I AM the glimmer of dawn, I AM the air of eventide,
I AM the rustling of the branch and the roar of the sea.

I AM the swiftness of wind,
The strength of the ocean and the firmness of the earth.
I AM the mast, rudder, helm and ship;
I AM the reef upon which the ship flounders.

I AM the breath of the flute; I AM the spirit of man and of woman
I AM the spark from the stone; I AM the sheen of metals

I AM the physician and sickness, poison and antidote;
Sweet and bitter, honey and gall.
I AM war and peace, battlefield and victory;
The town and its besiegers, the stormers and the wall.

I AM the plaster and the trowel, the builder and the plan,
Cornerstone and roof-tree, the building and it's ruin.

I AM hart and lion, lamb and wolf;
I AM the shepherd who gathers all into one fold.
I AM what is and what is not;
I AM the soul in the All.

I arise this day in God and cannot be defeated
For even if my enemies shall take my life from me
My true self cannot be harmed
I am One in Christ who is One in God
I rise in God this day.