May 12 | Guests of the Heart (Fire in the Wineglass #4)

Last Friday’s lesson was incredibly rich and rewarding for me, but so much came up that I couldn’t get my thoughts together for a post that day. Since then, a lot of my thoughts have been poured into a sermon I’ll preach on Sunday, so I’ll tease out all that was left behind. Enjoy this one, late as it may be!

What struck me right off the bat as I listened to Omid-jan was a notion I’d never heard before: the notion that God creates us in order to better know Godself.

This blew my mind, particularly as a somewhat closeted process theologian! I’ve always considered the idea that God would create the cosmos in order to be in relationship – that would be the Trinitarian within me. But to imagine also that God would want to craft an imageof Godself in order to contemplate God’s own being…that’s amazing.

Omid-jan called this “temporary distancing.” Separation is not meant to be our lot forever. You can imagine how moving I found this considering the times we’re living in.

The first image that came to mind was of a mother carrying a baby in her womb. I can imagine that, however arduous pregnancy may be, there’s a sense of profound intimacy unmatched in any other state of being that’s hard to let go of. There’s no relationship quite like it on earth. And yet, how joyful we are when we can actually see the face of our beloved child! Perhaps it is so for God, our Mother – certainly St. Julian of Norwich, whose feast we celebrated on May 8th, understood this. And while that intimacy may be changed, it does remain, for mothers also feed their children just as God or Christ feeds us.

Another thought that really caught my imagination came up shortly after this one. Omid-jan explained that Rumi teaches us that we must become vulnerable to pain in order to know love and empathy. If the desired state is unity with God and with all things, then we must allow ourselves to become permeable, to have hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone. Rumi talks about opening the heart, but the word he uses is the same as one used for cutting or filleting meat – it’s a pun.

This on its own is beautiful enough, but what really got me going was Omid-jan’s labeling of emotions as “guests” who deserve hospitality.

I love this idea! To get personal for a minute, I spent most of my childhood being told to reign in my feelings. I was constantly referred to as “too emotional,” or “sensitive” (and I could tell it was always a slur). While it is true that my emotions tend to be big and loud, this criticism most often came out when I was reacting to being bullied by other kids. It made me hate my emotions, feel afraid or ashamed of them, like they would take hold of me and leave me a huge puddly mess incapable of communicating or keeping friends. I spent years trying to silence and banish them, and it’s only been in the last decade or so that I’ve begun to try to understand them better.

Holding a Qatayef, a traditional Ramadan treat, in a shop in Nazareth. The man who owns the shop makes hundreds every day. Talk about sharing the love.

To think of them as guests is so helpful! What do we do when we have guests? We let them in, and allow them to make themselves at home. We tend to their needs, and ask them lots of questions. We are gentle and open and curious. We feed them and give them a safe place to rest.

It reminds me of a story Sherif Baba told us some time ago of a great Sufi leader who heard that someone had made plans to kill him. This man arrived at the leader’s office with a gun, and the leader’s staff, terrified, attempted to bar him entry. The leader said, “No, no, let him in.” The man arrived and shouted, “I’m going to shoot you!”

According to Baba, the leader said, “That’s nice. Would you like a cup of tea?”

The man stood there, stunned. The leader instructed his staff to make tea, and bring in snacks.

The two of them sat and talked for several hours. Finally, the man left…dropping his gun into the wastebasket on the way out.

If you treat emotions like guests, they will behave like guests.

This whole time, I’ve been conditioned to see them as robbers or criminals. I’ve bolted the door or locked them into one room in the house and crowded all of my furniture against it. What a gift it’s been to reclaim the idea that they are too loud and big for all of my attempts to push them away – to me, that means there is a strength within me that pushes back against the injustice I visit on myself, a holiness confronting the adversarial force or shaitan, if you will.

Let me be clear that this doesn’t make me stronger or better than anyone else who is able to tame their emotions or push them down. Despite my struggles I received plenty of strength from other sources, things that fed the desire to be in balance, things like love and friendship. I have been very lucky in life to have these things. We all have this voice, this desire, that speaks on our behalf and fights for us, but for some, it’s not given the food it needs to grow, and through no fault of the person herself. For some, basic survival is all they’re given the strength for – as if survival through any means necessary, including dissociation and self-harm, is a small thing.

This is the lesson we are given by Rumi. In order for others to feed their voice of love, we must allow ourselves to feed and model that voice.

I can’t tell you how many people have told me that those big feelings which I so hated as a child and a teen have given them the courage to speak their own truth. When I’ve made my anger manifest through speaking out against injustice, when I’ve allowed myself to cry in front of others, when I’ve testified to the joy I have in God, when I have given my emotions the vast expansive space they need through creating music and art, the people around me have felt safe to open the door to their own guests.

All of us are called to this, to open the doors of the heart.

It’s not easy, but I think it’s the only choice we have in the world we’re living in.

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