As an agnostic, chary of the assumed authority of scriptures and clerics, I confess to having a soft spot for mystics.  Just as the human race spawns Michael Jordans, born to play ball, and Michael Jacksons, born to sing, it persists in spawning Michaels- --those near to God, seized heart and soul and mind by what they at least perceive to be direct communication and union with the divine. 

I admit to some inconsistency in my attitudes, since scripture is in large part the direct or indirect product of mystic perception, and clerics study that product in search of a secondary buzz -- and many of them are in fact mystics of some sort. But let's just say that most of what comes from the horse's mouth (as the mystically inclined/psychotic artist in Joyce Cary's great novel of that name calls the source of inspiration) -- gets lost in an endless game of telephone.

But I do sense the mainline connection at work in some writings. Call the perceived contact with the divine psychosis or an evolutionary quirk, if you will.  But it strikes me as at least marginally more plausible that the human mind connects with some other form of mind than that mind itself is simply an accident of physics. That suspicion gets a further boost from accounts of near-death experiences.

All this is by way of too-long introduction to my own beginner's pleasure in the poetry of Rumi, aka Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, the great Persian Sufi mystic poet, whose works have been called a Persian Koran. It's heady stuff -- seemingly straight from the horse's mouth, per Joyce Cary above.  For those of us in the West who encounter Islam chiefly through fearsome Koranic quotes about "infidels" or pious assurances that it is "a religion of peace," these verses open a window. (And many have opened it; Rumi is perhaps the best-selling poet in America.)

I am reading Rumi cold, and my knowledge of Sufiism is Wikipedia-thin, so I will avoid the hubris of commentary and just share my own unmediated 'first contact.' Here's an early favorite -- one of a series that figure the world as a tavern and life as drunkenness.]]>