“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Rumi, a 13th century Sufi mystic, said that. We like mystics. They make for good memes, especially when they’re exotic and provocative. It just sounds cool – Sufism – as if surfing, kung-fu, and philosophy had a three-way baby. But sometimes I worry about the meme-ification of spiritual experience, that it can diminish the depths and the demands (to say nothing of the rewards) of religious life.
When I gleefully ‘like’ a mysti-meme on Facebook or Instagram it does nothing to commit me to the transformative act the mystical imperative suggests I undertake. That would require actual experience and in actual experience selling cleverness is, like, difficult. We ‘like’ mystics, but we rarely take their advice. And what a shame that is, because I, for one, could surely use more bewilderment and less cleverness.
Read Full Article »