Mawlana Rumi
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Religions are not the main cause of humankind's hardships. It is in their interpreters that we find absolutisms, power battles, the bipolarity in between Good and Evil, "Truth" and "Sin", dominant and dominated peoples. It was in this kind of context that Prophet Muhammad met with the excluded Christians, who chose paths of love and faith, running away from a certain kind of orthodoxy. He had long conversations with them, in search of faith, reason, an looked for a way out of ignorance. The teachings about Jesus conveyed by these Christians who adopted the Arab culture, informed the thinking and spirituality of Arabs and Muslims in profound and unknown ways.
Mawlana Rumi
(XIII cent), for example, a Sufi poet, still an acclaimed mystic worldwide, wrote various poems about Jesus. We hear that there is a Christian church in Shiraz - Iran, where one can find a verse of Rumi, carved in stone above the main door, saying the following:
Where Jesus lives, the great -hearted gather.
We are the door that's never locked.
If you are suffering any kind of pain,
Stay near this door. Open it.
In another piece of his Masnavi, Rumi writes about "What Jesus runs away from"
"The son of Mary, Jesus, hurries up a slope
As though a wild animal were chasing him
Someone following him asks, 'Where are you going? No one is after you'. Jesus keeps on, saying nothing, across two more fields. 'Are you the one who says words over a dead person so that he wakes up?' I am. ' Did you not make the clay birds fly?' yes. Who then could possibly cause you to run like this?'
Jesus slows his pace.
"I say the Great Name over the deaf and the blind, they are healed. Over a stony mountainside, and it tears its mantle down to the navel.
Over non-existence, it comes into existence. But when I speak lovingly for hours, for days, for those who take human warmth and mock it, when I say the Name to them, nothing happens. They remain rock, or turn to sand, where no plants can grow. Other diseases are ways for mercy to enter, but this non-responding breeds violence and coldness toward God. I am fleeing from that.
As little by little air steels water, so praise dries up and evaporates with foolish people who refuse to change. Like cold stone you sit on a cynic steals body heat. He doesn't feel the sun.
Jesus wasn't running from actual people.
He was teaching in a new way".
After all, civilizations do not clash. This is a nice example of the ways in which they intermingle and humanism evolves. The only clash we know is when societies are unable to integrate the needy, the powerless and the hopeless in their priority agendas, while spreading the seeds of violence and intolerance.
