I am mindful of the fact that many of us are still in process of grief, and for some of us there are loved ones recovering from injuries still in the hospital. Yet one of the lessons of our religious traditions is that the ease is already provided inside the hardship, that the remedy is inside the pain, and a healing inside the wound.

Taking comfort from that promise, I invite us to sit with a few questions: What are we as people as faith to do in and after the Boston Marathon explosions? This is not so much the question of where is God or where was God, but rather the question of where are we, where do we stand, with whom do we stand, for what do we stand?

Needless to say, those questions presuppose the fundamental question of who we are. How wide is our circle of "We"? What does "we" mean where the illusion of separatedness in this world is shattered for better and worse, and "over there" and "over here" are blended into one planet?

In the very midst of the explosions, we saw that atrocity and beauty, evil and goodness, were all present on full display on that day. We have all seen the horrific images of explosion and resulting carnage. We have all also seen courageous human beings -- truly heroes, if that word has any meaning -- police forces, and first responders, ran not away but toward the explosions to save someone, anyone and everyone that they could. We are reminded of the poem attributed to Rumi:

A dragon attacked an innocent soul.
Everyone ran away,
except for one man who ran to the dragon.

He found his victim wounded and alive, yet puzzled
who asked his savior:
"Why did you come when everyone else ran away?"
The man said: "I came,
because I heard you cry."

These are the real human beings. These are the ones who have figured out what it means to live as God created us to live: to love and serve others, to put others before our own selves.

In Boston, we saw these real human beings: people who rushed toward the injured and the wounded, with no one pausing to ask whether the injured were U.S. citizens or undocumented immigrants, rich or poor, Fox News watchers or NPR listeners, Republican or Democrat, Muslim or Jew, Christian or atheist. We saw real human beings make the courageous decision not to be compassionate by proxy, but to reach out in direct action and compassion towards anyone and everyone they came across.

There was an immediate demand for compassion. The goodness of so many human beings was on display: That divine response which precedes thought, and taps into that something in us which is more luminous than cost/benefit analysis or partisan politics or petty self-interest. That gives me hope. These real human beings confirm my faith in humanity, knowing that even as a few of us human beings are capable of violence, many more of us are inclined towards compassion.

As the event of that Monday confirms my faith in humanity in the very midst of explosion and brutality, much of what I have seen after that concerns and deeply saddens me. It concerns me because of what I have seen as our tendency to focus on the evil rather than seek the good. I don't mean that in the sense of belittling the manhunt to apprehend the suspects, rather in the sense of the obsessed, pre-mature, and speculative national conversation about the two suspected brothers and their motivations. Nor am I even talking about the hateful and zealous conversations from certain media sources that talk about putting Muslim women in prison simply because they choose to cover their hair. Nor yet am I focusing on the egregious conversations about rolling back immigration, nor even the prejudiced comments of elected congressmen who openly advocate racially profiling Muslims not on the basis of what they have done but on the basis of collective guilt. No, I simply mean that we have speculated and focused too much on two suspects that a week ago almost no one had heard about. In the process, we have moved away from the beautiful life and teachings of the victims and the first responders, including the precocious wisdom of the 8-year-old victim Martin Richard: "No More Hurting People. Peace." Our national conversation so far has been drawn more to speculation about violence than to the certainty of good and beauty.

That loving and compassionate self-sacrifice that we saw among so many of the First Responders, civilians and the police force is none other than the very presence of God. In the Christian and the Islamic tradition there is a reminder that God is with the broken-hearted. God is with the suffering and the marginalized. For us today, God is not an entity, this "person" somehow on high, floating on high, beyond the pearly gates. Rather, God is the very manifestation of self-less compassion, of courageous concern with one's fellow human beings. God is the very principle, the "Force," that connects us to every sentient being even as it compels us to a dangerous kind of loving unselfishness. So as to where was God in Boston, we know where to find God: in the sacrifice, in the compassion, in the service, in the reaching out toward the wounded and the suffering.

As to where is God after Boston, that question still has to be answered. And we are the authors of that answer. Part of that challenge is to figure out who the "we" are, and how willing we are to locate ourselves as part of a global network of humanity. Here one has to answer in truth, in compassion and in humility. The world that we have created and participated in is a world that lives with violence as a daily reality. We saw that violence in Boston, in inner-city Chicago, in the unregulated explosion in the Texas factory, in the collapse of the Bangladesh factory, in the drone attacks on Yemen and Afghanistan, in the ongoing occupation in Palestine, in sectarian violence in Pakistan and Iraq, in the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and in the ongoing massacre in Syria.

When we listen to the grievances of Muslims worldwide, both the majority who are simply in anguish and the small minority who resort to violence, time and again they identify the same causes. They cite and recite the atrocities of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American drone attacks, and one-sided U.S. support for Israel. Fortunately, we are starting to see more honest grappling with these realities that Muslims have been talking about for years. Recent comments from Tom Brokaw and Glenn Greewald are but two such honest admissions. Here we too must speak, and we must speak with compassion and with truth. And yet we must speak.

Those who have an understanding of the Islamic tradition are already aware of the fact the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad categorically prohibit infliction of violence upon civilian populations. The Prophet himself forbade the killing of non-combatants, of women, of the elderly, of priests and rabbis, of cutting down trees and of poisoning water wells. So my point here is far from justifying the actions of terrorists who come from Muslim background. As I have said previously, these Muslim individuals and groups who utilize violence seek to legitimize their actions through religious action. However, to depict them as embodying the essence of Islam (as Islamophobic forces routinely do) is precisely to grant them the very legitimacy that they crave. They neither possess nor deserve this legitimacy.

However, we cannot simply stop at pointing out the lack of legitimacy in these attacks. We are also called to address the legitimate underlying grievances. There is an important distinction between justification and causation. We, in this case meaning Americans of all backgrounds including Muslims, have to understand that while there is no moral basis on the basis of which atrocities like the Boston Marathon explosion can ever be justified, actions that our government has taken and continues to undertake on a daily basis are complicit in this violence. Our actions abroad are a key factor in causation of these grievances.

Paraphrasing Dr. King's objection to the Vietnam War in the Riverside Church speech, we can never again raise our voice against the violence in Boston without also speaking out against the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government." In Boston all of us saw the wanton disregard for human life, and we condemned it. Now is the time for us to confront the violence that the United States (and our allies) inflict on Muslims every day in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Palestine and elsewhere. If the taking of human life is wrong in Boston (and it is), it is wrong everywhere and anywhere, for all of us are caught up in this network of mutuality. All of us are created by the same loving God. Every life is sacred, no matter the soil under its feet or the flag over its head.

People all over the world, and many people inside this country now, see the United States' militarism as reflecting an arrogant military-industrial complex that inflicts violence upon thousands of human beings, primarily Muslims. The usage of drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan serves as a ready recruiting tool for radicalization. As the Yemeni man whose village was droned by the United States said to the U.S. Senate this week: This one American drone attack was more beneficial to al Qaeda in terms of recruiting than years of propaganda had been. Indeed, one need not be a radical to state that these drones, unchecked and uncontested, dropping death sentences from the sky on unsuspecting people is not right. The United States killing more than 100,000 people in Iraq is not right. Driving over a million people to become stateless refugees in Iraq is not right. Occupying other people's land is not right. These actions of the United States humiliate people all over this world, and betray our own lofty principles.

There is a difference between justifying terrorist attacks, and understanding the role that our own government has played in causing grievances that lead to these attacks. There is a difference between explaining terrorist attacks away, and understanding that we as a country have committed actions that create resentment among millions of people in this world. We have become, and have been for a while, not a Republic but an Empire. We spend more on our military than the next 12 countries combined, and we have military bases in more than 100 other countries. No other country in the world behaves this way, and no other country in the world gives itself the right to unilaterally bomb other citizens to death. No one in America would stand for it if China or Russia or another country did that to us, and yet we do precisely that to so many countries every day. It is wrong, it is immoral, and it is past time that we say so and say so clearly.

The United States' actions abroad are a root cause of radicalization. Every Muslim organization in America has condemned the Boston atrocities as they condemned the attacks of 9/11. But it is time for us to move beyond the "we hate and condemn" demand that we put before American Muslims and also ask the question of why the United States government inflicts an even greater violence on civilians worldwide that we rightly condemn in terrorist attacks? If targeting civilian populations is an act of terror, what does that make the United States when we again and again kill civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

These are not just political questions; they are also moral, ethical, and religious ones. The answers we provide to them will say a great deal about the health and sanity of our Union, and the compassion of our bond with the rest of humanity. So in light of that concern, let us return to that key question:

Who are "we"?

How do we make sure that the "we" that we seek is not merely Boston, and not merely the United States, but nothing short of the human community? Are we willing to acknowledge that the suffering in Boston is related to the suffering of the victims of American drone attacks, because the humanity in Boston is related to the humanity of those who die under American drones? Are we ready to admit that the shootings in inner-city Chicago is as unacceptable and morally repugnant as the catastrophic devastation of Syria?

Are we were able to expand our circle of concern to encompass the whole of humanity? How far does our love, our care, our compassion extend?

If the circle of our concern encompasses only one individual, it is ego-ism.

If the circle of our concern encompasses only one family, it is nepotism.

If the circle of our concern embraces only one people, it is tribalism.

If the circle of our compassion stops at our national borders, it is selfish nationalism.

If the source of all compassion and all love is none other than the All-Compassionate and All-Loving God, then compassion and love cannot but in return encompass all of that same God's creatures.

Dr. King taught us:

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.

No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world."

[Martin Luther King, "A Christmas Sermon On Peace", Dec. 24, 1967]

What if we saw that the God of Martin Richard and Krystle Campbell and Lu Lingzi and Sean Collier is also the God of the Yemeni and Afghani and Pakistani and Palestinian and Israeli and Iraqi and Iranian children? Are we willing to see beyond the "national loyalties" to acknowledge what has been true all along: that all of their lives are equally precious, and that any attack on any of God's children is an attack on all of us because our humanity is shared?

In woundedness, we can either recoil and strike back, or stretch outward and be healed. We either circle inward and turn on our own to define ever more restrictive definitions of who is "authentically" an American, or we can stretch outwards till we embrace the whole of humanity.

We can respond in vengeance, setting out on the dangerous path which confuses justice and legal accountability with revenge, or we can respond in humility and love, stating that we too have been guilty of wrong-doing to others around the world, that we identify with their grief and suffering as so many now identify with our grief and suffering now.

We are going to redeem ourselves by the way we respond.

We are a wounded nation that responded to the attack with heroism and bravery. On what path do we set out now? Will it be a path of vengeance and revenge, turning against our own Muslim citizens and again at Muslim citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Iran? Or do we respond in humility and love, stating that we yearn to be responsible citizens of this shared planet, not an overlord.

The great Persian Muslim poet Rumi has a beautiful line:

The Wound is Where the Light Enters You.

There is a Wound in America's soul. Many of us in this country are now feeling wounded. May it be that we choose a response that is not going to be one of vengeance, that morally weak response which confuses justice with the desire to inflict equal if not greater harm on others. May it be a courageous decision to say that our woundedness is going to be a source of blessing, and where the light enters us. That would be a redemptive response to woundedness.

The choice is ours: Will we inflict wounds on others, or will we open ourselves up for healing, so that the Light can enter us?

That choice is ours. The path that we embark upon will reveal a great deal about who "we" are, and not the values we preach, but the values that we live by.

May it be blessed, God-willing.

May every wound be healed.

May every wound be healed,

And the Empire and the victimized come together as brothers and sisters, as real human beings.

I used to be raw,
Then I was cooked,
now,
I am on fire.

Go,
Seek out that rare jewel
That's your goal!

Last night the spiritual teacher was wandering around the town, with a lit torch at hand.

He said: "I am sick and tired of these two-legged beasts. I want to find one real human being."

Everyone said: "O, there is not even one of those to be found."

He said: "That very one that is not to be found, that's the one that I seek with heart and soul."

"We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny ... I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be," she said, quoting her husband. "I've always felt that homophobic attitudes and policies were unjust and unworthy of a free society and must be opposed by all Americans who believe in democracy," Mrs. King told 600 people at the Palmer House Hilton in 1998, just days before the 30th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination that occurred on April 4, 1968.

She said the civil rights movement "thrives on unity and inclusion, not division and exclusion."

Her husband's struggle parallels that of the gay rights movement, she said (Chicago Sun Times, April 1, 1998, p.18).

Connectedness Of Prejudice

"Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood," she stated.

Indivisibility Of Justice

"For too long, our nation has tolerated the insidious form of discrimination against this group of Americans, who have worked as hard as any other group, paid their taxes like everyone else, and yet have been denied equal protection under the law. ... I believe that freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience," she said.

"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people," she said.

"My husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' On another occasion he said, 'I have worked too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible.'

Like Martin, I don't believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others. So I see this bill as a step forward for freedom and human rights in our country and a logical extension of the Bill of Rights and the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and '60s. The great promise of American democracy is that no group of people will be forced to suffer discrimination and injustice (Coretta Scott King, remarks, press conference on the introduction of ENDA, Washington, DC, June 23, 1994).

But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

"But they are sinners," I can hear the preachers and politicians say. "They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished." My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

Die now! die now!
In this Love, die;
when you have died in this Love,
you will all receive new life.

Die now, die now,
and do not fear this death,
for you will come forth from this earth
and seize the heavens.

Die now, die now,
and break away from this carnal soul,
for this carnal soul is as a chain
and you are as prisoners.

Take an axe to dig through the prison;
when you have broken the prison
you will all be kings and princes.

Die now, die now before the beauteous King;
when you have died before the King,
you will all be kings and renowned.

I died from the mineral kingdom and became a plant;
I died to vegetative nature and attained to animality.
I died to animality and became a human.
So why should I fear?
When did I ever become less through dying?

Next time I will die to human nature,
so that I may spread my wings
and lift up my head among the angels...

Once again, I will be sacrificed from angelic nature
and become that which enters not the imagination.

I have abandoned travel,
I have come to dwell with the Friend,

I have become secure from death
because that long life has come.

All of us will die.
May we all live like this: a life of compassion and love.

Many seek the meaning of life.
Perhaps we first have to seek the meaning of death.

May we live like this.
May we "die" like this.
May we be born again into a life of love like this.

Here is one of the sweetest and most profound of these tales. Even if you think you have heard every good Jesus story, you may have not heard this one. This story appears in a number of important Muslim sources, such as the Musibat-nama of Farid al-Din Attar (a great 13th century poet and mystic from a generation before the time of Rumi), and the Khamsa of the 12th century sage Nezami of Ganja, the famed writer of Layla and Majnun (whose dark-eyed beauty Layla would someday inspire Eric Clapton to write his equally immortal song of unrequited love. (See the full story here.) Let's get to the story.

One day Jesus and his disciples were walking in the old city, which had very narrow streets. They came across the carcass of a dead dog. The dog had been dead for a long time, and its rotten stench filled the whole alley. The disciples of Jesus held their noses, picked up the hem of their robes, and tiptoed around the dead creature. One of them said: "Whew ... piff! What a horrible stench!" Another one said: "The very sight of this makes me sick to my stomach." One by one they made their way past the dead creature, even as others in town gathered around the carcass to further remark on its hideousness.

Jesus, and Jesus alone, stopped by the dead dog. He knelt down, and lovingly gazed at the dog. After a long pause, he finally said: "Praise be to God, what beautiful teeth this creature has."

Why do these Muslim sages tell and retell these stories of Jesus and the dead dog?

Is it to transform how we interact with dead dogs on our streets?

Of course not. These stories are parables. Like the parables in the Quran, they point to a truth inside our own hearts and souls. We come to see that the dead dog is us, the disciples are us, and yes, even Jesus is inside our own selves. There is a part of our own being that is rotten, a part of us that would like to pass by other human beings without dealing with their ugliness, and there is that part of us, divine or divinely-illuminated, that can pause and reflect Jesus-like upon any and every situation and recognize the presence of God right then and there.

The sages do not tell us these stories to change how we deal with carcasses.

They tell and retell these stories to change the way we deal with fellow human beings.

They tell us these stories to find the Jesus-like presence inside our own heart and souls.

It is often the case that we come to interact with one another when the other person pushes our buttons. No, let's be honest, when they take a hammer to our buttons. The other person may be a random stranger who cuts you off on the road, may be the pundit on news that reports the wrong perspective (i.e. different than ours), and is often our child, our parent and, all too often, our partner. How often we stand in judgment as Christ's disciples did in this parable, noting and complaining how hideous and malodorous the actions and words of this person were. At times, we might even think that it is not just their words, but also their very being that is hideous. "You stink!" something inside us proclaims.

The sages tell us these stories so that the image of Christ kneeling by the dead rotting dog instills itself in our hearts, and can be resurrected (as Christ was) in precisely such a moment. At the very moment that we want to equate another human being with the hideousness of their action or words, we recall the example of Jesus who was able to recognize something good and beautiful in the midst of all that ugliness. And as Jesus said, "praise be to God," or in another version, "This creature belongs to God." In other words, in looking at the person who shows us such ugliness, can we still pause and recall the divine presence inside us that always strives to recognize something divine, something good and something beautiful in the other person.

This is a great challenge, because we are called to do this not when people are their most beautiful, but precisely at the moment when their ugly side is showing. And we all have this, every single one of us. As Rumi says, every single one of us is a jackass, with wings of angels tacked on. Can we pause long enough to say to our own selves: this anger will not define me, I am not this vile fear and anger that has taken a hold of my heart, and I will -- so help me God -- reach to recognize in you something that is good and beautiful. However ugly and hideous the words of this person are at this very moment, are they any more hideous than that rotten dog was? And can I, for one instant, behave like Jesus did at that moment?

Why do the sages care about this?

Why should we care?

Because religion is not ultimately a simple matter of otherworldliness. It is not simply a matter of faith in a system of belief, and salvation There and Then. It is also a matter of a heart-transformation Here and Now. To walk in the footsteps of Muhammad and Christ and Buddha, one has to behave like them. Their very manners have to illuminate our hearts, and transform our beings. The measure of religion, ultimately, is the extent to which our interactions with fellow human beings and fellow creation are transformed to something is lovely and beautiful. While all of us know far too many example of religious bigots, that very combination is a sign that the very compassionate spirit of Christ, Muhammad and Buddha has not yet penetrated and transformed the soul just yet. In the language of the Quran, you have joined the ranks of Islam, but faith and beauty (iman and ihsan) have yet to penetrate your heart and soul. In the words of Gandhi, "As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality."

This recognition may or may not transform the person across from you.
This recognition may or may not bring the dead dog back to life.
This recognition may or may not get the person across from you, red in the face and foaming at the mouth, to act like a divinely fashioned human being.

But it will transform you.

And that, after all, is the whole goal of every religion: to take what is rotten in us, and transform it to something luminous and divine.

Praise be to God, what beautiful white teeth all of us have.

Service to humanity is the whole of worship:

The worship of God is not done by rosary beads,

robes of piety or prayer carpets.

And I don't mind telling you this morning that sometimes I feel discouraged. I felt discouraged in Chicago. As I move through Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama, I feel discouraged. Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged sometimes. Living every day under extensive criticisms, even from Negroes, I feel discouraged sometimes. Yes, sometimes I feel discouraged and feel my work's in vain. But then the holy spirit revives my soul again.

"And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name."

Mawlana Rumi's shrine is not a large place. It consists of three rooms: one is a long corridor that contains the graves of Rumi; his father, Baha Valad; his son, Sultan Valad; and many of his family and close companions. The second room is a large rectangular one where the Whirling Ceremony (Sama') was held, and the third is a mosque for the performance of the Muslim prayers. Due to the secularization of Turkey under Ataturk, Rumi's shrine was converted to a secular museum in 1926. Yet the standing of the shrine as a museum does not prevent more than a million pilgrims every year to visit this greatest of Muslim poets and mystics. On most times of everyday you find at least 50 people inside, but on this day there were a few thousand people packed inside. We got there a few hours before the ceremony that started after the late afternoon (asr) prayers to find a place to stand. Our Sufi teacher, Cemalnur (the leading female Islamic teacher in Turkey), had wisely reminded us to not drink anything from the morning, because we wouldn't be able to leave to use the facilities. This is one of the many admirable qualities about these teachers: They think of the whole human being -- yes, the heart, the soul and even the bladder!

We kept looking around as more and more waves of loving pilgrims arrived, and each time we thought the shrine was as packed as it could possibly get, more would fit. As a parent, it reminded me of when my children were born. After my first daughter was born, I felt I had discovered a love like I had not ever known before. It was a love pure and holy, which took over my whole heart. When we became pregnant with our next child, I was actually initially concerned about how I would love another child to the same extent. And yet something miraculous happened when my son was born: as soon as I first laid eye on him, I felt inside that my heart was expanding. I now loved each of my children fully, completely and equally. I didn't love my daughter any less because another soul had entered my heart. My heart had become larger, capable of more love. And this is what Rumi's shrine felt like, it had become a representation of the heart. The shrine kept expanding and expanding to take in more and more pilgrims. It was a palpable lesson that we as humans are capable of growth, of becoming much more than we thought, and taking in so many inside of our hearts if we dare to let it expand to encompass the whole humanity.

The crowd huddled inside was an international gathering: there were hundreds of Iranians, who had come on bus and planes, each with a collection of Rumi's poetry, silently and beautifully going to their favorite poems. The Turkish pilgrims were of course there, offering prayers to God in the presence of Mawlana Rumi, and simply giving thanks. They offered thanks for a love that starts from God, flows through humanity, and takes us back to God. And there were Americans there, some who are formally Muslims and some who are drawn to this amazing Muslim saint without having adopted Islam. There were Germans and French and Italians and Senegalese. I wondered for a moment how it was that a poet, a saint, had left such a legacy that people would travel from around the world to be there to celebrate him, to celebrate the impact he had had on their lives. I can not think of a single king or ruler who so would draw people centuries after his death. These saintly souls are the true kings, because they draw with love, not with force.

Above the entrance to Rumi's shrine there is a lovely poem inscribed:

This place is like the Ka'ba for lovers.

All come here broken and incomplete

All leave whole.

As a teacher once told me, the poem is a reminder that all that is required to be on the spiritual path is the desire to be close to God, to have one's heart illuminated. One does not set out on the path because one is already beautiful, but because one wishes to become beautiful. This is true now, and it was true in Rumi's own time. His time was a magnificent time, where urban Muslim culture was refined and elegant, where everyday speech was ornamented with lines of poetry. Rumi's own followers, however, were anything but refined. The town's ruler, Mo'in al-Din Parvaneh, once said: "I love Mawlana Rumi, but his followers have terrible manners." Word of this ultimate insult got back to Rumi and his circle. Mawlana, surrounded by his disciples, marched into the ruler's court, and said: "Did you say of my followers that they have bad manners?" The ruler, embarrassed before the saint, put his head down and confessed that he had indeed called them that. The followers rejoiced, for they expected Rumi to call out the ruler. Instead, Mawlana said: "Everything you say about them is true. They do have terrible manners. I took them on as my disciples on the path to God because they have terrible manners. If they already had beautiful manners, I myself would have become their disciple."

And they come today, the refined and the ill-mannered ones. The overwhelming majority came with the content smile of those who have discovered the greatest secret: Love is divine. Love transforms, it is the real alchemy of turning what is base in our spirit into something golden. Love burns everything inside that is not divine, until there is nothing left to stand in one's path back toward the Divine origin. And yes, there were the ill-mannered few, who would push and shove, but they were few.

What has stayed with me was the silent kindness and generosity of pilgrims, nodding in gentle acknowledgment of others who were drawn by the same force of love. There was an old Turkish woman who for four hours simply offered dried apricots and apples out of a large plastic to the waves of pilgrims as they came in. There were bottles of water that people shared with a smile with those around them. We sat down for four hours, many on their knees, without being able to move an inch. So many people's feet had naturally fallen asleep. When it was time to stand up, people would put a hand under each other's elbows, and gently, tenderly help one another stand up. There were also unexpected encounters: I was sitting for a while next to an Iranian pilgrim from Khorasan (the same region that Rumi was originally from). He turned to one of my Turkish friends there, and offered her a beautiful turquoise stone from his hometown, and offered it with a prayer that the blue color of the stone would bring her the tranquility of the ocean and the serenity of the sky.

There were many different Sufi groups present there: followers of the Mevlevi order, Shadhili order, Chishti order, Qadiri and Rifa'i orders. And many who are not formally affiliated with any order. When the ceremonies started, we began in unison by calling out:

Ya Hazra-e Mawlana

haqq dost



O His Holiness Mawlana,

Friend of God

This is what the saintly ones in the Islamic tradition are called, the friends of God. These are the ones who attain to a station of ease and intimacy with God, when they are finally attuned to the forces of the cosmos instead of struggling against their own true selves and the maker of the stars. And then we moved on together, thousands of us, in recalling the poem attributed to Mawlana Rumi in praise of the Prophet Muhammad:

O Beloved of God

You are the Messenger of the One God

You are Chosen by the Lord of Majesty, Pure, peerless

My Sultan...

You are the sweet darling of the Divine Presence

....

You are the healer of hearts...

O Friend of God

Friend...

Friend...

There is such an intimate relationship between Mawlana Rumi and the foundational sources of Islam. It has often been said that the whole of Rumi's Masnavi, his great masterpiece, is a great commentary on the Quran. Indeed, it has often been described as the "Quran in Persian." And as for the Prophet Muhammad, Rumi himself was called "the offspring of the soul of Muhammad." There is something of the sweetness, of the gentleness, of the love and of the mercy of the Prophet in this offspring.

Politics and tensions were not absent on this day: The Turkish prime minister and opposition parties had also traveled to Konya to give formal speeches. And there was an Ebenezer Scrooge in this gathering as well: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the anti-Rumi of Iranian Islam, who blocked planes chartered by Iranian pilgrims to come to Konya. Nevertheless, this day belonged to the saintly Rumi, and to the thousands of loving worshippers who had come from near and far to share in this message of love and devotion to the highest and loftiest aspiration of Islam.

The evening session culminated in a large whirling ceremony with the dervishes, who slowly, graciously, unfurl their arms and turn again and again, with one hand open toward the heavens and the other hand turned toward the earth creatures. It is a slow, meditative whirling, something more akin to Tai Chi than frantic dancing, with the symbolism of dancing in the rain of Divine mercy. The rain that they "catch" with their right hand flows through them, goes through their hearts, and then gets poured onto creature. This is the station of the real human being, the mature human being, one who becomes as it were an instrument of God's will. One foot (the left one, closer to the heart) stays stationary, and with the right foot they circle the earth. This too is akin to our own state, combining stillness and silence in the presence of God with activity in the world.

And a few days after the ceremony, we are like this too. There is a part of us that remains still, even as all the pilgrims return to their earthly homes. Rumi had once said that the whole of his life could be summed up in these three phrases:

I used to be raw

Then I was cooked

Now, I am on fire.

God-willing, those who were there and those whose hearts were drawn there came away a bit more cooked, a bit sweeter than before.

Ultimately, God is present everywhere, and the friends of God can reach one anywhere, everywhere. Mawlana Rumi himself had said to not look for him under the earth, but rather if we experience any joy in our hearts, he is inside of that. That bit of Mawlana Rumi this pilgrim carries with him back to his family and loved ones here halfway around the world. As many of Turkish pilgrims were leaving Konya, they kept wishing to each other: Ashk Olsun. "May it become love." May this experience become transformed inside your consciousness into something that makes you aware of your true existence, of the pervasive and overwhelming nature of Divine Love. Ashk Olsun.

Omid Safi is a Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, and the author of 'Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters' (HarperCollins, 2009). He leads a spiritual tour to Turkey every summer, open to people of all backgrounds.