I.
When the title of this sermon, “Favorite Bedside Reading,” appeared in the last newsletter, some of you may have realized what I was referring to, if you were here several years ago for the memorial service for one of our longtime, much-loved members, Hazel Williamson, wife of Claude Williamson and mother of Jane, both of whom are here this morning.

It was Claude who had the idea to include in the eulogy for Hazel a list of the books that were on her bedside table, as a good way of helping people remember or get to know better who Hazel had been. It was an inspired idea, and everyone at the reception agreed that my reading that list had brought Hazel to mind in a delightful and enlightening way.

But it also made more than a few people think what their own bedside reading would reveal, just as enlightening, perhaps, but not necessarily the cause of similar delight. I remember one person confessing that what she kept to read at the end of the day, just before sleep, were any business matters that hadn’t been important enough to address in prime time, but couldn’t be put off forever.

This fall, several themes will weave in and out of each other, Sunday to Sunday, as happens now and then. I’ll be talking about Transcendentalism in November, and this morning, too. And I’ll be talking later in October about the concept of the Sabbath, and the importance of balancing the busy, productive way that many of us use most of our time with rest and relationships, learning and lounging, pleasure and peace.

The end of the day can be seen just that way. I have friends, hard-working friends, who say, from ten o’clock on, that’s time for me. You may have found another block of time the one you find easier to claim as your own, as when the baby naps just after lunch, or when you arise before most of New England. I have a colleague who always arrived at work a half-hour early so he could treat himself to some serious theology. But for a lot of folks, like me, that time comes at the end of the day, and how we spend it, what claims our attention, is on display on the bedside table.

I confess my own selection exposes me as less erudite than Hazel was. It has too many magazines, albeit ones I hope will yield a sermon’s topic or illustration. But there are some books, especially ones of a certain sort, like those that deliver insight and pleasure in small blocks of time, like essays, short stories, and poetry.

Among them this past year has been a collection of poems, titled The Gift, by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, as freshly translated by Daniel Ladinsky. The poems are short and many, and offer rewards with each new reading.

I was led to Hafiz by a colleague of mine, Barbara Merritt, minister at the First Unitarian Church in Worcester, where Tom Rosiello [our intern] is a member. In a column, she quoted four lines by Hafiz, who is one of the most distinguished writers in the Sufi tradition of Islam. His actual name was Mohammed Shams od-Din (or Shamseddin Mohammed), but he earned the title of Hafiz, sometimes spelled Hafez, meaning one who has memoried the Quran, of which he was a teacher. He was also the court poet in his home town of Shiraz, now in Iran, though he never wrote down any poems. He spoke or sang his poems, and other recorded them.

These are the lines Merritt used, translated by Landinsky, although they aren’t included in The Gift:

It is always a danger to the aspirant on the path
When one begins to believe and act
As if the ten thousand idiots who have so long ruled and lived inside
Have all packed their bags and skipped town or died.

I thought that was clever and witty and true, so I bought the book, and this morning I’m going to share some of my favorite poems by Hafiz, as well as some that best illustrate the themes that recur in his work. They include such messages as, stop worrying, life is for enjoying, God is in everything, love and kindness are all-important in the intoxicating, delirious dance of life.
 

Every
Child
Has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does
Anything weird,
But the God who only knows four words
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come dance with me.”
Come
Dance.
                                                                                  [“The God Who Only Knows Four Words”]

Hafiz says he “knows there is no one in this world who is not upon God’s Jeweled Dance Floor.” [“If God Invited You To a Party”]

You will start recognizing some of Hafiz’s recurring imagery, like the dance, the drunken ecstasy of being fully alive, and a fair amount of surprisingly earthy references, most of it to convey Hafiz’s mystical faith that what God has provided us in life is a party.

I say “mystical” because he is not offering an argument to persuade us but poetry to awaken us, to turn us from our petty personal preoccupations to recognize our actual, intoxicatingly favored situation. So you get a poem like, “Why Aren’t We Screaming Drunks?” which I will quote before long. I apologize to those of you for whom drunkenness has been a terrible thing; you may want to try to put that out of mind for a little while, because that’s Hafiz’s metaphor for ecstasy, and he’s sticking with it, as in the poem, “What Should We Do About That Moon?” If you can get past his cavalier attitude toward alcohol abuse – and it is just a metaphor, just a little fable – the poem offers a delightful presentation of Hafiz’s attitude toward life, and toward most religion, too.

A wine bottle fell from a wagon
And broke open in a field.

That night one hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered

And did some serious binge drinking.

They even found some seed husks nearby
And began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.

Then the “night candle” rose into the sky
And one drunk creature, laying down his instrument,
Said to his friend – for no apparent
Reason –

“What should we do about that moon?”

Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music

Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.

The sun once glimpsed God’s true nature
And has never been the same.

Thus that radiant sphere
Constantly pours its energy
Upon this earth
As does God from behind the veil.

With a wonderful God like that
Why isn’t everyone a screaming drunk?

Hafiz’s guess is this:

Any thought that you are better or less
Than another person

Quickly
Breaks the wine
Glass.
                                                                                      [“Why Aren’t We Screaming Drunks?”]

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.

Actually, Hafiz’s best-known mention of moles, the poem “Counting Moles,” ends up referring to more than those of his darling:

Lovers
Don’t tell all of their
Secrets.

They might
Count each other’s moles
That reside in the shy
Regions

Then keep that tally strictly
To themselves.

God and I
Have signed a contract
To be even more intimate than
That!

Though a clause
Mentions

Something about not drawing detailed maps
To all God’s

Laughing
Moles.

Some gods say, the tiny ones,
“I am not here in your vibrant, moist lips
That need to beach themselves upon
The golden shore of a
Naked body.”

Some gods say, “I am not
The scarred yearning in the unrequited soul;
I am not the blushing cheek
Of every star and planet –

…Not do I reside in every pile of sweet warm dung
Born of the earth’s
Gratuity.”

Some gods say, the ones we need to hang,
“Your mouth is not designed to know God’s,
Love was not born to consume
The luminous
Realms.”

Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened people
Create

To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.

What
Do sad people have in
Common?

It seems
They all have built a shrine
To the past

And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.

What is the beginning of
Happiness?

It is to stop being
So religious

Like

That.

The
Great religions are the
Ships,

Poets the life
Boats.

Every sane person I know has jumped
Overboard.

That is good for business
Isn’t it

Hafiz?

Once a group of thieves stole a rare diamond
Larger than a goose egg.

Its value could have easily bought
One thousand horses

And two thousand acres
Of the most fertile land in Shiraz.

The thieves got drunk one night
To celebrate their great haul,

But during the course of the evening
The effects of the liquor
And their mistrust of each other grew to such
An extent

They decided to divide the stone into pieces.
Of course then the Priceless became lost.

Most everyone is lousy at math
And does that to God –

Dissects the Indivisible One,

By thinking, saying,
“This is my Beloved, he looks like this
And acts like that,

How could that moron over there
Really
Be
God?”

Our
Union is like this:

You feel cold
So I reach for a blanket to cover
Our shivering feet.

A hunger comes into your body
So I run to my garden
And start digging potatoes.

You ask for a few words of comfort and guidance,
I quickly kneel at your side offering you
This whole book –
As a gift.

You ache with loneliness one night
So much you weep

And I say,

Here’s a rope,
Tie it around me,

Hafiz
Will be your companion
For life.

O, I don’t care about your thoughts
Or what you have ever done,

Just open up this book whenever you are
Sad

For I love the way you
Smile!

Or the magnificent couplet,

I am like a pitcher of milk
In the hands of a mother who loves you.
                                                                                                     [“Out of God’s Hat]

It
Is all
Just a love contest
And I never
Lose.
Now you have another good reason
To spend more time
With
Me.

Emerson liked the enthusiasm, the intoxication of the senses he found in Hafiz, and Hafiz’s relatively accessible style was one he tried to emulate. Emerson’s high regard echoed Goethe (as Emerson so often did), who wrote that “Hafiz has no peer.”

But perhaps Emerson also appreciated Hafiz weighing in on the liberal side of an argument that has preoccupied New Englanders since the English first arrived, the one about the nature of God and of humanity, the one about Calvinism. The Puritans who settled this town believed with Calvin that thanks to Adam and Eve, we are all born in sin and deserve eternal hell, which we’ll get unless God gratuitously selects us for salvation. Behind these doctrines of native depravity and election was a god who passes judgment, a god of power and righteousness.

Over time, congregations like this one and ministers like Emerson took to almost the opposite point of view. And few people are farther from Calvin in outlook than Hafiz, to wit:

“Only One Rule”

The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish that swim.

The planets are the white whales I sometimes
Hitch a ride
On,

The sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves into my heart
And upon my
Skin.

There is only one rule on this Wild Playground,
[not ten commandments, just one rule]

Every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.

They all say,

“Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,
in the Beloved’s divine
Game,

O, in the Beloved’s
Wonderful
Game.”

At some point, of course, and maybe real quickly for some of you, a listener might wonder if this character isn’t so inebriated he can’t see plain truth. For many people much of the time are afflicted with poverty, disease, war, or oppression, which makes the game not all that wonderful.

We could give him the benefit of the doubt and say, the Beloved (God) has created this wild playground for us to enjoy, and we should, but we ourselves frustrate God’s intentions with our selfishness and violence, instead of living together in love and peace and fun.
Even Hafiz knows that solution doesn't quite work, knows that there is suffering that no one brought upon anyone else or themselves, and he says so in one poem [“His Winter Crop’], and fiercely. Addressing God, it begins,

I have
Seen You heal
A hundred deep wounds with one glance
From Your spectacular eyes,

While your hands, beneath the table,
Pour large bags of salt into the heart-gashes
Of Your most loyal servants.

Dear world, I can offer
An intelligent explanation
For our suffering,
But I hope it really makes sense
To no one here,
And come morning,
You are again at God’s door
With ax and pickets,
Eloquent petitions and complaints.

So it’s not that he hasn’t suffered, or is unable to give God the blame. But most of his work has a different point to make, a cheery, invigorating call to note that life has more blessing and glory in every day than we allow ourselves to perceive and enjoy. I will read you my favorite poem by Hafiz. It’s called, “To Build a Swing.”

You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare—
Don’t mix them!

You have all the genius
To build a swing in your backyard
For God.

That sounds
Like a hell of a lot more fun.
Let’s start laughing, drawing blueprints,
Gathering our talented friends.

I will help you
With my divine lyre and drum.

Hafiz
Will sing you a thousand words
You can take into your hands,
Like golden saws,
Silver hammers,

Polished teakwood,
Strong silk rope.

You carry all the ingredients
To turn your existence into joy,

Mix them, mix
Them!

I am about as far
From a sacrilegious man as this
World can endure,

For I
Have found the power
To say “no” to any actions
That might harm myself
Or another.
                                                         [“Where Great Lions Love To Piss”]

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of god” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
“Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”

He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking about sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”
Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,
“You have asked me if I thought your visions were true,

I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.”

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.

Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,

With that sweet moon
Language,

What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.

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