Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When I bought someone a vibrantly colored print with the quotation shown above, I didn’t know who the poet was. According to Wikiquote: “Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi or مولانا جلال الدين محمد بلخى Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273) was a Persian philosopher, theologian, poet, teacher, and founder of the Mevlevi (or Mawlawi) order of Sufism; also known as Mevlana (Our Guide), Jalaluddin Rumi, or simply Rumi.”
Something about the words grabbed me, or I wouldn’t have been so drawn to it, even with the beautiful artwork. What does it mean, though, and should I be quoting a Muslim poet in the first place…now that I know who “Rumi” is? Aren’t there enough Christian mystics down through history?
Yes, but they don’t have the monopoly on wisdom. That belongs to the Bible, and I would argue that Rumi, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps as a sincere seeker of truth, stumbled upon biblical truth.
In Genesis we read the story of the Fall of Man. God creates man and woman, gives them work to do in the Garden of Eden, shows them one tree from which they may not eat. Regardless of attempts in the past to assign the blame of original sin to All Things Sexual, the tree is clearly named in scripture: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why would God not want Adam and Eve to partake of its fruit? Good and evil exist — wouldn’t God want them, and by extension us, to know the difference? Recognition of good and evil is essential to making correct and wise choices, isn’t it?
Apparently not. When God told his perfect couple living in his perfect garden to steer clear of the tree, he didn’t have restriction in mind, but freedom. Before they tasted the forbidden fruit, they had access to every other fruit in all of creation. Because they disobeyed the one little rule they were given, they lost it all. Instead of tending the trees in God’s garden, they had to toil under difficult circumstances and raise food for themselves.
Creation only makes sense when we begin not at Genesis 1:1, but at John 1:1:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (NIV).
Jesus was. Before creation. Before time. The very name of God that was given to Moses to lead the Hebrews out of slavery is an enimga: I am that I am. I will be what I will be. I am. Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection were planned before the first star was hung in space, because an omnipotent Godhead saw the need for a perfect sacrifice for sin before breath — before spirit — was breathed into the very first sinners.
Adam and Eve’s disobedience was no surprise to God. He walked and talked with them in perfection, yet they had free wills, independence, without which their love and devotion would mean nothing. God knew they would use their independence wrongly, succomb to temptation. The kind of tree or fruit didn’t matter — it was simply the one thing about which they were told “No.”
However, God gets mileage out of everything; the tree he forbade offers an important lesson to us still. God never intended for us to decide right and wrong, good and evil, in our own strength and wisdom. He never intended for us to make up lists of the Do’s and Don’ts so prevalent today, especially within all flavors of religion. This is the path! Do this, and you will be saved! If you do this, you’ll burn in hell!
Instead, God’s intention is that I meet with him in Rumi’s field — the one he described, anyway. Back in that perfect, pre-sin garden. Just God and I. God of all wisdom and love and power, source of everything that can meet each of my many needs, needs he placed within me. Beyond what I think of as rightdoing and wrongdoing, beyond what I think about anything, really. Just God and I. There, the Holy Spirit can blow the cobwebs of my thoughts and experiences and what others have projected on me from my mind, can breathe life into every nook and cranny. There, he can teach me Truth…not what I think is truth, but Truth that is the very person of Jesus Christ.
The old hymn had it spot-on:
In The Garden
I come to the garden alone While the dew is still on the roses And the voice I hear falling on my ear The Son of God discloses.
Refrain: And He walks with me, and He talks with me, And He tells me I am His own; And the joy we share as we tarry there, None other has ever known.
He speaks, and the sound of His voice, Is so sweet the birds hush their singing, And the melody that He gave to me Within my heart is ringing. Refrain
I’d stay in the garden with Him Though the night around me be falling, But He bids me go; through the voice of woe His voice to me is calling. Refrain
---Words: Charles Austin Miles (1912)
In that field, that garden spot, he talks to me about the times I have done the right thing for the wrong reason. He talks to me about the times I have done the wrong thing, but was motivated by love. He can talk to me about being merciful to the people in my life who have hurt me out of their own ignorance, their own wrong motives, their own wrong attempts to be Right.
Proverbs 3:5 makes it clear that we are to “trust in the Lord with all (our) heart and lean not on (our) own understanding. Yet, so often we do the opposite, thinking ourselves mature and rational and wise, even spiritual. God beckons us to come play in a field, and we are too busy cataloguing all the reasons why we can’t.
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