Ya Hazrati Mevlana! By Wayne Arnason December 7, 2011

For all the time we've been travelling, our e-mails about making arrangements to be part of the Starr King School for the Ministry's Intensive Course on the Sufi religious leader and poet Rumi have had these words in the subject line. The words loosely translated mean "Hail Saint Mevlana" (the name that Sufis and most Turks call Rumi.) Over the past twenty-four hours, we have returned to Istanbul and made the transition from being tourists roaming all over Turkey to being pilgrims whose eyes are turned towards Konya, where the annual Mevlana pilgrimage will be held next week.

We have wanted to join this Intensive ever since Starr King first offered it three years ago, not only because we have long enjoyed the poetry of Rumi, but because we knew there was a deeper story and context to the Rumi poetry translations popular in America, which generally skim over and universalize the Islamic foundation for everything Rumi wrote.

For those reading this blog who are unfamiliar with Sufism, it is described most simply as the mystical branch and order within Islam. Like so many mystical traditions, it resonates profoundly with the teachings of monastic and mystical orders within other religious traditions, especially with the Zen Buddhist and Christian forms with which we are most familiar.

Our "baba", or teacher these next twelve days is Dr. Ibrahim Farajaje, a Starr King School faculty member who has a home in Istanbul and is a practitioner in the Mevlana Sufi tradition. We are joined by Dr. Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King, and co-author of "Saving Paradise", a book on the early Christian understandings of Jesus' life and message and how they were highjacked by theologies of atonement and sacred violence. Seven Starr King students, seven auditors, and five scholar-artists make up our group, which also includes two lively toddlers!

Today we visited Hagia Sofia for the second time, enjoying Rebecca Parker's introduction to this Basilica/Mosque as a vision of paradise on earth as the goal of religious life, and hearing Ibrahim Farajaje's reflection on the "Holy Wisdom" within Christianity and Islam to which Hagia Sofia is dedicated. We also visited a Greek Orthodox church and monastery dedicated to the healing power of the Virgin Mary.
Tomorrow's program explores the history of Sephardic Jews in Istanbul, as we continue to find connections back to our time in Spain where we first met the Sephardic Jews whose exile from Spain brought them here to Constantinople.

So we feel richly rewarded by choosing this Intensive course as our last adventure in these three months of travel. It will tie together a lot of threads connecting Jewish, Christian, and Muslim practice at the deepest level. However there is one new thread we have experienced here already that we recognize we have missed personally as we have travelled, and that thread is worship and group devotional practice.

So much of our travel to sacred sites has involved intellectual learning, in history and theology, and aesthetic enjoyment of natural and artistic beauty. There is a devotional quality to learning and to enjoying beauty, of course. This is different from group devotions and worship through liturgy and song, however. Liturgy, recitation, scripture, and song are going to be important gateways to encountering the Sufi's wisdom on this final stage of the journey, and we welcome this with open arms.

This morning we began the day learning the recitation and chant that is included in the five daily prayers a Muslim may offer. We also learned to sing a Jewish song that includes the chorus " L'Haim Olahim " - "To the Life of the World" ! We sang it on the bus on the road to our destinations today. Wonderful!

And so it begins ! Ya Hazrati Mevlana! L'Haim Olahim!

Location:Istanbul, Turkey