Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Moses and the Shepherd

Maikel, Bea, Sara, Vahid and I gathered together yesterday in my place for a dinner and for chatting on beliefs, faiths.

I cooked yoghurt soup and dolma (stuffed paprika). Maikel helped for the mixing of flour and yoghurt for the soup. Vahid fried the cigarette pastries. After the dinner, we had Mangos by Bea and ice-cream by Sara as desserts. I always want to take a picture of dinner table in these occasions, but I always forget.

We talked about many things, nice moments. At one moment, Sara told us a story from Mevlana (Rumi)'s Mesnevi: Moses and the Shepherd:

A shepherd prays God: "My God, I love you, I want to kiss your hand, I want to serve you milk, I want to clean your bedroom, I want to wash your clothes....".
Moses hears this and gets angry "How come you can personalize God! You will make Him angry". And prevents him to go on with his prayer.
Moses gets a revalation just at the time by God: "Why did you separate my lover from me? Is your mission as a prophet to unite or to sever? Every person has his/her own way of approaching to me..."

Sara sent an e-mail to us today, and gave links to the english translation of the complete poem:

http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/jrumi/masnavi/moses_shepherd.php

http://www.islamicamagazine.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=358

She quoted the following parts from the second translation:
"Don't bother with good manners anymore,
But let your heart express what's in its core!"

I would really want Kiran and Kaustubh to be with us during these discussions..

2 comments:

me said...

You see? Now I know your blog and I check it. I'm really sad I wasnt there for the dinner. First because I'd see you and Maikel. And it would have been to talk about religion with such good friends. Specially because beeing an atheist I'd like to have the chance for a serious nice talk about it with friends with several different beliefs. (Although we had some talks about christian and muslim rituals we never did discuss relegion as a larger vaster thing)

Once again: I'm sad I wanst there. But I'm glad to be keeping in touch :)

tunahan said...

Heyy dear Filipe!
We plan to go on with these meetings with a more systematic way.

Who knows? Maybe we even can make a blog out of these discussions by forming a small community with different backgrounds yet open-minded people that can understand and tolerate each other, and discuss the things..

You never know, if we can make this, you can be a member of it, and join/follow discussions online..

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