The Meeting of Rumi and Shams
composed by Jim Burklo from the poetry of Rumi
acted by Jim Burklo and Tom Devine
Narrated by Julie Carlson
2-26-06
Narrator: The year was 1244. The place was Konya, in what is now Turkey. Jelaluddin Rumi was a theologian and teacher, an intellectual in a long family line of clerics and jurists. He had many devoted students. Shams of Tabriz was a wild, wandering mystic of the Sufi mystical order of Islam. After their meeting, Rumi was transformed from a conventional scholar into an ecstatic poet. After Shams’ mysterious disappearance, Rumi never signed his own name to his poetry. Rumi entitled the collection of his poems as “The Works of Shams of Tabriz”. The poetry you will hear in this play is Rumi's.
(Rumi sits at his desk, reading and writing)
Shams (muttering behind the curtain): Who is greater?
Rumi: What was that? (turns head and then goes back to his books)
Shams: Who is greater?
(Rumi lifts his head, looks around, then goes back to studying)
Shams (leaping out from behind the curtain): WHO IS GREATER?
Rumi (shocked – stands up): Who are you? A madman?
Shams: You are so smart. Such a scholar. Surely you know!
Rumi (offended): Know what?
Shams: Who is greater? The one who exults in his knowledge, or the one who admits his ignorance?
Rumi (stunned): Allahu akbar! (passes out on the floor)
Shams (joyful): Allahu akbar! God is great! For such a friendship I would happily lose my head!
Narrator (poem by Rumi):
I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.
(Rumi wakes up and lifts his head)
Rumi: How could I have missed it? All these years in my father’s library! How have I missed the question? The answer – so simple. The greatest is the one who admits his ignorance. For the one who admits his ignorance, the way is always unfolding. I am ignorant! I am ignorant! Allahu akbar!
(laughing, Shams lifts up Rumi to whirl)
(Shams and Rumi sit on pillows on floor)
Shams: You are the notes
Rumi: And we are the flute.
Shams: We are the mountain,
Rumi: You are the sounds coming down.
Shams: We are the pawns and kings and rooks you set out on the board.
Rumi: We win or we lose.
Shams: We are lions rolling and unrolling on flags.
Rumi: Your invisible wind carries us through the world. You are in my eyes. How else could I see light?
Shams: You are in my mind, this wild joy!
Rumi: How can so great a love be inside me? I am too small.
Shams (laughing): Your eyes are small and they see enormous things!
Rumi: Something opens our wings
Shams: Something makes hurt and boredom disappear
Rumi: Someone fills the cup before us
Shams: And all we taste is sacredness.
(they drink from jug)
Rumi: When grapes turn to wine, they long for our ability to change.
Shams: When stars wheel around the North Pole, they are longing for our growing consciousness.
Rumi (laughing): Wine got drunk with us, not the other way. The body developed out of us, not we from it.
Shams (laughing): We are bees, and our body is a honeycomb. We made the body, cell by cell, we made it.
Rumi: I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door.
Shams (laughing): It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside!
Rumi: Those who don’t feel this Love pulling them like a river
Shams: Those who don’t drink dawn like a cup of spring water
Rumi: Or take in a sunset like supper
Shams: Those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.
Rumi: This Love is beyond the study of theology, that old trickery and hypocrisy.
Shams: If you want to improve your mind that way, sleep on.
Rumi: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Shams (dropping cup and falling back on the floor): When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Rumi (falling back on the floor): Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
(They stand and walk away, stumbling, dancing, laughing, behind the curtain)
Narrator: Rumi and Shams went wandering together, laughing and singing, drunk with love for Allah within them.
(Rumi enters and sits at desk, studying)
Rumi’s students became intensely jealous of the time that he spent with his new friend. But he knew he would never be the same after meeting Shams.
(slamming a book shut) Rumi reads:
Rumi: Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.
I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn't.
I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?
Shams: A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
Rumi: That's how I hold your voice.
I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.
I saw you and became empty.
Shams: This emptiness, more beautiful than existence, it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes, existence thrives and creates more existence!
Rumi: To praise is to praisehow one surrenders to the emptiness.
Shams: To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.
Rumi: So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It's a total waking up!
Shams: Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?
Rumi: It doesn't matter how long we've been unconscious.
Shams: We're groggy.
Rumi: But let the guilt go.
Shams: Feel the motions of tenderness around you,
Rumi: The buoyancy.
(Rumi stands and goes behind the curtain.)
(Shams and Rumi emerge, dancing)
(Shams bows to Rumi and takes his leave, going behind the curtain)
(Rumi goes back to books)
Narrator:
No one knows for sure what happened to Shams, but it appears that he fell victim to the enraged jealousy of Rumi’s students... literally losing his head for his friend.
(From behind curtain:)
Allahu Akbar! (loud thump)
Rumi: Shams! Shams! (jumping up and darting back and forth in a panic, then going behind curtain)
Narrator: Rumi feared the worst for his friend, but he heard a rumor that Shams had been seen in Damascus, so he went south to Syria to look for him.
(Rumi wanders through the congregation)
Rumi: Have you seen Shams of Tabriz? A strange fellow, roughly dressed, his turban always askew? Singing and dancing for no apparent reason? Blathering in iambic pentameter? Seemingly drunk out of his mind, but without the slightest whiff of liquor on his breath?
Narrator: But Shams was nowhere to be found.
Rumi: (laughing) I am so ignorant! How could I miss him? Why should I seek? I am the same as he. His essence speaks though me. I have been looking for myself! (falls to the floor on the altar and rolls around – then rises and eagerly returns to his desk to write)
Narrator:
They’re lovers again: sugar dissolving in milk.
Day and night, no difference. The sun is the moon:
An amalgam. Their gold and silver melt together.
This is the season when the dead branch and the green branch are the same branch.
Men and angels speak one language. The elusive ones finally meet.
The essence and evolving forms run to meet each other like children to their father and mother.
Good and evil, dead and alive, everything blooms from one natural stem.
You know this already, I’ll stop.
Any direction you turn, it’s one vision.
Shams, my body is a candle touched with fire.
(Rumi lights candle on desk and then exits, dancing)
Narrator:
One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked, ‘Who is there”
He answered, ‘It is I’.
The voice said, ‘There is no room for Me and Thee.’
The door was shut.
After a year of solitude and deprivation he returned and knocked.
A voice from within asked, ‘Who is there?’
The man said, ‘It is Thee.’
The door was opened for him.