An image of the Sufi poet Hafiz
14th century Sufi poet Hafiz invites us to be the love for others that we wish they would be for us. Author and founder of Benedictus Contemplative Church, Dr Sarah Bachelard, reflects on Hafiz’s poem With That Moon Language*, and also that if we are truly to live by Christ’s injunction to love others as we love ourselves, then we must let ourselves be loved by God, and receive the life God longs to bestow on us.
With That Moon Language
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?
Hafiz (trans. Daniel Ladinsky)
Reading poetry well involves the same kind of reverent, contemplative attention that we must bring to our reading of Scripture. As we bring a good poem into conversation with our experience and the wisdom of our tradition, it helps us see differently; it heightens awareness and offers us new ways of relating to life and its meaning. In other words, like Scripture, poetry is about truth and waking up to it. ‘Insofar as poetry has a social function’, wrote American poet Denise Levertov, ‘it is to awaken sleepers by means other than shock’.[1] And if that implies we are in danger of having nodded off in life, how better (and despite what Levertov says) to be slightly shocked awake by Sufi poet Hafiz’s opening accusation. ‘Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me”.’
You do not mean me, surely? Are you really saying that I walk around all day with a big sign on my chest saying LOVE ME?[2] Of course, Hafiz goes on, ‘you do not do this out loud; otherwise, someone would call the cops’. They would think you were pathetic, needy, desperate – and that is the last thing any of us want to appear. And that is why we are inclined to dismiss the poet’s peremptory assertion. Hafiz knows it. So he suggests we look again. ‘Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect’. This line made me think of the way little children want to give you things, show you what they have been up to, have it rejoiced over and know themselves affirmed, received, celebrated. Then it made me think of how that never goes away – our deep need to be seen and known, to share our very selves. ‘Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me”’.
Well, it is a bald and rather confronting insight. And, as I have already suggested, a reason it is hard to admit is that we are culturally primed to think this a bad thing, a weakness to be overcome. Of course, it is true there are ways of seeking love, attention, approval that are not ultimately good for us or anyone else. It is true that psychological and spiritual health necessitates some degree of self-sufficiency, some level of non-attachment to what people think of us and whether they like us or want us around. But – and this may seem surprising – that is not what Hafiz wants us to focus on. He simply takes it as given that we long and need to be loved, and he does not admonish us to get over it, or tell us to stop hoping for it, or beware the possible corruption of our need. Nor, though, does he offer strategies for coaxing others into giving us what we want.
Instead he invites us to consider offering to others what we and every other person on the planet hopes to receive. ‘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?’ Why not become the one in the light of whose soft, yet full moon gaze others are gently illumined, saved from the darkness of oblivion or invisibility? And I love Hafiz’s profound play on the fact that the one ‘who lives with such a full moon in each eye’ speaks ‘what every other eye in this world is dying to hear’. Our willingness to love this way, he seems to say, simultaneously enlivens us and has the power to redeem others from a certain kind of death.
Hafiz lived in 14th century Persia, modern-day Iran, a mystical poet of Islam. Yet what he urges here is utterly consistent with the Christian Scriptural tradition. We could pose his question in the words of Jesus: why do we not become those who love our neighbour as we love ourselves? Why not indeed?
Well, there are people we do just love, whose being delights us, who we are able to see whole. But it is not always the case – even when we think it should be. Not all parents find their children unconditionally loveable and vice versa, and that is well before we get to our bullying boss, the annoying person in the supermarket queue and the narcissistic political leaders plunging us into disaster. And we know neither Hafiz nor Jesus is talking only about loving those we naturally love. They are speaking of loving ‘every other eye in this world’. How does that become possible?
The author of the first letter of John thinks that we can love others because God first loved us, and indeed that we must love for the same reason. ‘Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another’ (1 John 4.11). But this just seems another injunction to do what we cannot do – we would all like to love one another, to speak that sweet moon language – but we do not. The more we try, the more we discover that out of our own resources, we cannot. And this is where (though admittedly in a rather convoluted way), I think the text of 1 John does suggest a way forward.
We usually read passages like this with the following kind of logic. God loved us, so we should follow God’s example; or, God loved us so much that we should be really, really grateful and do what God wants us to do. We should try harder, feel bad when we fail, and, as a last resort, fake it till we make it – hence the sense of pious exertion that pervades some of our attempts to ‘love’ our neighbours. But John’s deep insight is that this gets the logic backwards. Dietrich Bonhoeffer insists: ‘The relation between divine and human love must not be misunderstood as if the divine love ... preceded human love, but only in order to activate it as an autonomous human doing’.[3] No, it is that as we are loved, as we receive the gift of being unconditionally accepted and known, we are changed. The more we experience ourselves beloved, the more love just flows through us; the more we experience our own foibles and frailties being accepted and forgiven, the more forgiving we become of the foibles and frailties of others.
We know this from our experience of human loving. And ultimately, according to the saints and mystics, the more radically we open ourselves to the love of God – in trust and prayer, the more we experience our love participating in, sharing the character of God’s love. Which is perhaps why Hafiz speaks of this love in terms of ‘moon language’ – after all, the only light the moon gives off is the light it reflects from the sun. The moon’s light is not self-generated, and in the same way it is only the love with which God loves us that constitutes the love with which we love others. Or as John writes, ‘If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us’ (1 John 4.12). It is no longer about duty and trying hard. Our loving one another is itself the sign that God dwells in us and is transforming us. Which is why John goes on to say that ‘Those who say, “I love God”, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars’ (1 John 4.30) – their lack of love for others is the sign that they are estranged from God who just is love.
Hafiz asks: ‘Why not become the one who is always saying what every other eye in the world is dying to hear?’ How do we become this one? We let ourselves be loved; we receive the life God longs to bestow on us. And perhaps the way to begin to receive this gift is to admit before God what we sometimes find so hard to acknowledge – the great pull in us to connect, the silent cry of our hearts: ‘Love me’.
This article is an extract from Dr Bachelard’s book, Poetica Divina – Poems to Redeem a Prose Word; Reflections on Poetry, Scripture and Experience (Medio Media). See: https://mediomedia.com/products/mtpet2
Dr Bachelard is the founder and leader of Benedictus Contemplative Church, an ecumenical worshipping community based in Canberra, Australia. (See: https://benedictus.com.au/) She is also a member of The World Community for Christian Meditation, and author of Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis, Resurrection and Moral Imagination, and A Contemplative Christianity for our Time.
Hafiz’s poem ‘With That Moon Language’, translated by Daniel Ladinsky, comes from the Penguin publication The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, by Daniel Ladinsky.
[1]From a statement on the power and responsibility of poetry written for The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
[2] Cf. Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again &Again (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), p.108.
[3]Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 6, ed. Clifford J. Green, Trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), p.337.