Stop Being So Religious
What
Do sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
So religious
Like
That.
Hafiz
I'm sitting here looking through The Gift, a collection of Hafiz poems that I often use in class. This is a clean copy, and thus not the one with my innumerable scribbles all over it, but it's amazing how many of the poems I remember. This is one of my favorites. Yes, and I know that it seems strange that a historian by training would cull out a poem featuring the line: "It seems/They have all built a shrine/To the past" but it is the real deal. Naturally, it always brings me back to Marcus Aurelius and his admonition that we only control this moment in time, but yet so many people are trapped by something that happened in the past. In a larger sense I do think it speaks to one of failings as people of faith, in that we should be living this spiritual moment and not focusing on what someone said centuries ago.
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