The Gift of Lovers

The Gift of Lovers
By: Rumi
If a spiritual explanation alone were sufficient,
the creation of the world
would have been vain and pointless.
If love were only spiritual,
The practices of fasting and worship
would not exist.
The gifts of lovers to one another are,
in respect to love, nothing but forms;
yet, they testify
to an invisible love.

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī was a 13^th century poet and Sufi mystic. He lived in Konya, which is in modern-day Turkey. This pericope comes from his most famous poem, Masnavi. It is considered one of the greatest poems ever written in the Persian language. Persian poetry embodies romance, spirituality, and deep insight into the human condition. Rumi is the most famous of poets in the tradition and is the most read poet in the world.

This translation1 obscures any rhyme or meter that may have been in the original. I assume the sentence breaks are original, giving us this form. There is repetition in the words “spiritual” and “love”, which gives us a theme for this pericope.

Lines 1-3 tell us the creation could not possibly be merely spiritual. Creation is tangible; you can hold stone and dirt in your hand. If the motive for creation was merely spiritual, it would have been pointless to create in the material. There must have been some other motive for the creation of the world.

You see arguments against dualism in lines 4-6. There were schools of thought in the early centuries that the spiritual world was good and the material world was evil. But because there is a motive behind the creation of the world, our piety means something. If devotion is merely spiritual, our embodied piety would be meaningless. Fasting and bowing in worship would be empty gestures, “would not exist”. Since the meaning behind creation is love, so too does our love have meaning.

Physical actions are not love but are a part of love. The last lines bring together the spiritual and the material into one. What we do in the physical “testify” to the love within our hearts.

The creation as it exists testifies to the love of the Creator. Love creates the cosmos.

What about this poem moves you?

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