"The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall... but it’s still one light."

The mystical tradition of Islam, the Sufi tradition, also sees all mystical traditions as one. Rumi says:

All religions,
all this singing,
is one song.
The differences are just
illusion and vanity.
The sun’s light looks a little different
on this wall than it does on that wall...
but it’s still one light.

Rumi grounds the likeness found in every mystical tradition to the depth of the experience of the Divine one touches in a particular tradition. Love is the key.

For those in love,
Moslem, Christian, and Jew do not exist....
Why listen to those who see it another way? –
if they’re not in love
their eyes do not exist.

Thirteenth-century Sufi Hafiz also addresses Deep Ecumenism. He writes:

I have learned so much from God
that I can no longer call myself
a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

He warns about living in the past and following a religion that lives nostalgically when he writes:

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.

Sometimes spirituality demands that we jump ship.

The great religions are the ships,
Poets the life boats.
Every sane person I know
has jumped overboard!
That is good for business, isn’t it, Hafiz?

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