A Gravestone Made of Wheat

A couple years ago I met a girl. Or shall I say re-met a girl. The kind of girl who makes you want to figure out what life is about.

One night at her parents house we watched one called Sweet Land, a little known film from a few years ago. Set in the rural Minnesota shortly after WWI, the film follows the difficulties surrounding the marriage plans of a new German immigrant to a "Keillorian" Norwegian Bachelor Farmer.

Stunned by the film's visual and narrative beauty, I scoured the Web for "A Gravestone Made of Wheat," from which the film was adapted. After reading the story, I came to a startling conclusion. For the first time, I think, in my life I thought a film told a better story than a book. Several plot changes, such as the historically compelling additon of a banker who preys upon "Bigger Better Faster" believing farmers creates a conflict between Man and Biblical Beast that the original narrative lacks.

The young couple evokes Wendell Berry's understanding of ecomony in their relationship and work. In the films penultimate scene, the couple brings in the wheat harvest by hand after being ostracized by the rest of the community.

As Khalil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, "Work is love made visible."

To Jelal ad-din Rumi

Having been an English Literature major in college, I am often guilty of ignoring the rest of the world's stories, essays, drama, and poetry. My sin is not one of prejudice so much as ignorance. Occasionally, someone crosses my path and shares a writer who wasn't born one of the British Isles sometime in the last thousand years.

One of those someones is Aaron Weiss, a humble, spindly man from Philadelphia. Meeting him, one could believe in his city's name. Although he is a poet and a singer (or more accurately, poem-shouter) of the band mewithoutYou, he is a listener. Most nights, still covered in the sweat of frenetic concert dervishes, Weiss listens one by one to the line that has gathered at his feet. With poetic lines such as Why not let's forgive everyone/ everywhere, everything, and If your old man did you wrong/ then maybe his old man did him wrong, the gathering is not surprising.

After my first time seeing his band, I waited to see him too. Other lines of his poetry seemed to fit his stance towards others - No clever talk nor gift to bring/ requires our lowly lovely king./ Come, you empty-handed/ you don't need anything. 

Seeing first hand the care he offered hurting folks, and the way they fed on such attention, I wanted to know who fed him -- what writers have helped him see more clearly God and creation within God and man within creation and God.

When I arrived at my turn, he stuttered through a few familiar names, as well as Scripture, and then he mentioned Rumi, an early Persian Sufi poet.

Since I'd heard of neither Rumi nor Sufis, I made that my next mini-research project. As it turns out, he lived in 13th century Persia (modern day Iran) and inherited a leadership position at a religious school at just 25, and was very much within the religious "in-crowd."

Around a dozen or so years later, he met an ascetic named Shams. As a result of their friendship, Rumi transformed to embraced asceticism. Rumi's change prompted such controversy that (allegedly) Shams was kidnapped and killed, probably at the hands of Rumi's son.

Despite (and possibly due to) the pain of that loss, Rumi continued in ascetic Sufism, typically expressed through poetry. As a Sufi, his basic goal was to experience/ sense/ feel/ know the fullness of God every moment.

And, interestingly, Rumi made some jaw-dropping statements regarding Jesus. Here's one:

In the fire of the Divine love,
behold I saw a whole universe
Each particle there possessed Jesus’ Breath.

I'd encourage anyone interested in Christianity, faith, life, art, and/ or poetry to read up on his life, not because he was perfect or always spoke the whole truth, but because his work reveals beauty and compelling affection for Jesus.