As a child I was taught rituals that tuned my heart to the church, but not to nature nor to life. Mine was a religion that did not illumine life, but itself needed illumination.
It was from the Sufis that I learned of a path that could call us past our sects and dogmas and into life itself. I could tell the Dervishes were dancing to a music I could not yet hear.
Years ago ran across the works of a wonderful Sufi named Hazrat Inayat Khan who said: “The true use of music is to become musical in one’s thoughts, words and actions. One should be able to give the harmony for which the soul yearns and longs every moment. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony, and harmony is best given by producing it in one’s own life.”
When one sings or dances without reservation, the sense of a separate self sometimes melts away and we become one with the music of life itself. At that point we learn to hear beyond the feeble hymns of religion and begin to hear the sacred music of streams and breezes, and to dance to that cosmic hymn in which we live and move and have our being.