This I Believe ...
Sunday, March 11, 2007
  

This I Believe

by
Tony Fathman

My belief statement this morning will be a bit different. One day, not long ago, I shared with Cary Eustis, our intern, a short but meaningful reading given from this pulpit by Ruppert Lovely. Ruppert was our Interim Minister a few years back. His reading grabbed me as few have. It was written by the 13th-century Muslim Jalalud'Din Rumi, a Sufi Mystic poet. It goes like this:

The winds of grace blow continually,
But to catch the wind
You have to raise the sail.

I remember thinking—that's why I'm in this church this morning, singing in the choir and putting money in the collection plate. I'm raising a sail to catch the winds of grace.

A few weeks later, during a windsurfing vacation to Padre Island, I was raising a sail, literally, and understanding in a visceral way the effort and sometimes pain that effort took. But, the reward of flying over the water, your body part of the rigging of the board, was a transcendent experience.

In the evening, with Ibuprofen, scotch, TV visuals of the invasion of Iraq and my pipe, I began to ponder Rumi's short eloquent lines:

The winds of grace blow continually,
But to catch the wind
You have to raise the sail.

Vacations are supposed to clear your mind. This one did, and I wrote a song inspired by Rumi's thought and the images and reality of the war. Cary asked that I sing it for you, and afterward I'll close with a few final thoughts. (This is a Muslim, gospel song, a genre incompletely explored.)

Duty, responsibility, knowledge, enlightenment, fellowship, community, joy, beauty, reverence and love are among the values I believe in and that I believe help us order our lives. I have come to believe the word "grace" embraces them all.

So, here is my core belief statement: I believe we should live our lives in a way that allows us to achieve a state of grace—to catch the wind, raise a sail.