[Sunlight] "Love is Reckless"

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Here, Sunlight offers verses from Rumi's "Mathnawi", Book VI,
lines 1967-1974, as interpreted in versions by Kabir Helminski and
Coleman Barks, along with the literal translation by Professor
Nicholson, on which Helminski and Barks relied in developing their
versions:

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"Love is Reckless"

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God's favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

-- Version by Kabir Helminski
"Love is a Stranger"
Threshold Books, 1993

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"The Circle Around the Zero"

A lover doesn't figure the odds.

He figures he came clean from God
as a gift without a reason,
so he gives without cause
or calculation or limit.

A conventionally religious person
behaves a certain way
to achieve salvation.

A lover gambles everything, the self,
the circle around the zero! He or she
cuts and throws it all away.

This is beyond
any religion.

Lovers do not require from God any proof,
or any text, nor do they knock on a door
to make sure this is the right street.

They run,
and they run.

-- Version by Coleman Barks
"Feeling the Shoulder of the Lion"
Threshold Books, 1991

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Love is reckless, not Reason: Reason seeks that from which
it may get some profit.
(The lover is) fierce in onset and body-consuming and un-
abashed: in tribution, like the nether millstone;
A hard-faced one that has no back: he has killed in himself
the seeking of self-interest.
He gambles (everything) clean away, he seeks no reward, even
as he receives (everything) clean (as a free gift) from Him (God).
God gives him his existence without any cause: the devoted
(lover) yields it up again without cause;
For devotion consists in giving without cause: gambling
(one's self) clean away (pure self-sacrifice) is outside of (tran-
scends) every religion.
Forasmuch as religion seeks (Divine) grace or salvation,
those who gamble (everything) clean away are (God's) chosen
favourites.
Neither do they put God to any test, nor do they knock at the
door of any profit or loss.

-- Mathnawi VI: 1967-1974
Translation by Reynold A. Nicholson
"The Mathnawi of Jalalu'ddin Rumi"
Published and Distributed by
The Trustees of The "E.J.W. Gibb Memorial"

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[Sunlight] "Love is Reckless"