The Sense of Union

In introducing a section of his translation of Rumi's poetry, Colman Barks makes the case that the reason we feel the sense of separation from God so poignantly is because we have already known union with God elsewhere, before we came into time. We have this sense of inner longing and pain that Rumi breathed through his reed-flute song in the opening verse of the massive volume of poetry known as the Mathnawi, because we carry within us the after-taste of divine union. Earlier, in the last century, Karl Barth noted that we suffer because we bear within ourselves an invisible world, finding that this unobservable inner world is met by the tangible, outer world with its dislocations and jostling fragments, which, though it feels powerful, is somehow “foreign” and strangely menacing, even hostile, at times (especially as it is expressed in its human articulation). Because of the “aftertaste” of union, everything else is pale (and even painful) by comparison. There is awakened in us, perhaps only as a fleeting realization, that the outer world cannot give us what we are really looking for or need. Only a strengthening inner world, opening to the Infinite, will suffice.