“Can you get indigestion from taking people into your heart?”

The whole of my life
is summed up in these three phrases:
I used to be raw
Then I was cooked
Now,
I am on fire.

– Rumi

In a recent blog post, Don’t Leave Me Raw, Omid Safi discusses the “wisdom of chickpeas” through an ancient tale by Rumi, a thirteenth century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Safi opens his blog article with a rather entertaining question: “Can you get indigestion from taking people into your heart?”

In many countries around the world, including here in Bolivia, many people get their protein not from meat but rather from beans, legumes, or other protein-rich carbohydrates, such as quinoa. Taking the time to cook these “alternative” protein sources to their desired softness takes time. As Safi put it, “There is a grace [to be found] in this softness.” In the original article, Safi explores the parallels that exist between Rumi’s fable of cooking the chickpeas and the human quest to cultivate loving relationships and a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in our own human lives.

Safi highlights the importance of taking the necessary time to be fully cooked and fully digested in order to live a wholly fulfilling and sustaining life. Though many of us, Safi writes, would enjoy to simply transform from being “raw” to “cooked”, the most important part of the transformative journey through life is the sometimes painful, yet always deeply rewarding process of being cooked.

Safi concludes his powerful article by writing, “May we have the heart, the courage (the word courage comes from root word for having heart) to go through the cooking. May we have the courage to commit ourselves to the flame. May we have the heart to finish our cooking, to make each of us worthy of being inside the heart of another fellow human being.”

Read the full article here.