The Light in Our Sky Series #4

A quote from Rumi

The Light in Our Sky

Volume #4

February 17th, 2025

“Everyone chooses suffering that will change him or her to a well-baked loaf.” Rumi. (Sufi Mystic, 1207-1273.)

ZAN: This quote has been echoing in my head lately. One of the worst parts of any difficulty in life is feeling like it’s happening to you without your consent. (Haven’t we all at some point or another asked the question: why me?) So this bit of wisdom from Rumi helps me reframe such difficulties—to me, “choosing” suffering doesn’t mean actively seeking out pain as if browsing for it among the supermarket shelves. Instead, I interpret that wording as attracting the type of suffering that comes with the lessons we need in order to evolve. The question that remains, of course, is who decides what makes a well-baked loaf…

PA: Rumi is amazing. In my own lifelong effort to understand suffering, my idea of God has changed. As a Catholic boy, it was a Jesus-in-the-sky kind of God, praising and punishing. Now it’s the water-freezes-at-thirty-two-degrees-Fahrenheit kind of God. Einstein—a believer—felt that the universe was ‘ordered.’ It’s easy to grasp the idea that water turns to ice at a certain temperature and pressure, that the universe is ‘ordered’ in that way. It’s much harder to believe there’s an equivalent moral law. An immutable cause and effect. If we see ourselves as living one lifetime, a lifetime in which you can do terrible things and not suffer, then everything can seem disordered, nonsensical, even perverse. But maybe, if we live many, many lives, our suffering serves the purpose of bringing us into alignment with the moral law of creation. We ‘choose’ our suffering by our behavior in previous lives. Maybe, in some cases, we suffer for the sake of others. I’m thinking that, life by life, lesson by lesson, we come to abide by the fixed and absolute laws of the moral universe. Slowly, the loaf bakes.

***