“Someone once asked Rumi: ‘What is a Sufi?’ His reply: ‘One with a broken heart.’ A broken heart is the state of one who feels an existential longing for something, they know not what, which cannot be requited or fulfilled by anyone or anything in this world, although anyone we love is the face of that One.’” (Rupert Spira, The Heart of Prayer, 37).
Indeed. A broken-hearted one who longs for the One and is none other than that One on the way home to the One — nameless, thingless, selfless, empty aware being — is a Sufi. I’m a Sufi, happily broken-hearted. In a sense, we are all Sufis but only if and when we recognize our broken heart and unrequited longing, which can be fulfilled only by returning to the dimensionless origin of each thought, feeling, sensation, impulse, object, activity, and relationship. Our hearts long for home.
Image credit: Rupert Spira.
