Matthew Gatheringwater relays his experience with real, live Sufis and ruminates on why, if they don’t practice the to-the-ends-of-the-earth-and-then-some tolerance that many Unitarian Universalists (though a reading of Rumi) assume they do, then why do we try to appropriate them?
Loneliness, I think. By erecting outselves as a tiny world religion, mainline Unitarian Universalists have the more pressing problem of finding kin wherever we/they can. The experience of Transylvanian Unitarianism has embolded some (the Christians disproportionally so, I suspect) and worried others who see in the Transylvanians something unlike us.
We hear others’ propaganda, and believe it. Which makes us gullible. We hear other people and read them through our own assumtions. Which makes us careless. You can judge which is worse.
So we get known as the religious version of an easy lay, and wonder why the polyamorists want to have their ways with us. They’re just the next in line, and all the while other groups of religious people (Sufis included, it seems) get all that much clearer that they know they’re not like us UUs.
Yet another reason I grow deeper and deeper in Christian faith. . . .