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Hrrm. Long time no post.
The problem I'm having with the current material in my lit class is a purely personal one, but knowing this doesn't make any of it easier to read. I think I am more suited to the Buddhist idea of non-attachment than the Sufi idea of ego destroying devotion; these are my own issues, of course, but it's not difficult to imagine that someone would find the idea of unconditional, slavish love a little discomfitting. And, as I am still working through my atheism, the idea of unconditional, slavish love of God is even more discomfitting for me.
"Discomfitting" is putting it mildly, by the way. It would be more accurate to say that it fills me with skin crawling revulsion; parts of The Conference of the Birds had me in tears, and I don't know how to explain that to my professor. "I'm having difficulties with this material because it hits most of my anxiety and insecurity buttons and upsets me on a visceral level." If the whole thing were written in abstractions, it might be easier; instead, it's explained through parables (because how else can you express the inexpressable?) and reading anecdote after anecdote about slavish devotion and self abbrogation in the name of love makes me anxious and upset. I find that sort of outlook to be fundamentally poisonous, and seeing it portrayed as the ultimate path to connecting with the divine throws me for a loop.
Also, The Conference of the Birds has an inadequate translation; Dick Davis put the whole thing in heroic couplets, but his register isn't consistent and the whole thing sounds hideously hokey in places. *sigh*
The problem I'm having with the current material in my lit class is a purely personal one, but knowing this doesn't make any of it easier to read. I think I am more suited to the Buddhist idea of non-attachment than the Sufi idea of ego destroying devotion; these are my own issues, of course, but it's not difficult to imagine that someone would find the idea of unconditional, slavish love a little discomfitting. And, as I am still working through my atheism, the idea of unconditional, slavish love of God is even more discomfitting for me.
"Discomfitting" is putting it mildly, by the way. It would be more accurate to say that it fills me with skin crawling revulsion; parts of The Conference of the Birds had me in tears, and I don't know how to explain that to my professor. "I'm having difficulties with this material because it hits most of my anxiety and insecurity buttons and upsets me on a visceral level." If the whole thing were written in abstractions, it might be easier; instead, it's explained through parables (because how else can you express the inexpressable?) and reading anecdote after anecdote about slavish devotion and self abbrogation in the name of love makes me anxious and upset. I find that sort of outlook to be fundamentally poisonous, and seeing it portrayed as the ultimate path to connecting with the divine throws me for a loop.
Also, The Conference of the Birds has an inadequate translation; Dick Davis put the whole thing in heroic couplets, but his register isn't consistent and the whole thing sounds hideously hokey in places. *sigh*