BBC Radio 4 2015-12-12

Good Morning. Coldplay released a new album this week, A Head Full Of Dreams, but the lyrics of one song, Kaleidescope, have been around for quite a while.

'This being human is a guest house/’ they read. ‘ Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, / some momentary awareness comes/
as an unexpected visitor / Welcome and entertain them all...'

The words are neither written nor performed by Chris Martin, the band’s lead singer.

They come from an 800 year old poem called Guest House, by Jalal ad-Din Rumi, and they’re spoken by a 78year old American writer Coleman Barks.

Barks has made it his life’s work to translate the poetry of the Muslim mystic Rumi from the original Persian into modern English.
He’s been more successful that he could have imagined. Last year Rumi’s C13th verses were the best-selling poetry in North America.

Chris Martin for one, says that when his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow ended, this poem changed his life. 'It's about every feeling that you have being a gift,’ he says, 'Self-doubt and depression - as well as the joyful feelings - are all useful if you can harness them.’

But how do the words of an ancient Islamic scholar - born in Afghanistan in 1207, who lived and died in Turkey - still ring true across eight centuries.

The explanation may lie in the fact that in his late thirties Rumi had a dramatic experience of love and then loss.

Ultimately the devotion and then the grief led him from a traditional religious faith to a more mystical understanding - often called Sufism.

And when faith is freed from the maths of orthodoxy it can become poetry.

Rumi found that dogmatic religion can only get you so far, that belief can be oversold by its adherents. That the creeds and tickboxes of orthodoxy can pass their sell-by.

'Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field,’ he wrote, 'I'll meet you there.’

There is always a danger that religions present themselves as exclusive doorways into truth. Not everyone wants to push on those doors.
There are other paths into faith and for many people poetry is one.

‘God is the poetry caught in any religion,’ writes the poet Les Murray. ‘Caught,’ he adds, ‘not imprisoned.’

The Coldplay song Kaleidescope segues from Rumi’s Guest House into a sample of Barack Obama.

It was recorded at the memorial for the South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney, victim of a mass shooting at a Charleston church during a Bible study.

The President breaks into a spontaneous version of Amazing Grace. I once was lost but now am found/Was blind but now I see.

Even on the darkest day poetry may be how we find ourselves, and music how we regain our sight.