“In the slaughterhouse of love, they kill only the best, none of the weak or deformed. Don’t run away from this dying. Whoever’s not killed for love is dead meat.”

― Rumi

At first glance, when we hear a phrase like “killed for love”, it conjures up a grisly image of a deranged stalker, or a marriage that has degenerated into a tragic murder/suicide. Rumi’s not going there with this theme. He’s talking about a different kind of dying, a dying of the small “s” self, of the ego, in order to open to something immensely greater.

In another of his quatrains, he writes this dialogue:

“I would love to kiss you”

” The price of kissing your life.”

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting, “What a bargain! Let’s buy it!”

Rumi suggests that if we don’t let ourselves be swept away, complete dissolved, “killed” for Divine Love ( and he might posit that all genuine love is Divine Love), we are nothing more than walking corpses, dead meat. The real zombie apocalypse lies in forgoing and forgetting love, in failure to surrender and letting love have its way with us.

My wife Sara and I discovered early in our courtship that we had both tried everything to make our previous relationships work except surrender to the other. We took a deep breath, and have been surrendering ever since. 23 years, a home, a business and two children later, we still struggle with it, and ultimately still surrender to love and each other. It’s scary sometimes, but it beats being dead meat. And we always are reborn into something larger.

In what ways can you surrender to love today?

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Jalal ad-Din Muhammed Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufimystic. Rumi’s influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions; people of all faiths and nations have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world’s languages and transposed into various formats. Rumi has been described as the “most popular poet” and the “best selling poet” in the United States.

Joe Laur is a father, husband, naturalist, executive, consultant, and a lowly rabbinic student. He can be reached at joe.laur@godsdog.net.