“Rumi has always been a healer of the spirit,” says author and artist Michael Green, talking about ONE SONG, his new illuminated collection of Rumi poetry. “But when I started this book I was thinking of a piece of Native American wisdom. It comes from the Iroquois, and they say there are three kinds of healing. First there’s personal medicine, like when a doctor fixes a sprained ankle, and then spirit medicine, which is what Rumi practiced seven hundred years ago. And which good ministers do, or grandparents. And then there’s what the Indians call clan medicine, which is community healing.”

Somehow, that’s a role that Rumi is also filling now, as perhaps the most sympathetic Muslim figure in America today, as a beloved poet-sage in both East and West. Our community, which is now the global community, has these huge man-made theological systems, and Rumi is throwing a bridge of light across them. “My teacher, who was also a Sufi, was once asked what religion he was. ‘Whatever religion God is, that’s my religion,’ he replied.” The same could have been said by Rumi–or for that matter by any believer. But the devil is in the details, very literally, those details where paths don’t cross-reference, where we’re right and you’re not.

Here’s where Rumi really matters, because the place where we find God’s religion is in another state of being altogether, a state of grace where some fundamental construct of the “I,” with all its non-negotiable dogmas and theologies–is left behind. In this place, God alone is real. And Rumi matters because he’s witnessing from this place, and because the state is anchored nor only outside mind but outside time, he’s witnessing right now as well as in the13th century. I think it’s this immediacy or presence that comes though in his poetry, even in these translation-renderings.

So it’s not just talk, or word-play. It’s the truth that passeth all understanding; a light unto the nations, and Rumi’s genius is to continually restate it in fresh ways. Considering how people are getting ramped up right now, it may be the Message of the Hour.

Coleman says it really nicely: “Rumi reminds us of the radiant depth inside that is present in grief and in love, in being ecstatically here in the moment. What he celebrates has many names, the soul, Buddha nature, the person of Christ, the Nur, and Rumi praises them all at one table. There is no quarrel about names or scriptures in Rumi. His work does not divide; it includes, and that is a blessing in these sectarian days. Rumi represents a nourishing exchange for both the East and the West, like the Silk Road was in his day where the beauties of the great religions and the storytellers and poets and their music flowed together and mixed into a new and vibrant fusion.”

“In the past when I’ve finished a book, that was it, I moved on to the next thing. One Song feels different, I think there’s a duty to get it out there, get the choir started, get some momentum going. The Illumination Band and the songs are a great vehicle. We’re gearing up for concerts across the country, and I’m starting work on a big traveling installation of art from the book.

“Rumi's passing was, typically, mourned by Muslims, Christians and Jews together. Seven hundred years later, his beautiful clarity is a Godsend to this same fractious family.

May our hearts be opened to the truth: All these religions, all this singing, it’s just one song.”