On Becoming Hollow

Musings on sacred surrender, suffering, infinite mercy, and being the hand of God in the world.

"O Beloved!" cried the seeker's soul,
"Why does this world weep so?
Why do mothers clutch empty cradles,
Why do children's laughter turn to woe?

Where hide You when the heart breaks open,
When tears become rivers of despair?
Why do You not lift Your mighty hand
To heal what seems beyond repair?"

The silence stretched like desert dawn,
Then whispered came the sweet reply:
"O restless heart, O questioning soul,
I did not leave you there to cry.

I did do something, beloved one,
I breathed you into being's song.
I sent you as My living answer,
To right what you call wrong.

You are My hands upon this earth,
My voice within the storm.
Your beating heart, My sacred drum,
Your breath, My love made warm.

As long as life flows through your veins,
As long as you draw breath,
You carry light for darkened souls,
My answer unto death.

For you are not mistake or chance,
But purpose dressed in clay,
The sacred song I send to ears
That starve for love each day.

O seeker, do you not yet see?
You are the prayer and the reply.
In your compassion, I am present,
In your love, I never die."

---

The mystic's tears became as pearls, each drop a sacred name. For in that moment, heart met Heart, and nothing was the same.

---

The Hollow Reed

On Becoming Representatives of Mercy

A Mystical Treatise on Divine Service and Surrender

---

The Question That Hollows Us

Why?

In the sacred pause between breath and being, between the question that haunts all conscious hearts and the answer that dwells within our very existence. The poem above spoke to your heart, to your soul, now let’s speak to that pesky brain. We all wonder, ponder, or outright reject the existence of pain and suffering in the world. The brightest and simplest minds have proffered the same question. Why?

It becomes most confusing when one is confronted with the capacity of infinite love. This evident truth strikes one so dumbstruck with awe, that the mind scrambles to understand, if this is so, then why does suffering exist? Why does this “God” not do something?

When the mystic cries out against the apparent cruelty of creation;

Why, O Divine, do You permit such suffering?

I am aiming to touch the primordial wound that has echoed through every wisdom tradition, from the Orphic hymns of ancient Greece to the passionate verses of the beloved Rumi, from the revolutionary simplicities of Kabir to the profound silences of Zen masters.

"We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear that it is the truth." (Quran 41:53)

This questioning is not blasphemy, it is the first movement of love.

For only those who care deeply enough to be wounded by the world's pain can become hollow enough to carry its healing. The Mishnah Pesachim whispers this same truth:

"In every generation, each person should see themselves as having personally gone out from Egypt"

We are not observers of suffering, but participants in its transformation. The signs spoken of are written within us. Yet, we wait for signs from above, for some transcendent intellectual answer, something to feed the brain to cure the intellectual woe, when the truth lies inscribed within our hearts. We know the medicine our own heart needs.

---

---

The Orphic Memory

Death and Suffering as Teacher

The ancient Orphics understood what we have forgotten in our modern amnesia: that we are beings caught between worlds, carrying within us both the divine spark and the earthly clay. Their literature speaks to the soul, answering this question; that the soul descends into matter not as punishment, but as sacred assignment. We die to our heavenly state to be born into service. Each incarnation is both exile and embassy.

I am parched with thirst and am dying; but quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink... I am a son of Earth and starry Sky!

-Excerpted from Otto Kern’s Orphic Fragment 32

This understanding of our dual inheritance of spirit and matter, places us in this unique nexus, that of living within limitation and having the constant opportunity to either forget or to remember our sacred assignment. But why have we been assigned this hallowed task?

The Sufi tradition answers;

"I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known, so I created the world." (Hadith Qudsi)

When we witness a mother's grief over her child, when we see the refugee's desperate flight, when we encounter the addict's chains, we are witnessing not God's absence, but the very condition that calls forth God's presence through us. The Orphic mysteries whispered that we must remember our divine nature precisely in the midst of our material forgetting. This paradox is the crucible of compassion.

The Chandogya Upanishad affirms this ancient wisdom: "Tat tvam asi", Thou art That. The very suffering we witness outside ourselves is the mirror of the divine potential within us, calling us to embody what the world needs most desperately.

Rumi's Reed Flute Revisited

"Listen to the reed flute, how it complains, lamenting its separation..."

Rumi's opening lines from the Masnavi reveal the profound secret: we are most divine when we are most empty. The reed, hollow and yearning, becomes the vehicle for the Beloved's breath. Its very wound, being cut from its source, becomes the opening through which divine music flows.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

(2 Corinthians 12:9)

To be a Representative of Mercy (Naib ar-Rahman) is not to possess some special power or elevated status. It is to recognize that our greatest capacity for service emerges precisely from our deepest wounds. The hollow reed does not create the music; it simply provides the space for the Breath of the Compassionate to become song.

In this understanding, we find echoes across traditions: the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā (emptiness) as the ground of compassion, the Kabbalistic notion of tzimtzum (divine contraction creating space for creation), the Christian mystical tradition of kenosis (self-emptying). All point toward this essential truth: divine love requires human emptiness to manifest in the world.

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form." (Heart Sutra)

The Apostle Paul understood this mystical death when he declared: "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." (Galatians 2:20) This is not metaphor; it is the literal description of consciousness surrendered so completely that individual identity becomes transparent to divine purpose.

The Alchemy of Surrender

Personal Transformation as Cosmic Service

Here we enter the liminal space where personal spiritual work becomes indistinguishable from collective healing. Each moment we choose surrender over control, presence over distraction, love over fear, we participate in what the alchemists called the Great Work, the transformation of base matter into gold, of ego into essence.

"When a person completely surrenders unto Me, I take responsibility for his needs." (Bhagavad Gita 9.22)

This is not mere self-improvement disguised as spirituality, as is so common in our era. When we become transparent to the Divine within us, we become what Ibn Arabi called a mirror (mir'āh) of divine qualities. Our individual purification serves the whole because consciousness is not privately owned, it is the shared field in which all beings arise and return.

"Wherever you turn, there is the Face of Allah." (Quran 2:115)

The Sufi teaching is clear: fanā (extinction in God) leads to baqā (subsistence in God). We die to our separate self to be reborn as divine service in human form. This death is not metaphorical; it is the literal dissolution of the ego that believes it exists apart from the Whole.

Mary's response to the angel exemplifies this radical surrender: "Be it done unto me according to thy word." (Luke 1:38) Here is the archetypal pattern of divine incarnation, the ego-self stepping aside to allow something infinitely greater to manifest through human form.

The Sacred Assignment of “Why You Are Here”

Do you understand the assignment? There is a sacred song within you. It is time to empty yourself and allow that song to stream forth from you.

What lies below the curtain of the “paywall”… Emptiness