I love the writings of Rumi and Hafiz, Persian mystics and poets of the 13th and 14th centuries. I especially love the fact that they never get self-righteously pious, but portray their spirituality in the vivid colors of real life — from tears to laughter, from confusion to clarity, from the sublime to the outrageous.

Thomas Merton would have approved. When he was Novice Master at Gethsemani, he began a talk to the wannabe monks with these words: “Men, before you can have a spiritual life, you gotta get a life!”

Merton knew how many seekers think that the spiritual life requires a long face, a somber voice, and a downcast spirit of forced humility. Wrong! It requires a full range of fully-lived human experience.

So here’s an outrageous Hafiz poem about how the Divine wants to “Hold us upside down/And shake all the nonsense out” of us, wants to smash “all our teacup talk of God.”

There’s another image in the poem I will never be able to shake off, nor do I want to: God wants to “practice His dropkick” on us!

True confession: some days, a Divine Dropkick is exactly what I need to wake me up to the beauty and glory of simply being alive on the face of this amazing earth!