“The Wound is the Place Where the Light Enters You” (Rumi) by Sam I. Gellens

     I bear neither physical wounds nor scars from cancer to this point…but, I can’t predict what the future will bring. Will the lung cancer return in six months’ time? Will my doctors be able to get the prostate cancer under control? Has Rumi’s lustrous mystical light indeed entered me? If so, how? How will I know? Right now, it does not feel as if that light has either entered me or provided a shining beacon to lead me to a place of peace and mindfulness and insight and wisdom and acceptance. I feel consumed by worry, uncertainty, aging and fear of being alone too much of the time.
     I go to work each day not only because I feel needed there, do a very good job at what I do and am legitimized by my efforts. I go to work because I am not alone there, there are colleagues about and students, young, healthy students to advise who, unlike me, have their whole lives before them. They make me feel momentarily young again and that I can make a difference in their world, and I marvel at their youthful vigor and energy. I feel pursued by cancer, consumed by its presence, the possibility that it will ravage me further and possibly put an end to me.
     Rumi is speaking of a divine light which will suffuse our being and make us rise above the mundane cares of this world, even illness and how it wears us down. I wonder if he knew cancer. Did he know people who had it? If one follows the Sufi mystical path of Rumi, is there indeed transcendence, perhaps even triumph over illness and all of the other afflictions of human life, and is it then that the light enters you? When does one know? To live with cancer and not know, well that is a form of torture one must bear…