from The Religious Gathekas, Hazrati Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
(with minor edits for gender neutrality, by Muiz Brinkerhoff)
If anybody asks you, “What is Sufism? What religion is it?”, you may answer, “Sufism is the religion of the heart, the religion in which the most important thing is to seek God/Goddess/Source in the heart of humanity.”
There are three ways of seeking God/Goddess/Source in the human heart. The first way is to recognize the Divine in every person, and to care for every person with whom we come in contact, in our thought, speech, and action. Human personality is very delicate. The more living the heart, the more sensitive it is; that which causes sensitivity is the love element in the heart, and love is the Divine Being. The person whose heart is not sensitive is without feeling; that heart is not living, but dead. In that case the Divine Spirit is buried in that heart.
Those who are always concerned with their own feelings are so absorbed in self that there is no time to think of another. The whole attention is taken up with their own feelings: they pity themselves, worry about their own pain, and are never open to sympathize with others. Those who take notice of the feeling of another person with whom they come in contact practice the first essential moral of Sufism.
The next way of practicing this religion is to think of the feeling of the person who is not at the moment before us. We feel for a person who is present, but we often neglect to feel for someone who is out of sight. We speak well of someone to that person’s face, but if we speak well of someone when that one is absent, that is greater. We sympathize with the trouble of someone who is before us at the moment, but it is greater to sympathize with one who is far away.
The third way of realizing the Sufi principle is to recognize in our own feeling the feeling of the Divine, and to realize every impulse that rises in our heart as a direction from that Divine Source. Realizing that love is a divine spark in our heart, we blow that spark until a flame may rise to illuminate the path of our life.
The symbol of the Sufi Order, which is a heart with wings, is symbolic of its ideal. The heart is both earthly and heavenly. The heart is a receptacle on earth of the Divine Spirit, and when it holds the divine spirit it soars heavenward; the wings picture its rising. The crescent in the heart symbolizes responsiveness; it is the heart that responds to the spirit of God/dess that rises. The crescent is a symbol of responsiveness because it grows fuller by responding more and more to the sun as it progresses. The light one sees in the crescent is the light of the sun. It gets more light with increasing response, so it becomes fuller of the light of the sun. The star in the heart of the crescent represents the divine spark reflected in the human heart as love, which helps the crescent toward its fullness.
The Sufi Message is the message of the day. It does not bring theories or doctrines to add to those already existing, which puzzle the human mind. What the world needs today is the message of love, harmony, and beauty, the absence of which is the only tragedy of life. The Sufi Message does not give a new law. It wakens in humanity the spirit of sibling-hood, with tolerance on the part of each for the religion of the other, and with forgiveness from each for the fault of the other. It teaches thoughtfulness and consideration, so as to create and maintain harmony in life; it teaches service and usefulness, which alone can make life in the world fruitful and in which lies the satisfaction of every soul.