September 12, 2026

Spare Every Heart

Demolish the mosque, demolish the temple, demolish everything in sight. But don't break anyone's heart, for that is where God resides.

Bulleh Shah was an eighteenth-century Punjabi Sufi poet who studied under a low-caste teacher, Shah Inayat, a bond that scandalized his own family and the religious authorities of Lahore. He wrote these lines during a time when Hindus and Muslims were pulled apart by clerics obsessed with ritual purity and correct doctrine. Rather than choosing a side in that quarrel, he insisted that every building made by human hands could fall, but the human heart could not be touched. For a tradition built on release, this is the clearest teaching: forgiveness is not a rule to follow but a place to protect.