Spiritual Window Shoppers

There's a Rumi poem (translated by Coleman Barks) that starts:

"These spiritual window shoppers who idly ask,
"How much is that?
Oh, I'm just looking."

These window shoppers have a few Buddhas in their gardens and a couple of African tribal masks on the walls of their studies but haven't invested much beyond the acquisition of an interesting collection of spiritual artifacts. They are like those bachelor types that can't stay interested in a woman beyond the six-month grace period that typifies the first flush of love.
But passion is like a bonfire. It needs to be lit and relit before it can begin to build upon itself.

Rumi says in another poem (via Barks):

If you can't pray a real prayer, pray
hypocritically, full of doubt
and dry mouthed
God accepts counterfeit money
as though it were real.

In other words, fake it until you make it. Any form of homage to the unknown— prayer, worship, a few sincere strains from an old hymn— could at least be a way to get some distance from that arthritic stance of superiority that proclaims, "It's not digified to humble myself before something that hasn't passed the check list of my intellect." How could the mystery pass the muster of your constricted little criteria? You don't even know enough to ask the right questions. How could you even compose a question about something that is beyond words?

I know, you don't want to be associated with the sort that falls down and cries "Miracle!" at the sight of any gnarled turnip that vaguely resembles the face of the Madonna. I understand. We're not talking about that. The religious hysteric doesn't honor the mystery either because he, too, is always super-imposing his little dogmatic template over everything on God's green Earth.

Your intellectual dogmatism is not superior to the hysteric's dogmatism because all dogmas are inferior. Mark Twain said, "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." Prayer, at least prayers of celebration, praise, and gratitude, aren't about dogma. They're about cognizance and passion. Get a little cognizance and passion in your life. Otherwise you'll wind up like Rumi's window shopper:

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

If you find depictions of the Christ as basically another long suffering, blood spattered, pin cushion of brutality melodramatic and smarmy don't throw the babe in the manger out with the bath water. Paint your own vision of how the Messiah should be. What's the gospel according to your soul? As Rumi says at the end of his window shopper poem:

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah,
It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.