The Beloved

To love God, to be in love with God is not the same as loving, being in love with a person because this love is a different kind of love, hard to describe since it is both familiar and unknown. This love is more demanding, more consuming as it gives us peace and steals our peace forever, or so it seems, at least until we come to that point of communion which heralds the merging, that union of one with One. It has nothing to do with the body except in the ways that love commands us to offer our body in service to Him and to those who experience love as we do, love as worship, love as an offering of duty, a connection through love for God to each other. Wisdom looks at God within each melting heart and sees itself, a luminous presence radiating His love back to us, and so we are continually with Him, continually reminded of Him even though we are never able to see Him or touch Him materially, physically.

The relations between the devotee and the Beloved are summed up in the word love which has been used, in every tradition, as the emblem or symbol of that mystical longing of the soul for its return to the source, the origin of its existence. Although human love and divine love are not interchangeable they have certain things in common. If we love someone because we expect something in return, that love is not disinterested, not pure; and if we love God because we expect favors in return from Him, that love is neither disinterested nor pure. If we love another concerned only for that person’s sanctity and joy, filled with the love that requires nothing, that love is pure; and if we love God filled with worship for the creator of our human existence, asking for nothing, offering only service, that love is pure. If we fall in love with someone and become so obsessed with this love that nothing else matters any more, nothing else except being with this person makes sense to us any longer, that is like falling in love with God. We give up everything for this love, we surrender to this love, we are a slave to this love.

We are subject to obsessions of every kind as human beings, work, success, family , position, titles, money, office, and as long as these obsessions allow us to function with a reasonable appearance of something resembling normal, we are not labelled psychotic. The obsession for God, if we cannot manage to keep it under wraps, deliberately conceal or obscure it, will have us labelled faster than any of these other obsessions will. There is a very fine line between determination and obsession, between love and obsession, a line easily crossed in pursuit of the invisible unknown. The majnun, the obsessed to the point of apparent madness, while not common is occasionally encountered, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether they are the only ones who really get it, understand what this love is about, or if they have merely crossed the line into genuine insanity. Our consolation, or theirs, is that we must assume a cure will be forthcoming because there is no unrequited love for God, this love is always fulfilled, although not necessarily in ways we can all see or recognize.

Since love is the most intimate basis for relations among us, and love of God lives at the deepest place in our being, parallels between human love and love of the divine are not hard to find. Initially, we might think that unattainable love, the love that is placed on a pedestal and never really known is similar to our love of God. After all, we cannot approach Him, we cannot see Him or know what He looks like, sounds like, but in fact, we do know Him if we know ourself, we can speak to Him and experience an unmistakable vibratory response; sometimes we catch His fragrance, His taste. Then it’s not that, not really that, it has more to do with a willingness to put our own apparent interests to one side while doing something to help someone else, offering our appetites and desires, our attachments and preferences as sacrifices on the altars we build to love. The similarity lies in our ability and capacity to submerge the self, the ego, in someone else’s requirements.

Getting rid of the ego, what I want or need, what I think or believe, what I identify or prop myself up with, these are the sacrifices we make for love, and to the extent we are successful in this, the love survives. When we marry, a sacred symbol for the union of the lover with the Beloved, we are so intoxicated we are persuaded nothing will change the way we feel about each other. Then as time passes and that haze of passion begins to subside, we discover a range of annoying imperfections, a laugh, a turn of phrase, bad taste, a bad quality like anger, jealousy, a lack of restraint, frugality or its opposite, extravagance, and love begins to die, it fades like a flower past its day and we call it a day. If love is founded on spasms of passion and not much else, it cannot survive the death of passion , it is not love and has no common ground with that pure love which is love for God. Nevertheless, if we can examine our own flaws with the same hard scrutiny, correct our own shortcomings with care, the example we set might inspire the other to correct his or hers, then we can join our hands together in respect, understanding, and come to the reality of genuine love for one another.

Marriage , the emblem of God’s divine love for us and ours for Him has produced exquisite literature in all the traditions, both monotheist and other, the image of the bride and the Beloved occurs again and again. Marriage implies the same union on the spiritual plane that it assumes on the physical level for human love, this most intimate union of one with One more than an interpenetration of soul with soul, it signifies the disappearance of one in the other so that what was once two becomes One. This is like a drop of water falling into the ocean, who can say where that drop is now, who can identify this drop or that drop, yet it is there, part of the whole, the surging sea of totality.

Whether we take the meaning of our relations with God to this exalted level or not, the most important, the most meaningful thing for our lives is to recognize the significance of love as a divine quality, let our heart be completely open to it and make love a part of our regular experience with each other; we need to be loving, exemplify love and teach everyone to love. Each one of us must learn to love every living being as if it were our own life, and once we have that love firmly planted in ourself, we will be able to find it everywhere, we will see in on the faces around us. But this will happen only if we have that quality in our heart, since we cannot recognize something out there if it is not first in here. This is true for all the qualities, good or bad, what we have is what we know. How can we recognize it unless we already know it?

We have to contemplate everything in a state of love to spread that love, this is what we have to give each other, the love that confers peace , the love that causes happiness , the love that is an emblem of God’s love for us. Sadness, sorrow, distress, even hunger can be dissipated by love because love is the reflection of Him, of the grace, the love and compassion He comforts us with. The things we learn from pure love are the treasures we have to dispense because these are the gifts of Allah, these are intimations of His love which He offers in His limitless capacity whether we are interested or not, whether we love Him or not. Because He exists as the form of love, simultaneously everywhere, His love is necessarily without limit, it falls equally on everything like the light of the sun or the moisture of the rain, and because the soul which has no fault or flaws is a reflection of His light, it must fill the world with that love.

There is a profound connection between love and the duty or service we offer to God and to each other. Unless we carry out our duties or obligations with love, they cannot really be described as duty which is an exalted concept. We should not confuse duty with the things we do because someone is forcing us to do it, and consequently we do in a state of discomfort, dislike, even anger. We need to see duty as an opportunity to do something, no matter how inconsequential, with the energy of pure love, we need to crave such opportunities, search for them with wisdom and be eager to do it, finding happiness in the performance of any such task, otherwise it is not duty at all. This does not mean indiscriminate plunging into everything lying across our path without the careful circumspection of wisdom , that is not necessarily duty either. We have to learn what to accept and what to reject or we might just end up running around foolishly, avoiding the need to sit still, contemplating the Beloved.

One of the hardest things is to help someone, offer love and service when it is clearly dangerous to do so. Our qutb, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, used to say if you go to help a snake take a very long stick, do what you have to and then make your escape. The snake can’t help that its fangs are filled with poison, it is only natural for a snake to bite if it feels threatened or in danger. When we are filled with that protective, loving concern for our fellow human beings we might feel obliged to help in situations which offer no avenue of escape, then wisdom counsels not to do it, this is for someone else to manage. Don’t get caught up in the drama, love does not invite love into inevitable disaster, love that is pure, God’s love, is never blind. Wisdom says if there should be a conflict between love and wisdom, the love is not pure, follow wisdom; love without wisdom is not that quality. Meanwhile of course, the love that is imperfect shouts the opposite, let everything yield to love, never mind the danger, this is what God commands.

There is another perspective on love and duty to look at, we should not for a moment expect to be thanked for what we do, we should not look for gratitude or to be given something in return. Duty that is done in a state of love is like God’s duty, the Beloved doing some little thing without a thought or the expectation, ah now at last that person will know Me and love Me. None of this should come up, quite simply because the person we help can only offer us what he or she happens to possess, and it could very well be the poison we used a long stick to avoid. Selfless duty with no thought of return rises automatically in that state of pure love. Sometimes we can see this to a certain extent within the frame of merely human love, even the shadow of that purest love is such a compelling condition it can become the counterfoil, at least for a time, for many less desirable qualities. Human love will often bring out the best in us for awhile because we want something in return, we want the person we love to love us in return; God’s love is different, it gives, it offers, it provides freely with no expectations, His love is a treasure for us to keep.

The difference between the love of the Beloved for His creation and the fragile, changeable human love we sometimes have for each other is unfathomable because His love is eternal, undivided, seamless, complete. His love emanates from the essence of the Nur Muhammad, the light of creation, the reason for His creation and its cause. If we want to know pure love, if we want to be pure love, we must have the wisdom to understand that the One who gives this love is the One who receives it, otherwise the love is something else, not the unchanging perfection, the unity and totality found in the completion which alone is the Beloved. It is His love that is the source of unity, it is His love that creates unity. The unity based on commonality of opinion or idea disappears when opinions and ideas change; they have no permanence, they are not even shadows of wisdom because they are products of the mind with no origin in truth and faith . A good idea is clearly not enough when we know that all our ideas, good and bad, are left at the grave. If we find that point of unity in the love that flows from the Beloved and connect with each other through this love, the unity, the oneness is genuine, it surrounds both worlds, now and hereafter.

We have to search for peace, that most elusive gift, through unity in our relations to each other and love for the Beloved. The human condition is a catalogue of woe, the sorrows of sickness, hunger, poverty, death and those miseries we invent for ourself, fear, boredom, anxiety , neurosis, all converge in a symphony of distress with dissonance the dominant note. Even when we go in search of the Beloved it is not always peaceful, sometimes we are in bliss, sometimes discouraged; we are still subject to the moods and tremors we have not yet discarded, still subject to the attachments which blind us, the qualities of anger, intolerance and impatience which impede our ability to move on. The peace that is more than balance or mere equilibrium, both hard enough to establish and maintain, comes from a fundamental contentment and gratitude rooted in the purest love and selfless compassion for everything in creation, for all living things. This alone brings true peace to the heart and freedom to the soul.

As wisdom emerges from the deepest faith , as qualities that interfere with our pursuit of the Beloved dissolve in the metamorphosis of determined change and we become more loving, we begin to see love in places we could never see it before. We need to be loving ourself to see love in others, and once we see that love our compassion and forgiveness are quickly aroused as well. When we look at each other with the wisdom of pure love we understand each other, it becomes easy to forgive what we understand. Someone who is wise, looking with love at the things others do, realizes their actions are appropriate for the wisdom they have, for the level of understanding they have at the time. Compassion says if I had been in that person’s situation I might have done the same thing, I would probably have behaved in the same way. How much more magnanimous is the Beloved; when we can find the way to forgiveness within our limits, know how ready are His mercy and His compassion, which are limitless, to veil our faults.

Our precarious human love with all its flaws and longings has to be examined, we have to change our selfish love into selfless love, a love that is pure, so pure that it becomes essentially indistinguishable from the love flowing in a constant stream from the heart of the Beloved Himself. Love is the opener, possibly the most accesssible of His qualities; and since each quality, pursued absolutely, pursued beyond the ends of limit converges with all the others at the source, this becomes the most easily defined way, the approach to Him which is open and available.

By Sharon MarcusExcerpted from the book, Sufi