To love God fully is to possess complete freedom from every other bond, and since God is absolute and infinite, it is to experience absolute and infinite freedom.

It has already been mentioned that God first loves us before we have the possibility of loving Him. This ontological priority must be always remembered. God could have created beings who could not but glorify Him, and He did so in creating the angels. But in the case of human beings, He created persons endowed with free will, beings worthy of loving Him consciously but also capable of not loving Him. There is no such thing as love through coercion. Divine Love is a reality that permeates creation by virtue of the very act of creation by the Divinity who is also Mercy, Compassion, and Love. But from the human side, it is possible not to love God as it is possible to reject His very existence.

 

Life in this world is not only a test of our faith, as the Quran asserts, but also of our love for God and the possibility of reciprocating on our own limited level His love for us. As the sacred saying quoted at the beginning of this chapter asserts, it is the right of men and women that God be a lover for them. On the basis of this reality, God asks us to be a lover for Him in the fullness of our free will.

 

The great impediment to responding positively to this divine invitation is that there are so many other things that can become objects of our love, starting with our own ego. God is aware of this situation, hence the revelation of religions and the spiritual power contained within them, which can disentangle the love of the soul for the transient and the perishable and turn it toward God. When the Sufis speak of love, they are thinking of its liberating and not confining aspect. To love God fully is to possess complete freedom from every other bond, and since God is absolute and infinite, it is to experience absolute and infinite freedom.

 

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The Garden of Truth by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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