TO LOVE

« He who truly loves must learn to weep. » Very true words. To experience bliss one also must experience despair, otherwise how can one be certain it is bliss?

I also agree with the overall message of the piece. When you love someone or something, you are really loving God. For no one has anything in and of themselves. They are all manifestations of God.

Beautiful piece.

Beautiful. Love is what unites us, heals us, comforts us. Love is everything and all that there is. God is Love. And to love God with all your mind, soul, heart and strength, to love your neighbour, your environment, your fellows as you love yourself is the meaning of everything.

Is infatuation legitimate love? Where does it come from? Is it good to fall crazy in love? Vox

Love’s intensity can be both terrifying and releasing. At times, if only one coud lessen that intensity, somehow turn it down, so that the bliss…or the despair… is less painful.

Prof Tariq,
Here’s a friend’s comment on your TO LOVE,

Satriyo,

But, he never tells us what the objective of love is. He asks and then gets poetic about how love is never what we hope for. He suggests that the objective of love is love itself, but, how can we experience love itself as true love, rather than the counterfeit loves he points out compete with true love, unless we know what the objective is.

I would say that love begins as a choice that remains consistent because love is by definition consistent. One might therefore say that God is love, but in fact, God is freedom of choice, and in the choice God makes, He chooses to be consistent in his commitment to our well being. Love is thus to be committed to the well being of another above one’s own fundamental best interest. I would say that when love begins, it is a choice to be loyal and committed in seeking another’s best interest, and it is this commitment, that when successfully lived that one comes to “feel” the emotion we call love.

The feeling of love is not itself the love. Perhaps the feeling of love is better called affection which is the result of love. Because I choose to love, I can love. Because I choose to live consistently with the commitments required of my choice to love, because I dare to seek the interests of my wife, my children, my father and mother and brothers and sisters, even my friends, I can feel love for them. And Tariq is right that love hurts, because it is hungry for two things – reciprocity and consistency. When such love is not returned, we hurt. And when we fail to be consistent, we hurt from disappointment with ourselves. But that is the nature of love-that as human beings we do not have the capacity to do it perfectly, because we cannot be perfect in consistently seeking the others best interest over our own. But we can try – and in this world, that is the essence, and ultimately the objective of love. To TRY.

So, this is my point. To say that all loves aside from the love of God are not true love is to miss the point. All loves are either the love of God or they are not – that is the choice. Love that which is loved by God, and you love God. Love that which is not loved by God, and you are loving your own desires in contradiction to God’s. But, no good love is inferior to another. To love one’s wife is not in contradiction to loving God but rather to love God himself through your wife. To love one’s wife is not “another love” from God – it is the love of God, because it is consistent with God’s love for your wife and for each of us. Whomever God loves can be a means through which to love God, and since God loves all people, to love anyone is a choice to love God. Tariq speaks of a contradiction: “To love our mothers, our fathers, our husbands, our wives, our daughters, our sons and, our senses dulled by habit, learn nothing from our love for them except when accident or absence strike. To become indifferent in the face of familiar presences. Isn’t it a curious paradox? To be blinded by too much seeing. To lose meaning because we are overwhelmed, drowned, carried away by the endless repetition of daily life.” In essence he says that our loves, whether family or friends, can become habits that make us “indifferent” to love itself, until disaster strikes. But is this really so? I would suggest that the habit of loving is not “to be blinded by too much seeing” as Tariq says, but rather to set the choice of love as a habit, that is to choose the commitment to serve another’s needs and desires above one’s own as a choice of daily activities and life time decisions that become so entrenched that the become unavoidably normal. The habit of loving. This is not to be “blinded by too much seeing,” but simply to become accustomed to what one sees and build a life constantly and repetitively consistent with it. Like prayer, five times a day.

Imagine having a great work of art in your bedroom – truly beautiful. Everyday you enter your bedroom and see it. At first, when you first hang it on your wall, you enjoy its beauty with a sense of rapture. Eventually, you become used to its beauty, because its always there (which is what Tariq means by “blinded by seeing”), so that as time passes you may not even stop and experience its beauty with as much intensity as you did when you first got it. This is normal and this what Tariq is talking about, I believe. Then one day, the painting is stolen, and when you walk into the room, you feel the pain of its absence. Even as the years go by, you feel the pain. But, the love is not gone, because once the choice of love is truly made, it will not be undone. That is the consistency of which I am speaking. So now you look at the wall in the way you always did, and you still see the painting – in your mind’s eye, and you still love it, even though it is not there to be seen. That is the impact of making love a habit. I am not trying to debate with Tariq just to debaote, but I simply can’t agree that love is a mysterious thing – it is a habit that any human is created to be able to develop, and the only question is how this habit is developed and how we express this habit in our daily lives. To love one’s wife is expected. But to express that love to your life as a habit is essential for the health of that love. It may become “rote” and repetitive, but that does not mean it isn’t meaningful. On video I gave two pieces of advice to our friend Ihsan’s daughter when she married – wake up and give each other a kiss and hug every morning, and seek and give forgiveness each night. Make these habits. Though they may blind you to the rare moments when that hug is essential to give reassurance, or when the giving or seeking of forgiveness is critical to the very survival of your marriage, their habitual use will perhaps ensure your marriage survives when others might not. And that’s what I’m getting at. Love must be a habit, and that means that sometimes it may not feel as fresh as it could be if such behaviors were only done when your heart genuinely cries out for them out of true love, by making them habitual, perhaps the marriage survives when it might otherwise fall to pieces in the face of misunderstanding.

Our love of God, as a choice experienced in commitment, is the same. Do your sholat five times a day, even though it can become “rote”, even when so much seeing might make you blind. Keep doing it, because the blindness of “seeing to much” is not real. It is true that in making our love for Allah a habit, we risk not having the excitement of a relationship that is purely spontaneous, but on the other hand, our habit ensures that we don’t spontaneously lose our love for Allah completely. It keeps us in the game even if we don’t feel the excitement for periods of time. Yes, this love may have less passion than the love that Tariq is describing, filled with the excitements of mystical experience and the sorrows of sudden loss, but then, I believe when it comes to any relationship, and especially our love of God, it is better that way.

Perhaps Tariq wants love to remain a mysterious, surprising experience devoid of normalcy, but I think that love, normalized in our lives, is a good thing. And as such, the love of God need not be a mystical experience as Tariq seems to envision, but rather a normal thing, expressed not only in our daily prayers, but in the love we give out of habit to those around us, in giving to the poor – out of love, in fasting – out of love, and in pursuing our aim to do the hajj – again, out of love. Such habits are the substance of a less exciting love, true, but perhaps a more dependable, consistent love that says – “I am making a habit of seeking your interest above my own.”

Tariq writes, “The love that will come to you is not at all what you are seeking. It is an illusion, a prison. The love you seek, the love that you must learn, opens wide to you the door of freedom: alone, by twos, by thousands, it teaches you to say: “It is Him I love” and, in the depths of your heart, feel yourself loved,” as if to say, ‘all the loves in this world are not really love at all, but rather counterfeits to the true love.’ Tariq encourages other loves only because they push us to discover that they are not the real love we seek, and perhaps to push further to find God’s love – both to love God and realize we are loved by God. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but ultimately more a sentiment than a practical reality. I say, choose to make a habit of the actions of love, and you will find real love. And real love is true love. The love of mother, father, sister, brother, wife, children, friends and even strangers, is true love, because it is the love of God. And, such love does not limit direct love of God. Such loves are not prisons, but rather bridges. The love we seek is the love Allah invites us to in our daily lives, but as with all things from Allah, they are simply incomplete without God. When we love others, and then add to them God, then we love God in fullness. But, if we love God but ignore all those others, our love is incomplete.

Going back to the stolen painting: To fail to see the beauty of the the stolen painting in a photo of it that you might see is to miss the point that the painting was intended to be beautiful, not a possession. Love is not something to be possessed, but rather something to be enjoyed. If you love a painting of great beauty only if it is in your possession, then you have not really loved – you have only possessed it. To seek to love God and not all those that God loves is equally an act of possession rather than love. Thus, where Tariq seems to see in all our other loves things that can lead us towards true love yet also keep us from that true love, I see in all these other loves an aspect of the ultimate love, which is complete when all are a part of the whole. Thus, we love those around us, and we love God, and only in this way do we have hope of loving God fully. And when its tough to know how to love God, or to feel love for God because we live in a post-modern world where such love is tattooed into our brains as “superstition”, I say, love those around you as much as you can and choose to love God as much as possible, and allow those loves that are concrete and real to be bridges for your heart to love God more truly and more directly and more fully. You will know its love when it finally brings forth within you the consistent desire to choose God’s aspirations over your own.

By the Mercy and Rahmah of Allah Ta’ala and through His Love we are eternally attracted towards Allah, bringing us closer to Allah and closer to each other.