Ideas Inspired by the Qur'an

Seeking Love

The capacity to seek GOD is latent in us all. (IIQ, page 467)

O you who have believed! Beware of GOD and seek a way to Him and strive upon His Path that you might be successful. (Q5:35)

The love that most of us experience in life is of the accepting kind. We come into a strange world where enormous beings are unaccountably already enamoured of us and try constantly to please us. Over time, a mysterious emotion stirs within our tiny, hungry hearts, and we begin to love them back. For the first and purest few years of our lives, we seek to know them and be like them. We grow out of that stage, of course, when we come up against what we think are their limits, and so learn (with a little luck and a morsel of gratitude) to accept them.

Then we go out into the world and seek people who will accept us and whom we can accept. This acceptance also has its limits. Friends, partners, lovers, spouses, celebrities, idols … we quickly learn their limits, just as they see ours. Over time, we settle into a comfortable state of mutual acceptance, and call this love, friendship, loyalty, corporate culture, fandom, groupthink, whatever … It seems the world was made for that.

Not so. Yes, you have loved — within limits — and accepted the other — with conditions — and your ego remains intact. You may have loved and lost, which is quite normal, but the very expression implies that most love is meant to be gainful.

But what about the love that GOD is asking you to undertake — a seeking love? Suppose you have accepted GOD’s Love and, haltingly, grudgingly, decided to love Him back (or so you claim). That stage of acceptance is the way of your world, and a good first step. But you went way past that point a long time ago, in your innocent, infant years. Can you remember that early skill of yours and turn it on again?

Can you be so much in love with GOD that you no longer care what you are getting from Him? Can you be so careful with GOD’s Love that it becomes your most precious possession? And can you do that intelligently — learning, self-correcting, aiming ever higher without weakening your reason or straining your sanity, according to the prayer: My Master, make me more in knowledge! (Q20:114)?

Yes, you can.