Love

Of all the forces that will have crossed your life, none will have been greater than this one. It is the one that drew you out of yourself, that kept you awake through whole nights, that made you forgive the unforgivable, that carried you through the worst without breaking. We become brave for someone. We rise in the morning for someone. And it is this same force, too — it must be said — that has broken you the most: for what has torn us apart most deeply, in leaving, has always been what we had loved the most. You know what I am speaking of. That lack from which we set out, in the beginning, perhaps already bore this name.

Our age has made this word small. It has turned it into a feeling one undergoes, an emotion one consumes, a thing that is sought, found and cast away. But for the sages of this path, love is not a mood of the human heart: it is the very engine of the world. That by which everything that exists was drawn out of nothingness, and that toward which all things, slowly, return. Before being your emotion, love is the secret movement that holds things together and calls them back to their source.

And here is the intuition that overturns everything. You believe you began to love. You set a date upon your loves, you keep their anniversary. But this path teaches the reverse: your thirst, your quest, this longing that never leaves you in peace — none of it is yours first. All of it is a response. You love only because you have, from time without beginning, already been loved. The love that bears you went before you by an eternity. Before the "they love Him" comes, and by far, the "He loves them."

The poets of Islam have searched for images to tell of such a love, and they have found only extreme ones. The moth that circles the flame, draws near it, scorches its wings, and at last throws itself wholly in — not out of madness, but because it has understood that the only way to know the light is to become it. Or Majnūn, "the madman of Laylā," who lost himself so utterly in the name of the beloved that he could no longer speak his own. Such a love does not wish to possess the other, nor to keep the other for itself. It wishes to be one with the other, even by being consumed — and to this it consents.

For at bottom love is the one force that crosses duality. All else separates, distinguishes, sets at a distance; love alone makes two into one, without abolishing anyone. The lover does not vanish into the beloved: there he becomes, at last, himself. So love is the bridge thrown across the whole abyss of the journey — it joins the lack from which you set out to that return toward which, without yet knowing it, you have never ceased to walk.