Hazrat Inayat Khan now considers our love for God. The previous post in the series is here.

When love is for the human being it is primitive and incomplete, and yet it is needed to begin with. He can never say, ‘I love God,’ who has no love for his fellow man. But when love attains its culmination in God, it reaches its perfection.

Love creates love in man and even more with God. It is the nature of love. If you love God, God sends His love evermore upon you. If you seek Him by night, He will follow you by day. Wherever you are, in your affairs, in your business transactions, the help, the protection and the presence of the Divine will follow you.

The expression of love lies in silent admiration, contemplation, service, attention to please the beloved, and precaution to avoid the beloved’s displeasure. These expressions of love on the part of the lover win the favor of the beloved, whose vanity otherwise cannot easily be satisfied. And the favor of the beloved is the only aim of the lover, nor is any cost too great a price for it.

The nature of beauty is that it is unconscious of the value of its being. It is the idealization of the lover which makes beauty precious, and it is the attention of the lover which produces indifference in the beautiful, a realization of being superior, and the idea, ‘I am even more wonderful than I am thought to be.’ When the vanity of an earthly beauty is thus satisfied by admiration, how much more should the vanity of the beauty of the heavens be satisfied by His glorification, who is the real beauty and alone deserves all praise. It is the absence of realization on man’s part that makes him forget His beauty in all and recognize each beauty separately, liking one and disliking another. To the sight of the seer, from the least fraction of beauty to the absolute beauty of nature, all becomes as one single immanence of the divine Beloved.

It is told that God said to the Prophet, ‘O Muhammad, if We had not created thee We would not have created the whole universe.’ What, in reality, does it mean? It means that the heavenly beauty, the beauty of the whole Being, loved, recognized and glorified by the divine lover, moved to a perfect satisfaction, says from within, ‘Well done, thou hast loved Me completely. If it were not for thee, O admirer of my whole Being, I would not have made this universe, where my creatures love and admire one part of my Being on the surface, and my whole beauty is veiled from their sight.’ In other words, the divine Beloved says, ‘I have no admirer, though I am standing adorned. Some admire my bracelets, others admire my earrings, some admire my necklace, some admire my anklets, but I would give my hand to him and consider that for him I have adorned myself, who would understand and glorify my Being to the fullest extent, wherein lies my satisfaction.’

To be continued…