Love for God

A concept that arises quite frequently in the Baha'i Faith is the love for God. We, mankind, have been called upon to obey the laws of God for the love of Him, to serve humanity for the sake of God's good pleasure, to pray out of our longing to be in the presence of God. As we have matured in our spiritual capacity and our understanding is greater we are no longer expected to do these things out of fear of punishment or out of a desire for reward but purely for the sake of love. This love is born of a conscious knowledge of the religion of God rather than mere acceptance for the sake of acceptance or acceptance out of fear or tradition or habit. We are called on by God to investigate His Revelation through the Divine Teachers or Manifestations that He sends and once we have accepted these Teachers to obey and follow their commandments for our love for Them and for our love for God.

This love for God has been a term that I grew up with and when something is part of your vocabulary from the time your vocabulary was created you can sometimes, and this is what happened in my case, fail to understand or grasp what the meaning and implications of that term actually are. The love for God. Through my reading of the Holy Writings, through my acts of service and through my attempts to deepen my knowledge of our spiritual journey and the implications of this life on our souls I began to notice that I was having a hard time putting into practice this concept of love for God. Suddenly, as if reading it for the first time, my mind was deviling into what this love actually is and was I able to feel it? Did I do things out of love for God? What does love for God look like? How exactly do I show it?

I started to wonder why it was only now that I was struggling to grasp this concept, why now was I so unsure about how to love God? Then it dawned on me.. the more I learned about God the more I realised I knew nothing about Him.

It is easier to feel like you know God when you say that God is like the sun or that God is this great being because you are giving physical attributes to God which our finite minds can comprehend. A God that looks like the sun, I can relate to. I can picture in my mind a God that is a great being or a man or one of the other images that we have created for God so that we can fathom who and what He is but the more I learned about God the more I realised I knew nothing about Him and so it became harder for me to find a way to connect with this force or spirit or essence that our human words have no power to describe and even the 3 letters we attribute as His name are nothing compared to what God is. We limit God because we are limited and I felt lost in trying to find a channel to God.

How do you love God when you don't know what God is? Although it was never that difficult for me to feel His love I was stuck on how to reciprocate that love back to God.

It was hard for me to fear God, when you feel unable to channel that love for God then it hinders you in feeling that fear of God. The fear of disappointing Him and of not being able to receive His love. These are concepts that I can't fully understand because I don't know how to show them or feel them for an essence that I can in no way comprehend or conceive.

As my time in South Africa has progressed I began to notice that I did have a channel to send and receive that love from and it was as a result of being so distant and far from that channel that I was able to realise its existence and that channel was through my mother and my little brother. These are the channels that I feel like I can reach God through because of the love that exists between these 2 people and myself.

I feel the the love of God through my mother as she has given so much for me, as she does everything in my best interests even when it doesn't seem that way. She gave me life and she will always be a source of unconditional love for me. This is how I can feel love of God and for God; through my relationship with my mother. Through this I can feel the fear of God as I fear disappointing my mother. She knows my capacity and my potentials better than anyone, she watched them develop throughout my whole life and for her to ever have to see those capacities and potentials go to waste because of my actions would shatter me.

The greatest expression of love that I have ever known is the love I have for my little brother and with this love comes a responsibility to him that I will be the best that I can be for his sake. I never want to let my brother down and I strive to be a better person because I love him so much and I want him to see me as a positive force in his life.

This is how I feel the love for God and the fear of God. This is how I can make sense of these immense concepts and create a pathway to God. They are my channels. Now I find it easy to pray out of love, to serve out of love, to obey the laws out of love. It is as if my mother and brother are mirrors which reflect my love for God to Him. Whatever love I feel for God I send to them and they reflect it to Him.

I know that I have my own personal relationship with God and I communicate directly with Him all the time, this is different from the expression of love that I feel for God which is where I find the difficulty. Now whenever I am in moments of deep thought or reflection, whenever I take time to meditate on my life and my actions I think of my mum and my baby brother and think of what I would become if I lost their love or if I disappointed them and then I know what I have to do with my life and how I have to improve because I know that I would become like utter nothingness, that my existence would be meaningless and my soul would shrivel up if I lost their love and that's how I know what I have to do for God because I know that losing God's love would feel so much worse and I wouldn't be able to survive.

This is how I know God. This is how I can love Him.