The First Letter
Figurative love and true love
In the Name of God, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate.
QUESTION:
Love for the opposite sex, called “figurative love” by Muslim saints and scholars, sometimes can become true or real love (love for the Creator). Can this happen with the love of the world?
ANSWER: The world has two faces; one mortal and transient, the other a mirror in which Divine Names are manifested and which is a field sown with seeds for the next life. If its lovers can turn away from its transient face to the other, such a love can change into love of God. But such lovers should not take their own particular, small, and perishable world for the whole vast outer world. If they forget themselves, become immersed in and fall in love with the external world, they, along with the misguided, will drown in the bog of nature worship—unless a hand miraculously comes to their aid.
Consider this analogy: Four of us are in a room with four walls, and each wall has a full-length mirror. This makes at least five rooms appear: one real and common to all of us, and “private” rooms reflected in each of our mirrors. Each of us can change our private room’s shape, appearance, and color by manipulating our own mirror. For example, we can make it green or red, by painting the mirror, or give it different shapes. But we cannot change the shared real room so easily. Although both private and common rooms appear to be almost identical, their disposition and manageability is quite different. You can destroy your reflected, private room with a finger, whereas you cannot even move a stone of the shared real one.
Likewise, the world is a decorated station in which each person’s life is a full-length mirror. In this station, each of us has a private world of which the pillar, center, or gate is our own life. Our private world can be compared to a page on which our deeds are recorded with the pen of our life. We love our private world, but inevitably realize that this world is built around our life and so, like our life, is transient, unstable, and perishable.
Given this, we should give our heart to the Divine Names’ manifestations and not to perishable things. Furthermore, we should know that our private world is assigned to us as a field in which to plant seeds to grow into our Paradise, and that we should love it for the sake of the fruits we will harvest in the other world. If we devote our love to the fruits of our deeds and the Divine manifestations, our love for the world will change into love for God. Otherwise, as stated in: Be not as those who forgot God, and so He caused them to forget themselves; they are the ungodly (59:19), we might drown in our private world by forgetting ourselves and our private world’s temporary nature, and so embrace our worldly life as if we and it would last forever.
Such a love for the world’s transient face causes endless pain and suffering, for it engenders a pathetic compassion and despairing tender-heartedness. Sensitive lovers feel pity for all beings and, accordingly, their feelings are wounded by the perishing of all beautiful, mortal creatures. As they can do nothing for them, they suffer great hopelessness.
On the other hand, those who find God discover a remedy for the ailments caused by such feelings of compassion and tender-heartedness. Perceiving that the souls of all living beings, for whose perishing they feel such pity, are mirrors in which a Permanent Being’s permanent Names are reflected constantly, their tender-heartedness changes into accepting joy and ease of mind. They understand that behind all the beautiful (but mortal and perishable) creatures is a pure grace and a sacred beauty manifested permanently through their delicate workmanship, ornamentation, and the wonder with which they are favored and illumined.
And so they understand how death and perishing are only processes of renewal to refresh and augment the beauty and pleasures and also to display the Divine artistry observed in the universe. Their pleasure in and appreciation of all Divine manifestations increases, as does their ardor.
The Everlasting: He is the Everlasting.
Said Nursi