The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the authoritative views of the Baha'i Faith.
Everyone who might have loved me seems to have been systematically removed from my life.
I lost my parents and siblings to estrangement caused by speaking out about my childhood abuse; my spouse to a divorce caused by my inability to deal with my issues and his at the same time; potential mates due to excess childhood baggage on both sides; and my son who got too busy with his life to include me in it.
With each loss, I’ve had nowhere to turn but to God’s love. It’s been the only constant, dependable, reliable, and free source of love in my life. (Of course, my cats come pretty close, but their love isn’t “free” in the sense that they’re expensive to maintain, and they die all too soon …)
RELATED: How to Process Grief and Pain
Through this process, I realized I had no idea what it means to love.
My parent’s love for me was violent and abusive; my husband’s love for me was conditional on my looking after him; potential spousal love for me was conditional on providing sex outside marriage; and my son’s love for me changed as he got older and didn’t need me any longer. My heart has been broken many times, so it became pretty closed off to both giving and receiving love.
After the last potential husband left, I described my heart to someone as surrounded by a brick wall. As soon as I said those words, I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life stuck there behind that wall, especially as a Baha’i, whose job is to love all the world and try to serve it. The Baha’i teachings say:
Our greatest efforts must be directed towards detachment from the things of the world; we must strive to become more spiritual, more luminous, to follow the counsel of the Divine Teaching, to serve the cause of unity and true equality, to be merciful, to reflect the love of the Highest on all men, so that the light of the Spirit shall be apparent in all our deeds, to the end that all humanity shall be united …
The wonderful part of this story is that all these losses helped me to achieve my life’s purpose, which is to know and love God — because I had to teach myself how to love from scratch.
Why Is God’s Love So Important?
In the record of his speeches in France, titled Paris Talks, Abdu’l-Baha, son of the founder of the Baha’i Faith, tells us a few important things — that with God’s love, we receive eternal life and become the living image of God:
Through this love [that flows from God to man] man is endowed with physical existence, until, through the breath of the Holy Spirit — this same love — he receives eternal life and becomes the image of the Living God.
Perhaps more importantly, Abdu’l-Baha explained that God’s love creates all the love in the world: “This love [that flows from God to man] is the origin of all the love in the world of creation.”
So if I wanted to learn to love others, I first had to learn to love God.
In Paris Talks, Abdu’l-Baha teaches us that love also gives healing to the sick, provides a balm to the wounded, and offers joy and consolation to the whole world. I was certainly in need of all of these:
There is nothing greater or more blessed than the Love of God! It gives healing to the sick, balm to the wounded, joy and consolation to the whole world, and through it alone can man attain Life Everlasting.
In case it’s hard, if not impossible, to get your head around God’s love for you, as it was for me, Baha’u’llah, the prophet and founder of the Baha’i Faith, declared how much we are loved when he wrote: “Thy name is often mentioned in the presence of this Wronged One and the glances of Our loving-kindness and compassion are directed towards thee.”
God knows us; He sees our efforts; and He loves us unconditionally, as Baha’u’llah revealed:
Rejoice thou with great joy that We have remembered thee both now and in the past. Indeed the sweet savours of this remembrance shall endure and shall not change throughout the eternity of the Names of God, the Lord of mankind. We have graciously accepted thy devotions, thy praise, thy teaching work and the services thou hast rendered for the sake of this mighty Announcement. We have also hearkened unto that which thy tongue hath uttered at the meetings and gatherings. Verily thy Lord heareth and observeth all things.
God has given us Baha’u’llah and Abdul-Baha, who love each one of us too, and continually pray for us. Abdu’l-Baha said:
At all times do I speak of you and call you to mind. I pray unto the Lord, and with tears I implore Him to rain down all these blessings upon you, and gladden your hearts, and make blissful your souls, and grant you exceeding joy and heavenly delights .…
Because I see evidence for Abdu’l-Baha’s love for me in these powerful quotations, I want to love him and turn to him as my hero, example, and role model.
RELATED: Why Am I in So Much Pain – and What Can I Do to Stop It?
How I Learned to Love
So, how did I learn how to love? It started with this beautiful passage from Baha’u’llah’s book The Hidden Words: “Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee.”
This seemed like excellent advice, not only in terms of my relationship to God, but to other people too. I started to experiment with it by saying and doing loving things for people and watching their hearts soften towards me.
Then I had to look at the link between love and faith, as I worked through these questions. Maybe you can relate to some of them:
- How do we know that God is even there so we can love Him if we are sick, alone, estranged from our family, bankrupt, homeless, and we’ve just been assaulted or raped, or abused? Faith.
- How can we possibly believe in a loving God if we haven’t ever felt loved by our families; if we’ve grown up neglected and abused and have no foundation or training from loving parents? Faith.
- What if all of these calamities happened after we recognized Baha’u’llah and did all the right things, and we’re still marginalized from the society around us? Faith.
- How do we have faith when there is no love? When we feel abandoned by God, or worse, maybe cursed or punished? But for what crime? Still, faith.
These are questions many of us have asked at one time or another. How do we start building faith from a place where we don’t feel loved?
There are no quick and easy answers to this question! I had to take myself back to the fundamental reasons I became a Baha’i — I believed that Baha’u’llah was who he claimed to be and that he had the blueprint for humanity to get itself out of the mess it’s in. Therefore, I could probably find the answers I needed in the Baha’i writings. Sure enough, I did — and I am very, very grateful!
Susan Gammage is a Baha'i-inspired author, educator and researcher with a passion for finding ways to help people apply Baha'i principles to everyday life situations so they can learn to "live the life". She has published over 900 articles and has ten books on Amazon...
READ MOREYou May Also Like
Comments
Thanks for sharing this poignant piece.