It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects. Remember one can only know what one is capable of loving. There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God.
Why is it so difficult for us to love our neighbors? It is our own imperfection, distortion, self entanglement. Permanently we tend to take our view of the world as the only possible and meaningful and so any other idea about the world irritates and agitates us. Immediately we feel threatened and react with rejection and anger. Then we draw ourselves back and cut our channels of loving energy.
We spend a lot of time on the surface and stay hooked there. Many of our daily procedures run superficially: Shopping, taking part in traffic, meeting people, greeting colleagues etc. On the surface, everyone is different, and easily we notice something disturbing or distorted. In addition to that, we are often under time pressure, tensed and stressed. By this, our empathic potential is suspended to a big degree, and the other person easily becomes an enemy who is just blocking my way and hinders my moving on.
How about friends and lovers? With them, it is easier to reach more depth. But there are also many pitfalls which send us back to the surface again as soon as we encounter them. We are often more sensitive and easier to irritate and to hurt as with strangers. We think that there is more at stake and so we cannot let the other get away with that. We become experts in pressing the sensitive buttons in the other person and are heavily affected when the same happens to us.
When we see ourselves as seekers, as pilgrims on the way then we should not miss any opportunity offered to us when we realize that we reject someone else. Then we can ask ourselves the question what it has to do with ourselves, which part in ourselves we reject in the other person. As soon as we start to accept this shadow part in ourselves, it will stop to irritate us on the outside and we can open up ourselves even deeper towards the other person. What we have got to know and learned to love about ourselves will help us to get to know and love the other person more.
This is the exercise: To meet people in depth who cross our way in daily life. This is meant by loving God’s creation and thus loving God. It does not mean to hug everyone in blind trust and superficial attraction but to meet them with respect and appreciation whether with words, gestures, looks or simply with the inner attitude. When doing this, we realize that the other people are not imperfect in reality but that it is just our perception which is obscured. Our projections and preoccupation prevent us from seeing the obvious truth. When we can free us of them, we gain a lot: Just wonderful friends around us.
The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com
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