"God, ever mighty and majestic is He, says" 'O child of Adam, it is your right from Me that I be a lover for you. So, by My right from you, be for Me a lover.'"
Muhammad, Hadith (Divine Sayings, p. 64)
Here is another selection from the collection of hadith qudsi that I've been reading the last few days. I chose this particular hadith because it plays upon the theme of the metaphor of God as a lover that is fairly common among the Sufis but that you don't normally see in the Quran or the regular ahadith. Considering that it was the scholar, and Sufi mystic, ibn-Arabi that initially compiled this collection I guess it makes perfect sense that these ahadith are featured so prominently. I would argue that the reason why the metaphor is so powerful is certainly not the sexual aspect, obviously, because that really plays no role in it. It's more than simply the love, because love takes many forms. I think the metaphor works because of the intimacy and the immediacy and the longing and the loneliness caused by separation that we associate with love. Shouldn't this be the nature of our relationship with God? Why, again, would we ever worship an angry, judgmental, hateful, rules-based god? And, for that matter, why would that particular version of a god ever create humans in the first place?
Muhammad, Hadith (Divine Sayings, p. 64)
Here is another selection from the collection of hadith qudsi that I've been reading the last few days. I chose this particular hadith because it plays upon the theme of the metaphor of God as a lover that is fairly common among the Sufis but that you don't normally see in the Quran or the regular ahadith. Considering that it was the scholar, and Sufi mystic, ibn-Arabi that initially compiled this collection I guess it makes perfect sense that these ahadith are featured so prominently. I would argue that the reason why the metaphor is so powerful is certainly not the sexual aspect, obviously, because that really plays no role in it. It's more than simply the love, because love takes many forms. I think the metaphor works because of the intimacy and the immediacy and the longing and the loneliness caused by separation that we associate with love. Shouldn't this be the nature of our relationship with God? Why, again, would we ever worship an angry, judgmental, hateful, rules-based god? And, for that matter, why would that particular version of a god ever create humans in the first place?
No comments:
Post a Comment