Heartbeat

The gospel for busy people: Love God.

How? Keep the commandments.*

In a world that lives by quick concrete answers, I fear that religion too often gets reduced (semi-consciously, at best) to this simplistic formula: loving God equals following rules, mostly the “Do Nots.” When this reduction happens, the Devil must be gleeful because the spiritual heart turns to stone. The experience of the Divine then remains surface-level, too superficial to overcome the materialistic, “carnal,” self.

     Let’s not be fooled by another simplistic move that flips to “Anything Goes.” No, that’s not the answer either because sacred scriptures does emphasize keeping commandments “for your good”*; and still the call of Love demands so much more. Yes, giving and following orders often provides safety in situations where a wiser one commands the more naive to stay clear of potential dangers such as the street, drug use, and fake-news; but to stay in that controlled zone limits Love’s dimension. Mature love expands freedom, enters paradox, and manifests God-given individualities.

     So, how do we learn to love God in ways that include and extend beyond the follow-rules-religion? I think that an initial step involves recognizing when dogma has dried up. For example, persons who call themselves Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or …) when doing racist, sexist, and other self-centered acts might wake up. Fake religion is not the path to God.

     Keeping to the Path to God demands hard honesty. True love is truth-telling; it’s not Hollywood, not SuperBowl, not status, drugs or money. At the birth of our first child, I knew without doubt that a powerful gift entered my heart. Why would I expect less in my relationship with God? Cold ritual, going to church/temple/mosque does not make the Religion of Love.

     Our spiritual guides try to tell us this over and over. Antonio Machado capsulized Jesus’ teaching: “I love Jesus, who said to us: Heaven and earth will pass away. When heaven and earth have passed away, my word will remain. What was your word, Jesus? Love? Forgiveness? Affection? All your words were one word: Wakeup.” Perhaps to love God, then, is to wake up, to feel gratitude both for the contraction as well as the expansion (but that’s a topic for another time).

     If we wake up and realize that the Love for God is missing, we might notice the dirty house, the veils, the extent of hypocrisy, within and around. Hafiz “considered hypocrisy in the form of the ostentatious display of religious piety to be the worst moral evil” (Lewisohn, p. 174), “the supreme sin” (p. 175).*** Lewisohn also quotes Ansari who “characterizes hypocrisy as shirk or ‘polytheism’” (p. 175) and Khurramshahi who says that Hafiz extended hypocrisy to include “self righteousness, smugness, conceited self-satisfaction, putting on airs, ostentatious displays of ascetic piety, vaunting one’s learning, considering oneself to be holy and sacrosanct, bragging of and setting stock in one’s own acts of pious devotion, superciliousness, mendacity, imposture, deceit, duplicity in one’s relation to God and man, cruel lack of feeling, being without love and wisdom, and so on” (pp. 174-5). Waking up leads to light coming in, feeling the hard realization of distortions, and bowing.

     When something terrible has become commonplace, what is a sacred poet or prophet to do? With Hafiz, I’m reminded of Hosea and his marriage to Gomer, considered “an adulteress, a common harlot, or a temple prostitute.” Gale A. Yee says the text and interpretation possibly call “into question the authority of traditional interpretations, which are embedded in the sexism and misogyny of Western culture, and calls for new ways of thinking about the body, woman, and the sacred.” ****

     To love God cares about that.

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* Deut 10:12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good.” (New JPS version). See also, Jn 14:21 “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (English Standard Version)

Qur’an 3:31 “Say, ‘If you love God, follow me, and God will love you and forgive you your sins; for God is Forgiving, Merciful.’" (3:31) See The Study Quran, p. 140, for elaboration of this passage.

** Antonio Machado. Translated by Robert Bly, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, Wesleyan University Press, 1983, p.109.

*** Lewisohn, Leonard. Hafiz and the Religion of Love. 

**** Gale A. Yee. “Gomer: Bible.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gomer-bible