God is infinitely rich and loving

Once upon a time, we were all fish swimming in the ocean, unaware of the water and ourselves. The ocean wanted to be recognised, so it threw us up on dry land. We flip after this, we flop after that, pursuing an ever more elusive happiness. Is the ocean tormenting us? Well, yes. It put us here. But, the more we burn, the more intensely we will love the ocean’s beauty when it calls us back. While we recognise ourselves as the fish, the ocean is indeed the Divine.
The above story is from Jalāl ad-Dīn Muammad Rumi (1207-1273), the Persian poet and theologian, a cultural icon of the vast Persian empire. Today, everyone recognises that Rumi was a poet of love. When we situate him in his own historical context, however, we see that he spoke for the mainstream Islam and not an oddity. What made him stand out was that he got to the heart of the matter more quickly and much more enticingly than most authors. He makes his agenda explicit in the introduction to the 25,000-verse Mathnawi: He is explaining “the roots of the roots of the roots of the religion”, which is, the Islamic religion.
Although the Koran mentions love about 100 times, we can easily see that these instances provide the germs for an extensive literature on the intimate links between God and the human soul. A conversation with God that became prominent in Sufi teachings is noteworthy. David asked God why he created the universe. God replied, “I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be recognised, so I created the creatures that I might be recognised.”
As noted by William C Chittick, this saying puts centuries of reflection on love into a nutshell. It means that God in his absolute unity is infinitely rich, boundlessly overflowing, merciful, compassionate, loving. Moreover, “God is beautiful”, as the Prophet said, “and he loves beauty”. In his eternal selfhood, that beauty is precisely the hidden treasure, for there is no other beauty. His infinite love for beauty then gave rise to the universe, which is defined most briefly as “everything other than God”. He filled that universe with beauty so that others might share in the joy of love.
But mountains and oce­ans, lions and eagles, no matter how beautiful they may be, have little or no capacity to recognise beauty in others. What is needed is a boundless receptivity to the infinite beauty of the hidden treasure, and that is what God gave to human beings when he created them “in His form”. God loves human beings because of the fullness of the divine beauty that they display and their resultant ability to recognise God’s beauty. God then wants that they love him in return.
Thus the human role in the universe is to recognise God, to love him as he should be loved. The relevance of Rumi’s poetry becomes a little more obvious when we recall that in Islamic theology, God did not create the universe way back in the past, but he is always creating the universe, which is nothing but the ongoing, ever-changing sparkle of the hidden treasure. God’s love to be recognised is never absent from the world and our lives, and it constantly instills energy into all things. Rumi gave a great variety of names to the human participation in God’s love — hunger, thirst, need, desire, craving, passion, fire, burning. Love is that empty spot in our hearts that we can never fill, because it craves the infinite riches of the hidden treasure.

(The writer is professor of science and religion in Pune and author of Dialogue as Way of Life)