Thus, the first time he utters: “O Eternal One, You alone are Eternal!”, it severs his attachment to transitory beings; he leaves those objects of love before they leave him and he is thus cleared of his fault. It declares that love should be restricted to the Eternal Beloved, and  expresses this meaning: “You are the only being that endures! Everything other than You is transient. My heart cannot become attached to anything transient,  for it was created for  everlasting love, to  feel ardour lasting from pre- eternity to post-eternity. Since those  innumerable beloveds are transitory and they leave me and depart, declaring, ‘O Eternal One, You alone are Eternal!’ I shall leave them before they leave me. Only You are immortal,  and  I know and believe that beings can only be immortal by Your making them so. In which case, they should be loved with love of You. They are not otherwise worthy of the heart’s affection.”

When  in  this  state,  the  human  heart  gives  up  innumerable  objects  of  love;

beholding the stamp of transitoriness on their beauty, it severs its attachment to them. It  otherwise suffers wounds to the number of its beloveds. The second “O Eternal One, You alone are Eternal!” is both a salve and an antidote for those wounds. That is, “O Eternal One!  Since You are Eternal, that is sufficient, You take the place of everything. Since You exist, everything exists!”

Yes,  the  beauty,  bounty,  and  perfection  in  beings,  which  excite  love,  are generally signs of the Truly Enduring One’s beauty and bounty and perfections, and passing through many veils, are pale shadows of them; indeed, they are the shadows of the shadows of the manifestations of His most beautiful names.

SECOND POINT

Included in human nature is an intense love of immortality. Even, because of his power of imagination, man fancies a sort of immortality in everything he loves. He cries out from the depths of his being whenever he thinks of or sees their passing. All lamentations  at  separation   are  expressions  of  the  weeping  caused  by  love  of immortality. If there were no imagined immortality, there would be no love. It might even be said that the intense desire for immortality arising from that passionate love of immortality, and from the spontaneous general prayer for immortality, is a reason for the existence of the eternal realm and everlasting  Paradise. The Eternal One of Glory accepted man’s intense, unshakeable, innate desire and his powerful, effective, general prayer, for He created an eternal realm for him, a transient being.

First PagePrevious(31)Next PageLast