…Love is the secret of God’s holy Dispensation, the manifestation of the All-Merciful, the fountain of spiritual outpourings.
Love is heaven’s kindly light, the Holy Spirit’s eternal breath that vivifieth the human soul.
Love is the cause of God’s revelation unto man, the vital bond inherent, in accordance with the divine creation, in the realities of things.
Love is the one means that ensureth true felicity both in this world and the next.
Love is the light that guideth in darkness, the living link that uniteth God with man, that assureth the progress of every illumined soul.
Love is the most great law that ruleth this mighty and heavenly cycle, the unique power that bindeth together the diverse elements of this material world, the supreme magnetic force that directeth the movements of the spheres in the celestial realms.
Love revealeth with unfailing and limitless power the mysteries latent in the universe.
Love is the spirit of life unto the adorned body of mankind, the establisher of true civilization in this mortal world, and the shedder of imperishable glory upon every high-aiming race and nation.1
- Selections from the Writings of `Abdu’l-Bahá (Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1982), p. 27.
Clearly love here is much more than the Western romantic ideal. We are left with the suggestion that love, as magnetic force, is the ‘energy-glue’ that makes of all the universe’s parts a Whole? Love, as the old popular song says, literally as well as metaphorically, makes the world go round.
So love is not just that which binds all successful relationships or friendships or families together it is the force that binds the atoms of all forms, but it even goes beyond that, as Deepak Chopra suggests;
“The material world is full of familiar objects that we can see, feel, touch, taste and smell. As big objects become small, shrinking to the size of atoms, our senses fail us. Theoretically the shrinkage has to stop somewhere, because no atom is smaller than hydrogen, the first material particle to be born out of the Big Bang. But in fact an amazing transformation happens beyond the atom – everything solid disappears.
Atoms are composed of vibrating energy packets that have no solidity at all, no mass or size, nothing for the senses to see or touch. The Latin word for packet or package is quantum, the word chosen to describe one unit of energy inside the atom, and as it turned out, a new level of reality.”
~ Deepak Chopra, How to Know God, p. 29
Taking these two views together love is seen as the attraction between any two ‘bodies’. It is the Holy Spirit, the Word (logos) manifested in Creation – the universal ‘teaching-machine’ (or Divine extended metaphor) through which we spiritually move upwards and outwards.
