All that being said, the Big Love, the Only Being, and One Love are personal favorites, if I must try to use words for That For Which No Words Will Do, and I hasten to add that anyone who says you should worship my God rather than your silly God as you understand God is really saying that you should worship me. If God really were a great big control freak up in the sky, and then having somehow, in a momentary lapse of attention, endowed human beings with free will, She’d probably have to be sitting in church basements learning to say, “I didn’t cause it, I can’t cure it, and I can’t control it.”
Perhaps I was attracted to a Sufi path in part because the word “Allah,” which is simply Arabic for “the God,” as in the One and Only, was so much less freighted for me; there are some interesting meditations on the root of meanings of “Allah” (used in the Middle East in all three of the Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) in Physicians of the Heart, which point to a healthier sense of a loving presence beyond our comprehension. The introduction to Omid Safi’s book Radical Love is a lovely expansion on the One Love, however understood—and while we’re on the subject, his book Memories of Muhammad is a sweet antidote to Islamophobia.
Concepts of God may always change even as the reality beyond our comprehension remains eternal, and if you’ve been taught a concept of God that isn’t nice, my unsolicited advice would be to just ditch it, and get you a nicer one. Concepts of God are constantly changing as we grow, anyway, until we arrive at a state of freedom from all concepts and get to live in Reality. Why we would even bother to try to name or comprehend that which is beyond all names and comprehension is a reasonable question, of course, but clearly we can’t help ourselves—we’re just people here. And if my own understanding of a power beyond understanding that is greater than myself keeps shifting, why wouldn’t everyone else’s?
So bearing all that in mind, and emerging refreshed from the thickets of theology, instead of wrestling with the ever-changing concepts of either a power greater than ourselves or the spirit of forgiveness, we may be free simply to invoke the Spirit of Forgiveness, without any expectations as to how that will go, or what that even is. No one really knows what forgiveness is. “To feel is for real”—we just know it when we feel it.
Here’s an example of how spontaneous it can be. For most of my life, my relationship with my parents could most charitably be described as vexed. They were both hot-tempered, and either one of them would hit a kid in a minute. Hitting kids is not a good plan. What with one thing and another, I left shortly after turning eighteen and never went back, and I was very glad to learn that Hazrat Inayat Khan said, “A person who has anger and control is to be preferred to the person who has got neither,” because, like most people who got hit when they were small and defenseless, I have that anger part down. Getting it under something like control is the work of a lifetime.
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