Love, Lover, Beloved

 I have a friend who is Sufi.   She tells me that Sufi's frequently talk about God as Love, Lover and Beloved.   This is interesting to me.  Certainly Christianity talks about God as a force of Love, and certainly a sense of Beloved.  But the idea of God as Lover seemed new.

In my 20's I grappled with questions of "what Gender is God?" and tried on what was the experience of tuning into Goddess.  While this did seem to tap into slightly different aspects of the Divine, in the end I came down on the feeling that the Divine is genderless or as we would say now nonbinary.  During that time I was working out what to call God.  In a particular episode I heard the words of the Cris  Williamson song: Song of the Soul.   This is a song which had played in the background of my life without my putting particular attention on it.   So I would hear this part:

Love of my life
I am crying
I am not dying
I am dancing
Dancing along in the madness
There is no sadness
Only a song of the soul

And we'll sing this song
Why don't you sing along?

and in my minds eye I thought it was a song about a human lover:  "love of my life"   But suddenly one day as I listened more closely I caught the first line:

Open mine eyes
That I may see
Glimpses of truth
Thou hast for me
Open mine eyes
Illumine me
Spirit divine

and I could finally see that this was a song about Spirit Divine - but also about God as Lover, as Partner, and in a dramatic turn then all of the names I had played with as the right name for "God" played in my head to the beautiful melody of this song, Song of the Soul, profoundly making the point that all of them are names for God.

So as my Sufi friend tells me that they think of God as Lover, I realize this does open a new energy for me around the Holy One.  Many of the Christian descriptions of God are of a parental God or "Lord" a sort of powerful ruler.  While Jesus calls god Aba, there is not God as Mother (Only Mother Mary) and there is certainly not words or frames for god as partner, friend or lover.  This is a kind of intimacy that Christianity does not suggest.  It is however an exciting set of possibilities.  It suggests a more tender approach from God, and a much closer in relationship - not a God that is "in the Sky" or otherwise far away but one that is right there at ones side.  And put next to the word Beloved, it also suggests a sort of reciprocal loving and adoration.  I think I will be living into this idea for a while.