LOVER AND BELOVED: Mystical Love in Sufism (excerpt) by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Sufism is a mystical path of love. The Sufi is a traveler on the path of love, a wayfarer journeying back to God through the mysteries of the heart. For the Sufi the relationship to God is that of lover and Beloved, and Sufis are also known as lovers of God. The journey to God takes place within the heart, and for centuries Sufis have been traveling deep within themselves, into the secret chamber of the heart where lover and Beloved share the ecstasy of union. Through this mystical journey the Sufi wayfarer comes to experience God as a deepening experience of divine love, a love that belongs to both the created and the uncreated worlds, form and formlessness.

To love God and to be loved by God, to experience the depth and intimacy of this relationship, is a secret long known to the Sufis. Within the heart we come closer and closer to our Beloved, so close that finally there is no separation as the lover merges into the Beloved, the lover becomes lost in love, “drowned in love’s ocean.” Step by step we walk along the path of love until finally we are taken by love into love; we are taken by God to God, and then there is no going back, only a deepening and deepening of this love affair of the soul. This is the ancient journey from separation to union, the journey from our own self back to a state of oneness with God…

…We all long to be loved, we all long to be nurtured, to be held, and we look for it in another; we seek a man or woman who can fulfill us. We follow it into the tangle of human relationships. But the mystic knows the deeper truth, that while an outer lover can appear to give us the love and support we crave, it will always be limited. And one day the mystic discovers that the source and answer to our primal need is not separate from us, but part of our own essential nature, our own true being. To quote Rumi:

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.[2]

Only within the heart can our deepest desires, our most passionate needs, be met, totally and completely. In moments of mystical intimacy with God we are given everything we could want, and more than we believe possible. God is closer to us than ourself to ourself, and we are loved with the completeness that belongs only to God…

SOURCE: https://goldensufi.org/lover-and-beloved-mystical-love-in-sufism/