A Perpetual Fire Within

The Wild Reed’s 2025 Lenten series continues with a fifth excerpt from The Awakening of the Human Spirit by Inayat Khan. (For the first installment of this series and an explanation for why I chose this book, click here.)

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God is love. If God is love, love is most sacred, and to utter this word without meaning is a vain repetition. The lips of a person to whom it means something are closed; they can say little. For love is a revelation in itself: no study is necessary, no meditation is needed, no piety is required. If love is pure, if the spark of love has begun to glow, then spirituality is within. One must keep blowing the spark until it turns into a perpetual fire.

Where is that perpetual fire to be found? In one’s own heart. The spark that one finds glowing for a moment and that then becomes dim does not belong to heaven, for in heaven all things are lasting; it must belong to some other place.

Love has become a word from the dictionary, a word that is used a thousand times in the day, which means nothing. To the one who knows what it means, love means patience, love means endurance, love means tolerance, love means sacrifice, love means service. All things such as gentleness, humility, modesty, graciousness, kindness; all are the different manifestations of love. It is the same to say, “God is all and all is God,” as to say, “Love is all and all is love.” And it is to find it, to feel it, to experience its warmth, to see in the world the light of love, to keep its glow, and to hold love’s flame high as a sacred torch to guide one in one’s life’s journey to fulfill the purpose of life [which is our spiritual awakening].

– Inayat Khan
Excerpted from The Awakening of the Human Spirit
Omega Press, 1982
p. 80

NEXT:
One Wisdom


NOTE: Each post in this series is accompanied by Sufi music. Today it is an instrumental piece called “Sufi Spirit ✧ Duduk Meditation Music” from the YouTube channel Blueberry Meditation’s “Sufi Winds” series. I find this music perfect for times of meditation and prayer. Perhaps you will too.






See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

LOVE
• Douglas Richer: “God is Love and There Is That of God Within Everyone”
• Opening to Love
• With Love Inside
• Love’s the Only Dance
• Trusting the Flow
• Love Is My Guide
• Keeping the Spark Alive
• In the Garden of Spirituality – James B. Nelson
• Our Lives as LGBTQI People: “Garments Grown in Love”
• The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
• Jesus: Our Guide to Mystical Love in Action – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”

AWAKENING
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Don’t Go Back to Sleep
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Peng Roden Her
• Awakening
• An Extraordinary, Precious Opportunity
• The Task at Hand
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Shining On . . . Into the New Year

THE SUFI PATH
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• The Sufi Way
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• Bismillah
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything Is Possible

INAYAT KHAN
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness

THE DIVINE PRESENCE
• “Everything Is Saturated With the Sacred”
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source Is Within You
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
• Prayer of the Week – October 28, 2013
• Neil Douglas-Klotz: Quote of the Day – December 29, 2011
• Cultivating Stillness
• Thoughts on Transformation | II | III

THE LENTEN JOURNEY
• Blessing the Dust
• “This Beloved Quickened Dust”
• Ash Wednesday Reflections
• The Ashes of Our Martyrs
• Lent: A Season Set Apart
• A Lenten Resolution
• Lent: A Time to Fast and Feast
• “Here I Am!” – The Lenten Response
• Let Today Be the Day
• Pope Francis on Lenten Fasting
• “The Turn”: A Lenten Meditation by Lionel Basney
• Lent: A Summons to Live Anew
• Now Is the Acceptable Time
• Lent With Henri
• Waking Dagobert
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 1)
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016 (Part 2)
• Move Us, Loving God

Recommended Off-site Link:
Inayat Khan and Universal Sufism – Filip Holm (Let’s Talk Religion, December 8, 2024).

Image: Alison Goss.