Sayings of Sidi Hamza on love and humility
A collection of sayings by Sidi Hamza, may God sanctify his secret, on divine love and humility.
- Love is the crown of works.
- I cling to love more than to anything else. Let us pray that God does not take it from us. The love between disciples, and between the fuqara’ and the master, is infinite; it grows without cease. One would wish never to part. This love is owed to the spiritual secret (sirr), and it exists because we are gathered for God alone. This love makes all cultural differences fall away. It is love that sets hearts to work, puts them in motion and makes them act. Love is the mount of spirits; it is through it that all things are known.
- When love dwells in the heart, nothing seems difficult any more, and one profits from everything that happens. This is because, thanks to love, the veil separating us from the Reality grows ever thinner; one then feels a deep joy at this proximity, and one is overwhelmed by a sense of beauty.
- It is love that causes the wound, the cry. Only he whose master is drunk cries out.
- Love all creatures, whatever their religion, their race or their opinions! Each is in the place where God has put him, and it is not for us to judge.
- When God loves His servant, He covers his qualities with His own Qualities. It is as though a king invited us to his house and we had no clothes clean and decent enough to make us worthy of his dwelling: the king then clothes us in his own garments and brings us into his house.
- When one lives a relation of brotherhood (I am not speaking here of brotherhood in the ordinary sense, but of that brotherhood invested with love), hearts beat in unison, spirits are in affinity: such a wine of love flows! That is the royalty of God!
- One cannot lay claim to divine love so long as attachments to the goods of this world still dwell in the heart. This is how the lover can be tested: true love goes hand in hand with true generosity. Sidi Boumedienne often told the following story: a man claimed to have the love of God and of His Prophet. God wished to test him and sent him an angel in human form, who said to him: ‘O you who claim the love of God and His Prophet, give me your djellaba!’ The man gave it to him. Then the angel said again: ‘Give me your robe!’ The man gave that too. He had nothing left but a pair of trousers, and the angel asked him to give them. The man went to a hidden spot, took off that garment and threw it over. He had nothing left at all. Then he heard a heavenly voice say to him: ‘If you claim to love God and His Prophet, your claim is true.’ He was thus approved in that state.
- At a certain degree, the need for God becomes like the need for help felt by a drowning person calling desperately for rescue. This need destroys every desire other than God.
- True knowledge is only obtained with humility. The way to reach it is like that of someone who wants to drink from a stream: he will have to stoop to drink. Water always lies in the lowest place; we must be like water.
- He who abases himself, God raises him up (hadith).
