Forbearance, patience and tolerance are the only conditions which keep two individual hearts united.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Love teaches lovers patience, forbearance, gentleness, because they think, ‘My beloved will be displeased; I will be as gentle as possible in my action and in my movements’. These thoughts are a correction to the lovers. With every such thought that passes in the life of the lovers they correct themselves. Hope is the only thing in life which keeps us alive, because it feeds on Love. Patience is fed by love. We can never have patience with anybody without love. How valuable is patience! As it is said in the Quran, ‘God loves the patient’.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume VII – In an Eastern Rose Garden: Love, Human and Divine )
Sacrifice is needed in Love to give all there is — wealth, possessions, body, heart, and soul. There remains no ‘I’, only ‘you’, until the ‘you’ becomes the ‘I’. Where there is Love there is patience, where there is no patience there is no Love.
The idea of sacrifice has always existed in some form or other, in every religion. Sometimes it has been taught as giving up one’s possessions for the love of a higher ideal, which means that when we claim to love our high ideal and yet are not willing to give up something we possess for it, then there is doubt about our devotion. But sacrifice of a possession is the first step; the next one is self-sacrifice, which was the inner note of the religion of Jesus Christ. Charity, generosity, even tolerance and forbearance, are a kind of sacrifice, and every sacrifice in Life, in whatever form, means a step towards the goal of every soul.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume IX – The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part IV: Abraham )
To be today friendly and tomorrow unfriendly cannot for one moment be called friendship; the value of friendship is in its constancy. Forbearance, patience, and tolerance are the only conditions which keep two individual hearts united. There is a saying in Hindustani, by Seman, on friendship, ‘Stand by your friend in their time of need, like the reed on the bank of the river.’ When people are sinking in the water and catch hold of a reed, it will save them if it is strong; and if not, it will sink along with them.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
These are the heart faculties, which flow out of the heart naturally and do not have to be cultivated. This is the difference between the moralist and the sage. The moralist tries to pour into the heart what the sage knows to be there already. It is heart, not head, which holds these qualities, and the awakening of heart brings them to view.
[ Moralists, in this context, are usually overly dogmatic and absolutist. They believe in the “universal truth” of what they feel needs to be “poured into” those they want to “better”, “reform”, “uplift” and “save”. Their dogmatism and unquestioned faith in the rightness of their own perspectives, the wrongness of the perspectives of others, and their consequent “authority” to force their beliefs onto others, often result in harsh threats and even penalties for those who choose not to cooperate with their “salvation” programs.
This reveals the fact that they’re operating primarily from their own limited egos, from below the mind-mesh. And they often confuse the map for the territory, believing that outer appearances and behaviors are what count. Despite their belief that they know the “Full Story”, in reality they’re grasping only a very small and very limited slice of the Larger Story. Their binary either/or, right/wrong, good/bad absolutism, combined with their mistaken belief that they understand the Full Story is a primary cause of religious and theological conflict and abuse.
The sages, having penetrated the barrier of the mind-mesh by surrendering the primacy and self-defeating “rightness” of their own ego-perspectives, are able to operate from the realm of Heart, which is non-judgmental, unifying, and inclusive. — Muiz ]