Sympathy is the root of religion, and so long as the spirit of sympathy is living in your heart, you have the light of religion.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Related Material by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compiled by Wahiduddin Richard Shelquist – wahiduddin.net
Those great souls who have brought the message of God to humanity from time to time, like Buddha, Krishna, Jesus Christ, Moses, Abraham or Zarathushtra, were well known as most learned men. But whatever they learned, they learned from the Love principle. What they knew was compassion, forgiveness, sympathy, tolerance, the attitude of appreciation, the opening of the heart to humanity.
( from the Sufi Message Series, Volume X – Sufi Mysticism: Sufi Poetry – Shamsuddin Muhammad Hafiz )
Sympathy is something more than love and affection, for it is the knowledge of a certain suffering which moves the living heart to sympathy. That person is living whose heart is living, and that heart is living which has wakened to sympathy. The heart void of sympathy is worse than a rock … The feeling of sympathy must be within, it need not manifest purely as sympathy but as an action to better the condition of the one with whom one has sympathy. There are many attributes found in the human heart which are called Divine, but among them there is no greater and better attribute than sympathy, by which one shows in human form God manifested.
In a popular English song there is a beautiful line, which says, ‘The light of a whole life dies when love is done.’ That living thing in the heart is Love. It may come forth as kindness, as friendship, as sympathy, as tolerance, as forgiveness, but in whatever form this living water rises from the heart, it proves the heart to be a divine spring. And when once this spring is open and is rising, then everything that a person does in action, in word, or in feeling is all religion; that one becomes truly religious.
A great poet has said in Hindi, ‘Sympathy is the root of religion, and so long as the spirit of sympathy is living in your heart, it is illuminated with the light of religion’. This means that religion and morals can be summed up in one thing and that is sympathy, which in the words of Christ, as interpreted in the Bible, is charity. All beautiful qualities as tolerance, forgiveness, gentleness, consideration, reverence and the desire to serve — all these come from sympathy. Another poet has said in Urdu that it was for sympathy that humanity was created, and the day when people discover this special attribute in themselves, they are shown their first lesson of how life should be lived.
Commentary by Murshid S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad)
Samuel L. Lewis
Religion is that which connects one with God. Therefore it is not mental, and not being mental there can be no theology or system of beliefs. When a mother suckles an infant there is no system of beliefs, there is not any intellectual enterprise. She loves it because she loves it, and this is very much simpler to explain than the love between God and the soul.
Now the feeling between mother and child, between God and soul which is called Love, or Agape by the Christians, Ishk by the Sufis and Muslims generally, Karuna by the Buddhists and has other names elsewhere, is the great driving power in the Universe. This sympathy is the same force which appears as cohesion, adhesion, and gravitation among the physical forces; this promotes all growth — physical, mental, or spiritual — and is the principle behind many faculties which appear in the world of creation.
As its essence is super-mental; it can be appreciated without being completely understood by mind. Nor is this necessary. Everyone can express sympathy or feel it from another; all that is therefore necessary is to perceive that that feeling and not any system of beliefs, is the fundamental root of real religion.