Sin, repentance and a need – Some wrods from Llewellyn Vaughan Lee taken from “The Bond with The Beloved”(1)

Someone once asked Râbi’a:

“I have committed many sins; if I turn in penitence towards God, will He turn in mercy towards me?”
“No,” she replied, “but if He shall turn towardsyou, you will turn towards Him.”

The spiritual quest is a response to a call: because He calls us to Him we turn away from the world to seek Him. Then begins the long and lonely journey home, the “flight of  the alone to the Alone.” His call catalyses a spiritual instinct that is within us. Every human being comes into this world with two primary instincts: the will to live and the will to worship. It is this latter instinct that is so dynamically awakened by the Beloved that we are no longer content to worship Him, but we need to unite with Him.

 The seventeenthcentury contemplative, Jeanne Guyon, describes this instinctual awakening:

As soon as God touches a seeker, He gives that  new believer an instinct to return to Him more perfectly and be united with Him. There is something within the believer that knows he has not been created for amusement or the trivals of the world but has an end which is centered in His Lord. Something within the believer endeavours to cause him to return to a place deep within, to a place of rest. It is an instinctive thing, this pull to return to God. Some receive it in a larger portion, according to God’s design, others to a smaller degree, by God’s design. But each believer has that loving impatience to return to his source of origin.  The Beloved has awakened his lover to the deepest need of the soul, to the hunger that is the driving force of the seeker.