Five Ways to Love God

It is easy to say “love God.” Harder to notice that love comes in different forms, and each person loves in their own way. Bhakti noticed this earlier than most. It did not leave love for God nameless and generic – it discerned within it several clear relationships: bhavas, the moods of the heart. This knowledge came down to the tradition not as theory but as the living experience of the saints, each of whom loved in their own manner.

The Heart Finds Its Form

A bhava is the flavour, the colouring, the cast of your love. One person reaches for God as a servant reaches for a master, in reverence and readiness to serve. Another – as friend to friend, with plainness and trust, without fear. A third loves God the way a child loves its mother, clinging and afraid of nothing. A fourth – the way a parent loves a child, with tender care, longing to protect. And a fifth burns toward Him with the love of a lover, in which no distance remains and there is only the thirst for complete union.

These relationships were not invented for beauty’s sake. They were read out of the lives of the saints themselves. Ramakrishna pined for Mother Kali precisely as a child pines for its mother – he wept, he called, he could not bear to be without Her, until She revealed Herself to him alive. This was no metaphor but the exact cast of his heart. Mirabai loved Krishna as a beloved, and so her path ran through the pain of separation and the heat of union – through that very closeness in which two become one. Tukaram served the God Vitthala almost as a devoted servant who has nothing but his faithfulness. Neem Karoli Baba taught his followers to see in every person they met their own mother, and to treat them with the same reverence.

Notice that these bhavas are not better or worse than one another. Bhakti does not build a ladder with service at the bottom and union at the top. It says something else: every heart has its own door. For one, reverence comes more naturally; for another, the plainness of friendship; for another, the defencelessness of a child. Pretending to a bhava that is not yours is useless. Love works only when it is your own, not borrowed from a saint you admire.

Why Love Needs a Name

You might ask: if love is already there, why divide it? Because love that is named becomes sighted. When you recognise exactly how you love, you stop imitating another’s fire and begin to walk by your own. Sarada Devi, the quiet Holy Mother, loved everyone with a maternal heart – and this was not a posture of humility but her own recognised bhava, in which there was no room for rejecting anyone. Her path to God ran precisely through this: to love all as her own children.

There is in these relationships a subtle distinction easy to miss. A bhava is not a role you play before God, but the truth of who you already are to Him right now. You do not decide to love as a servant – you discover that your heart is already shaped that way. The task is not to choose a brighter mood but to find your own and not lie to yourself. This is why Bhakti so prizes sincerity and so distrusts showy fervour. Sainthood cannot be bought or acted out – it grows only from genuine feeling, said Tukaram, and a bhava here is precisely about what is genuine.

And yet all these relationships lead to one place. Servant, friend, child, parent, beloved – each walks their own road, but the road is one: toward the moment when the boundary between the one who loves and the Beloved dissolves. A bhava is needed while there are still two – it is the very form in which the two reach for each other. And at the end of the road the form is no longer needed: a love in which there is no longer “I” and “Thou” is no longer servant or child, but simply love without a second.

So Bhakti answers a simple and difficult question – how exactly am I to love God. Not “love in general,” but “love the way you love.” Find your own bhava, do not counterfeit another’s, and let it lead you – until one day the very distinction between the one who loves and the One who is loved becomes unnecessary.