Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugene 2025

The Concept of Divine Love and Devotion in Various Religious Practices
World religions and religious studies

There’s a tiny, crooked temple at the end of a winding street in Varanasi, tucked between a cow-slicked alley and a chai stand that always smells like burnt ginger. I remember standing there one monsoon afternoon, soaked and itchy, watching a woman press her forehead to the stone floor, over and over, like it owed her an apology or a miracle—maybe both. No priest in sight, no chanting crowd. Just her and her god, and something ferocious between them that I couldn’t name.

Divine love. That’s what they call it.

But it doesn’t feel sweet, always. It doesn’t feel like the pastel fluff of Sunday School coloring books or the gentle glow of a nativity scene. It feels raw. It feels like yearning sharpened to a blade. It feels, if I’m honest, like being punched in the chest by something you begged to touch.

And that’s what I want to write about. The brutal, beautiful shape of divine love and devotion across the tangled branches of the world’s religious practices. Not to compare, not to synthesize, but to press my fingers into the pulse of it. This isn’t a survey. It’s a love letter to longing, stitched from theologies and prayers that smell like incense and ache.

The Ache Is the Point (or: Faith Is a Kind of Homesickness)

Let’s start here: divine love isn’t tidy.

In Christianity, divine love is agape—self-emptying, cruciform, bleeding on a tree for people who didn’t ask for it. In Hinduism, it’s bhakti—wild devotion, surrender so complete it makes you dance or dissolve. In Sufism (the mystical arm of Islam), it’s a firestorm: Rumi’s whirling ecstasies, the Beloved so blinding you forget your own name.

These aren’t just metaphors. They’re architectures of feeling. Whole systems built to hold the tremble between the finite and the infinite. And what’s wild is how often they come down to devotion—not just belief, not doctrine, but devotion. The shaking, stubborn kind. The kind that persists even when God goes silent.

Take the Psalms. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s not disbelief. That’s faith at a breaking point. It’s love that can’t let go even when it’s being ghosted by the divine.

Or the story of Mirabai, the Hindu poet-saint who refused a royal marriage because she was already “wedded” to Krishna. She wandered, barefoot and unbowed, writing poems that sound like heartbreak letters to a blue-skinned god. Love songs, sure—but desperate ones. Thirsty ones. “I have searched the world for your eyes,” she writes. “I have gone mad, crying your name.”

Devotion isn’t passive. It’s not a spiritual sigh. It’s an act of holy rebellion against despair. It’s—okay, wait—let me say it differently.

Devotion is the muscle memory of a soul that remembers what it was made for.

Dancing Toward God: Bhakti, Dervishes, and the Messy Joy of Worship

One summer in college, I went to a Krishna temple in Utah on a whim. (Long story involving a road trip, a heartbreak, and a Groupon. Don’t ask.) I expected solemnity. What I got was—honestly?—a party. Cymbals, drums, flowers, strangers pulling me into a circle and shouting the names of God like they were trying to wake him up from a nap.

At first, I laughed. Then I cried.

There’s something scandalous about that kind of joy. A devotion that refuses to be quiet, refuses to apologize for its excess. This is bhakti—not theoretical, but embodied. You love God with your voice, your sweat, your tears. You weep when he’s absent. You dance when he draws near. It’s loud. It’s chaotic. It’s deeply, shockingly intimate.

Sufi mystics do it too—those spinning dervishes you’ve probably seen in some flattened Instagram post. But the spinning isn’t aesthetic. It’s centrifugal longing. It’s a way of slipping the self. You turn and turn and turn, and if you do it long enough, maybe you forget your name, and maybe the Beloved speaks.

And there, again, is the contradiction: love that empties you out and fills you at once.

Divine love, in these practices, isn’t earned. It isn’t neat. It’s flirted with. Wooed. Chased. Like the goddess Radha searching the forest for Krishna. Like the Song of Songs whispering, “I sought him whom my soul loves.”

This isn’t faith and justice in the activist sense. This is faith as hunger. Faith as courtship. Faith as longing so loud it becomes music.

Devotion in the Shadows: Suffering, Silence, and the God Who Doesn’t Answer

Okay, but not all devotion dances.

Some of it keens. Some of it sits in ash and waits.

There’s a Jewish tradition where you leave a small stone on a grave when you visit. Not flowers—stones. Something that endures. It’s a gesture, yes, but also a kind of wordless prayer. A way of saying, “I came. I remember. I still believe in presence, even when it looks like absence.”

In Buddhist practice, devotion can look like stillness. Not an empty stillness, but a fierce one. You bow to the Buddha, not because he’s a god who saves you, but because he saw through illusion and didn’t look away. Love, in this context, isn’t sentimental. It’s clarity. It’s choosing to see the suffering of the world and stay awake inside it.

And then there's the Christian mystics—the ones they don’t teach you about in youth group. Simone Weil, emaciated with hunger for justice and meaning. John of the Cross, writing about the “dark night of the soul” like it was a lover’s absence. “Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning?”

This isn’t the kind of spirituality that sells well. You can’t merchandise it. It doesn’t look good on a T-shirt. But it’s real.

I’ve felt it myself—those moments where prayer feels like shouting into a canyon. No echo. Just wind. But even in that silence, I’ve caught myself whispering, “Are you there?” And maybe that’s the point.

Devotion keeps asking even when it knows the answer might not come.

Interlude: A Personal Heresy

Not to be dramatic, but I once fell in love with God and then broke up with him.

It was messy. There were long walks. Cigarettes. Angry underlining of Nietzsche. I said things like, “I just need space,” and “It’s not you, it’s my epistemological crisis.” (Yes, I was insufferable.)

But here’s the weird part: the love didn’t go away. Even in doubt. Even in rage. I still catch myself staring at the sky like it’s going to blink back. I still cry at hymns I don’t believe in. I still light candles in empty chapels like someone might notice.

Is that devotion?

Maybe.

Maybe divine love is less about certainty than capacity. The ability to yearn. To lean toward something. To let yourself be cracked open by beauty, by ritual, by the unbearable tenderness of being alive.

Devotion as Protest: Loving the Divine in a Broken World

Here’s where it gets sharp: sometimes, devotion is a kind of protest.

When enslaved Africans in the Americas sang spirituals, they weren’t just worshiping. They were reclaiming agency. Loving a God who loved them back when the world said they weren’t human. That’s not weakness. That’s resistance.

When Indigenous people pray in languages the church tried to kill, when queer Christians sing psalms in sanctuaries that once exiled them, when a trans woman lights a candle at a Marian shrine because Mary saw angels and believed anyway—that’s devotion. That’s defiant love. That’s the sacred weaponization of tenderness.

Modern spirituality often wants to skip this part. It wants love without the bruise. But in most world religions, divine love isn’t soft. It demands. It disrupts. It asks for your whole self—and then asks again.

Final Benediction (or: I Don’t Know, But I Still Light Candles)

I don’t have a neat conclusion. That feels like a betrayal.

But maybe this is enough:

There is a love that outlasts certainty. A love that survives silence. A love that shows up in temples and kitchens, in mosques and monasteries, in the cracked palms of grandmothers who say your name like a prayer.

It’s in the chanting monk. The weeping pilgrim. The boy in church who holds communion wine like it might burn his mouth but drinks anyway.

Divine love and devotion—across world religions, across centuries, across all our failing languages—isn’t always pretty. But it’s persistent. It bruises. It heals. It humbles.

And it remains.

Even when we don’t know why we keep singing. Even when the sky stays quiet.

Even when all we can say is:
I came.
I remember.
I still love you.