For some reason, the expression unconditional love has always bothered me. I guess I feel it is bandied around a lot. I wonder now if unconditional is an incorrect terminology that doesn’t really reflect the true meaning.

At first glance, at least for me, unconditional seems to mean: Anything goes.

Several things made me start thinking about this.

One is about what God in Heavenletters™ refers to as the Great Ones. They were calm. They didn’t flip their lid. They came from love. They truly honored the God in everyone, yet they didn’t say that anything a person does is okay. They came to the world to teach us. If everything any one of us did was okay, what would have been the point of their coming to teach us anything?

Another interaction recently made me think. A dear subscriber wrote wondering how Heavenletters can be unconditional love and not welcome every single post on the forum. It became clear to me then that unconditional love doesn’t mean license. It doesn’t mean: Anything goes.

Where this really hit home is when I was at the Sufi House last week.  It seems that everyone gets hecklers every once in a while. This one night I brought a woman along with me that I knew casually and had always enjoyed. It turned out that I didn’t know her very well.

The woman I brought had an axe to grind. Her axe to grind was that all Muslims are fanatics and — in their hearts at least — terrorists. She made no sense. She became like a terrorist herself in her verbal attacks on the very man whose house she was in and whose food she had eaten. And I had brought her.

For an hour, the rest of us sat and cringed while she asked her terrible questions. They weren’t really questions. They were her foregone conclusions. When Effendi said anything  she didn’t want to hear — such as that she was prejudiced — she would say to the translator: “He doesn’t understand. Tell him he doesn’t understand.” You could have cut her arrogance with a knife.

Effendi who is such a gentleman answered her calmly and logically and very directly, but she could not hear. After an hour, Effendi said: “You have been taking up an hour of my time and the time of everyone else in this room. If you continue this, I will have to ask you to leave.”

The lady continued and Effendi asked her to leave.

I learned a lot that night. I observed how Effendi answered questions. He didn’t sweep anything under the rug.

I came to my own understanding of what a fanatic is.  A fanatic is someone who can’t stop.

I want to backtrack a little.  At one point during that hour, the lady cried telling about a time many years ago when she had met a top Nazi in New York. At that time, she had expressed her unconditional love and forgiven him publicly.

Effendi said: “If you forgive a man for his cruelty, then you are supporting his cruelty.”

When Effendi told the lady to leave,  she left.  She later emailed me, saying that she had done her best to enlighten Effendi and she hoped that he had learned something from her.

Right after she had left, Effendi turned to me and said, “Gloria, don’t feel bad. Your heart is so pure you didn’t know.” Now that is love.

And now I must become more discerning.

[Note: Dear Friends, this entry is not meant to invite any political or religious discussion. It is meant to invite discussion about love.]