Regular reader Dave Schuler, who often follows our Sufi Wisdom series with its frequent emphasis on love of the divine, notes a Christian parallel:
Thank you so much for your Good News Saturdays posts. They are always a ray of sunshine. We Christians have our mystics, too. Here's a little snippet from "The Cloud of Unknowing", English, probably 15th centurry C.E. BUT now thou askest me and sayest, "How shall I think on Himself, and what is He?" and to this I cannot answer thee but thus: "I wot not." For thou hast brought me with thy question into that same darkness, and into that same cloud of unknowing, that I would thou wert in thyself.
For of all other creatures and their works, yea, and of the works of God's self, may a man through grace have fullhead of knowing, and well he can think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. And therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think. For why; He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never. And therefore, although it be good sometime to think of the kindness and the worthiness of God in special, and although it be a light and a part of contemplation: nevertheless yet in this work it shall be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And thou shalt step above it stalwartly, but Mistily, with a devout and a pleasing stirring of love, and try for to pierce that darkness above thee. And smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and go not thence for thing that befalleth.
stockholm syndrome?
Poor dad, within two years we've thoroughly corrupted the boy.
This reads much like Baha'u'llah (the Glory of God) Who teaches us that God is essentially unknowable, as the only way we could possibly know Him is through our own human knowing, hence in terms of being human.
So once every thousand years or so, a pure and stainless soul is singled out to make manifest the attributes of God, in a human body, subject to human limitations, and from Adam to Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and Baha'u'llah we can see a steadily progressive revelation of the Will of God.
We can see Christ in the Glory of God, in the Glory of the Father...
If we choose to look.