There is a trade-off that
each of us must face if we choose love as the organizing principle in our
lives. It is not possible to give everything for love, to burn in the fires of
intimacy, and escape utter, unbearable vulnerability. It is not possible to let
the unknown guide us into the uncertainty of the grace-caves of love, and not
live every moment until the day we die in an empty-luminous field of utter groundlessness.
If what we really want is love, we must be willing to feel everything – especially the tender sadness at the core of each and every human
heart. If there is one other person experiencing sadness on this planet, we,
too, will wade into the deep waters of broken-openness with them. We will stay
very, very close.
We will be called to
surrender the irresistible movement to exit immediate experience for some “better,”
more “spiritual,” “higher” state of consciousness, and be finished forever with
our spiritual fantasies of “awakening,” “enlightenment,” “pure consciousness,” “God-realization,”
and all the rest of it. None of this can survive an encounter with love, for
such a meeting involves a shattering, a loss of hope, and an abandonment of all
dreams and second-hand spiritual acquisitiveness; along with the simultaneous fulfillment
of the most essential longing that this raw human heart could ever, ever, ever know.
In this love, we are crucified, resurrected, and transfigured over and over and
over again, recycled by the Beloved and seeded as grace-fertilizer throughout
every star in every galaxy, no longer riveted to what new glorious spiritual experiences
can I get for me in this day, but how can my life and my love for others become
one continuous prayer of gratitude in motion. I’ll take this life, thank you; this
experience, this state of consciousness, without the demand for some other,
better, more “spiritual” or more “divine” one. For I know that everything I
could ever want is embedded by grace within it.
