Recycled by the beloved

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.