Mirrors of the Divine
Love calls --
everywhere and always.
We're sky bound.
Are you coming?
--Rumi
The Holy One, our Beloved Friend, the "One Love Consciousness", is the Source from which we are "localized manifestations". The human person, as a mirror of the Holy One, is charged with the task of building the New Creation in justice and peace. This exalted identity and purpose contradicts the central characteristics of our current culture and economics of unlimited greed and consumption, and of a politics of power and domination. In every "ism" of the world, the human person is asked to submit, to serve, to make, to buy, or to profess an established creed. Yet, the Universal Wisdom Teachings say that if a thing does not serve to transfigure us into Love, it is of no use and should be discarded or dismantled...
The richness of the Universal Wisdom Teachings inform and inspire, while many of the dominant forms of religious expression are becoming increasingly narrow, defensive, manipulative, and irrelevant. From "excommunications" for ordaining women and advocating equality before the Holy One, to the endless cycles of oppression and terrorism, injustice, and reactionary violence between brother faiths in the Holy Land: it is abundantly clear that individual persons are not the only ones in need of liberation!
The gentle personalist believes that each and every one of us is a manifestation or "mirror" of the Holy One, our Beloved Friend. Certainly we all need to "polish" our mirrors that we might realize this truth and the beauty of who we are: and for this both grace and a purity of intention are necessary! Love is the Way to this essential realization. The gentle personalist believes that every social institution, whether political, economic, educational, religious, or cultural, exists to serve the full development and liberation of every human within the context of the common good...
The time is ripe for a groundswell of modern mystic-activists who will carry the rEvolution of transformation throughout the world! What could be greater than entering fully into the whirlwind history, and serving the marginalized (we need the daily personalization of practice) while also practicing our freedom and creativity in building new institutions that more clearly reflect the "beloved community"? (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
More and more people are experiencing a deep interior call to either join or form an intentional community for the precise purpose of facilitating both personal and global transformation. But where to look? A beginning is the Fellowship of Intentional Communities and the Catholic Worker Movement: both have long histories of both successes and failures! But the one place that the seeker of a life of mysticism and action must not overlook is within one's own heart: just how ready and willing are you to love in practice and not in dreams? Community is the place where every great possibility for transformation exists: but those possibilities live side-by-side with a willingness to work and struggle everyday to be the person one wants everyone else to be: and there has also got to be an understanding and acceptance of the "higher reality" of the One Love Consciousness who says to each of us "You are so very dear to me!" ... and to relish that Love... and to adore and surrender to that Love... and to rise each day in service to that Love in one's sisters and brothers, the suffering poor, and in this suffering, yet precious. blue Planet... Community will then be possible: for your mirror will be steadily polished... and you will be increasingly radiant... and isn't that what you really want, after all?