While we have unlocked the potential of a single atom we have yet to unlock the full potential of wise, loving and compassionate action. The responsibility to do so does not belong to someone other than each of us. For it is we who posses capacities of loving and wisdom seldom fully realized or embodied in the world of time and space.
At the core of the spiritual heart lies two paradoxical instincts. One is the upward movement of transcendence and wakening up to reality, while the other is of the power and grace of redeeming love and the experience of unity as it expresses itself in the world of time and space. A full and inclusive spiritual life will take full account of both of these paradoxical spiritual instincts. For in the end we are called to wake up from the over identification with form, as well as to re-embrace and re-embody the grace of our true nature in and as the world of form.
Our world is full of challenges and tragedies, opportunities and unlimited potential. To meet these challenges, both personal and collective, we need to act not from fear, resentment and conflict, but from love and wisdom. We need to experience and embody the power and presence of redemptive love.
Redemptive love is an experience of love, given by grace, that at once redeems, meaning that it restores something or someone to their natural condition of wholeness. Redemptive love also seeks to be embodied in our humanity and challenges each of us to embody its grace in the very depths and actions of our humanity. Redemptive love is a love that is fully committed to being a wise and benevolent presence in the relative world for the benefit of all beings.
Whenever and wherever redemptive love is present and embodied in our lives there is the fire of grace alive and active, and life is experienced as containing great meaning and purpose. The circle of spiritual awakening is completed only by literally re-embodying the spirit of awakened wisdom and love in and as our human life. Thus the redemptive power of love can become embodied and in-formed, and pour itself out upon the world.
