Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
God Bless the Japanese People
As you pray with compassion for the stricken people of Japan, hold in your heart these words of philosopher Kenneth G. Mills:
"No collapse of anything material touches the indestructibility of the Divine."
"No collapse of anything material touches the indestructibility of the Divine."
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Can You Be a Sacred Activist?
"If the fire of the mystic's passion for God could be married to the activist's passion to enact change, then a new kind of human being would be born."
So writes Andrew Harvey -- poet, translator, mystical scholar and spiritual teacher -- in his 2009 book, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism (Hay House). He calls such contemporary luminaries as the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. "sacred activists": people who unite the fire of social activism and that of spiritual passion into a "third fire" of "wisdom and love in action."
But he doesn't leave sacred activism in the hands of just a few outstanding beings. The title of his first chapter indicates this: "Ten Things You Can Do Right Now." In another chapter, he outlines five forms of service.
Throughout the book, Harvey describes his experiences on his own spiritual path, writing with great ardor and poetic beauty of his love of the Divine. He puts forth a number of spiritual practices for mind, body, and heart that he has adopted, and prescribes these exercises for all sacred activists to provide both steadiness and compassion in the face of the crisis the world is undergoing.
Harvey writes with excruciating vividness about the death the human race is experiencing -- a death signaled by such factors as environmental devastation, nuclear proliferation, and the population explosion. He speaks of the "cosmic heartbreak" engendered by the necessity of honestly confronting what appears as this death. Yet through this death, he believes, can come a birth, ". . .the Birth of a new Divine Humanity that is taking place as a passionate response to the Death that millions of us are now waking up to."
The rest of the book describes the tools that will enable sacred acitivists to work as midwives to this birth.
I found Harvey's final chapter, "The Law of Networks of Grace," to be particularly hopeful and exciting. He uses the metaphor (from Deepak Chopra) of a caterpillar's death in its cocoon that enables the butterly to come forth. The forming of the butterfly is made possible by clusters of what scientists call "imaginal cells" which emerge from the liquified remains of the caterpillar. Harvey likens these cells to small groups of 6 to 12 people, praying and meditating together and executing together various actions promoting social causes both local and global. These "cells" form the "networks of grace" that can lead to the birth of a new society and a new humankind.
As of the book's writing in 2009, Harvey was working with 40 others to formulate a global curriculum to be distributed throughout the world to guide people everywhere in becoming sacred activists.
Do you have the courage, the love, and the compassion to set about finding 6 people today in your own community to band together as a "cell" of such activists?
So writes Andrew Harvey -- poet, translator, mystical scholar and spiritual teacher -- in his 2009 book, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism (Hay House). He calls such contemporary luminaries as the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. "sacred activists": people who unite the fire of social activism and that of spiritual passion into a "third fire" of "wisdom and love in action."
But he doesn't leave sacred activism in the hands of just a few outstanding beings. The title of his first chapter indicates this: "Ten Things You Can Do Right Now." In another chapter, he outlines five forms of service.
Throughout the book, Harvey describes his experiences on his own spiritual path, writing with great ardor and poetic beauty of his love of the Divine. He puts forth a number of spiritual practices for mind, body, and heart that he has adopted, and prescribes these exercises for all sacred activists to provide both steadiness and compassion in the face of the crisis the world is undergoing.
Harvey writes with excruciating vividness about the death the human race is experiencing -- a death signaled by such factors as environmental devastation, nuclear proliferation, and the population explosion. He speaks of the "cosmic heartbreak" engendered by the necessity of honestly confronting what appears as this death. Yet through this death, he believes, can come a birth, ". . .the Birth of a new Divine Humanity that is taking place as a passionate response to the Death that millions of us are now waking up to."
The rest of the book describes the tools that will enable sacred acitivists to work as midwives to this birth.
I found Harvey's final chapter, "The Law of Networks of Grace," to be particularly hopeful and exciting. He uses the metaphor (from Deepak Chopra) of a caterpillar's death in its cocoon that enables the butterly to come forth. The forming of the butterfly is made possible by clusters of what scientists call "imaginal cells" which emerge from the liquified remains of the caterpillar. Harvey likens these cells to small groups of 6 to 12 people, praying and meditating together and executing together various actions promoting social causes both local and global. These "cells" form the "networks of grace" that can lead to the birth of a new society and a new humankind.
As of the book's writing in 2009, Harvey was working with 40 others to formulate a global curriculum to be distributed throughout the world to guide people everywhere in becoming sacred activists.
Do you have the courage, the love, and the compassion to set about finding 6 people today in your own community to band together as a "cell" of such activists?
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