Jesus: Our Guide to Mystical Love in Action

Part 3

The Wild Reed's 2017 Holy Week series concludes with a third excerpt from "Resurrecting the Authentic Christ: Jesus as Guide to Mystical Love in Action," an interview with scholar and teacher Andrew Harvey published in the 2012 collection of Harvey's works entitled Radical Passion: Sacred Love and Wisdom in Action. (To start at the beginning of this series, click here.)

This year's series also includes images that seek to depict Jesus as the embodiment of the Cosmic Christ, which, says Harvey, is an expression in the West for the universal force of divine love, "the force of active, divine love that streams from the godhead to the creation."

In Jesus's life, you see what it actually means not only to realize the divinity of the heart of one's humanity, but to live it out. Jesus was not content only to realize he was divine at the core of his being. Realizing it made him very conscious of how to act as a divine being in the world, which simply means to act on behalf of everyone who is brokenhearted and destroyed and at a loss and humiliated in the culture, to serve the afflicted and to serve them with tremendous courage at the core of life.

I think this is Jesus's challenge to all of us, whatever path we're on. Do we love enough? Are we prepared to have not merely spiritual experiences and mystical awakenings, but actually to take responsibility for them and to work with their insights in the real, to transform the real into a clearer and clearer image of that love and justice that we discover to be the truth of God and the truth of ourselves.

This is Jesus's call to the world. He's saying, first of all, open up to the Divine within you. Really open up. Plunge into the divine part,
into the core of your being, open up your sacred heart, see the world radiate the fire of the sacred heart, see every being as utterly and totally holy, know nature as holy, know each animal as holy.

Then he's saying you have to take that knowledge into action in the world. You can't simply revel in it and enjoy it. You are responsible for it. You have to enact it, first in your inmost life as a soul, and then in the life of the heart, then in the mind, and then in the life of action within the world, which is to be nothing less than a completely divine, completely human being, working with the Divine in the human to transfigure the human more and more into an image of the Divine.

That is the Christ challenge and the Christ path.

– Andrew Harvey
Excerpted from "Resurrecting the Authentic Christ:
Jesus as Guide to Mystical Love in Action"
in Radical Passion: Sacred Love & Wisdom in Action
pp. 235-236

For more of Andrew Harvey's writing at The Wild Reed, see:
• Jesus: Our Guide to Mystical Love in Action (Part 1)
• Jesus: Our Guide to Mystical Love in Action (Part 2)
• The Cosmic Christ: Brother, Lover, Friend, Divine and Tender Guide
• Jesus: Path-Blazer of Radical Transformation
• The Essential Christ
• Andrew Harvey on Radical, Divine Passion in Action
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Andrew Harvey
• Toby Johnson on the Mysticism of Andrew Harvey
• A Dance of Divine Light
• Reclaiming a Wise, Spacious, and Holy Understanding of Homosexuality

See also:
• Why Jesus Is My Man
• Called to the Field of Compassion
• Jesus: Mystic and Prophet
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• Keeping the Spark Alive

Images: Artist unknown.