The Wild Reed: Jesus: Our Guide to Mystical Love in Action

This year for Holy Week I share three excerpts from an interview with scholar and teacher Andrew Harvey.

This interview, conducted by Michael Bertrand and first published online soon after the release of Harvey's 1999 book, Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ, focuses on Jesus as "guide to mystical love in action." It's an interview that can also be found in Harvey's 2012 anthology, Radical Passion: Sacred Love and Wisdom in Action (previously highlighed here).

The Wild Reed's 2017 Holy Week series also includes images that seek to depict Jesus as the embodiment of the Cosmic Christ, which, as Harvey reminds us, 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."

The authentic Christ is a mystical revolutionary – an emotional, social, and political revolutionary. The force of the Cosmic Christ is one which [equips] us on all of these levels to make us capable of not only being directed to the Divine but of acting with that divine connection in the inferno of reality. This whole vision of mystical action is very important at a moment when [humanity is] so much in danger.

Resurrecting the authentic Christ [is therefore] the most important work at the moment, because what is essential is that the heart of the West be transformed. Western civilization must go through a very radical and very complete transformation, because, after all, it's the West that has the overwhelming power at the moment. The fate of the world depends, in a way, upon that power.

I believed once that the Eastern religions by themselves had enough mystical power and great tradition of understanding to be able to transform the West. Now I believe that the Western transformation can come through not only making available the great mystical practices of the East, but also through a restoration of the authentic Christ to the heart of the West.

The Cosmic Christ is the universal force of divine love, the force of active love that streams from the godhead to the creation. It is also the force of divine love that is incarnate in the human being. It's a transcendent and immanent force that is at once one with the divine love that's sustaining the universe at every level and also incarnate in every one of us, whether we're Christian, Buddhist, or whatever we call ourselves, at the very core of our being.

– 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. 229-231

NEXT: Part 2

For more of Andrew Harvey's writing at The Wild Reed, see:
• 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

For The Wild Reed's 2016 Holy Week series (featuring excerpts from Richard Horsley's 1993 book Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, accompanied by images of Juan Pablo Di Pace as Jesus in the 2015 NBC mini-series A.D.: The Bible Continues), see:
• Jesus and Social Revolution (Part 1)
• Jesus and Social Revolution (Part 2)
• Jesus and Social Revolution (Part 3)