What happens when we cast our spiritual net wide and drop our bucket deep into the well of perennial wisdom? Where are the treasures in each of the world’s great religions? The pearls of mystical experience, social justice, reverence for the earth? And which are the divisive messages that must be left behind? How do we respond to the yearning of our souls to uncover life-giving truths and activate on behalf of all beings?

Perhaps you, like I, have been drawn to pretty much every spiritual tradition you encounter, and have fallen in love with them all. Those of us who walk an inter-spiritual path are sometimes challenged by the ones I refer to as “the keepers of the jewels” – those souls deeply committed to a single spiritual tradition who serve us all by safeguarding the depths of their tradition so that it will not become dissipated in our postmodern consumerist society – about being “spiritual dilettantes.” How, they wonder, can you find authentic nourishment if you are simply grazing the vast field of the religious landscape?

It took me years to recognize that this question is not fair. Having an interspiritual heart does not make us shallow. In fact, opening ourselves to the wisdom and power of many faiths can result in profound spiritual experiences within each one. We are like bees in the garden of the world’s religions, gathering nectar and bringing it back to the Queen where it is transformed into honey to nourish ourselves and feed the hungry world. We avoid the toxic substances, not because we are dabbling and unfit to grapple with difficult scriptures or manage believers who don’t believe as we do, but because bees know better than to drink the poison.

Cultivating discernment is essential to navigating an inter-spiritual path. Like Jacob, who wrestled all night with an angel of God, we are worthy of meeting the Mystery face-to-face. In fact, it is our birthright. We are endowed, I believe, with a faculty of discrimination that enables us to recognize the teachings of love and say yes to them. We know how to vanquish the easy answers that tempt us to otherize. I believe in us. In our ability to “go deep” in more than one spiritual space. This is not a path for the wishy-washy. It requires both courage and vulnerability. A willingness to abide in radical unknowing. To drop the impulse to figure out Ultimate Reality with our discursive minds and allow the truth of love to guide our hearts. Do not be deluded: grappling with the Holy One is likely to wound us. Jacob’s hip was dislocated in his divine wrestling match, and for the rest of his life he walked with a limp. Our scars are reminders of the living encounter with the mystery of love.

The single most effective way I have found to skilfully travel on the interspiritual quest is contemplative practice. A daily discipline of silent sitting helps us to make friends with our “monkey minds” and learn not to believe everything we think. When we show up for what is, with curiosity and tenderness, we begin to recognize our essential interconnectedness with all life – not as an intellectual concept but as a full-bodied reality. In letting ourselves down into the stillness, we become available for a direct encounter with the sacred presence and are able to carry that intimacy back out into the world. Having rested in being, we are more able to engage in doing, free from the need to defend our position and make others wrong. Otherness itself loses its fixed shape. The locks that keep us away from each other slide off the gates and they swing open.

Whether you are rooted in a single faith tradition, embrace a variety of spiritual paths, or consider yourself to be “spiritually independent” or “spiritual but not religious,” I bow to your mystical heart that affirms the beauty in all wisdom ways and seeks the medicine in all sacred spaces that can help heal and transform this broken world.

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Artwork for today’s post is by Fagon, an illustrator , fashion ethics & inclusion thought leader and garment maker. She writes a monthly Substack in which she breaks down Big Fashion/Slow Fashion chat from the lens of a womenswear & textile designer.

I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

An Interspiritual Invocation

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She is sixteen, and writhing on her pallet on the floor in the Sonoran desert of Mexico. Her Yaqui madre, only fourteen years older than the dying child, dips a bandana into a clay vessel, squeezes, presses it to her daughter’s temples. The girl alternately laughs, sobs, and then grows silent in the face of whatever wonder she is beholding behind her closed eyes. La madre goes back to her chores: feeding some chickens, slaughtering others, transplanting beans and grinding corn. She accepts that she may return at dusk to a lifeless body.

Teresita’s father, a fair-skinned ranchero, scarcely acknowledges her existence and takes no interest in her impending demise.

“Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe came to me,” Teresita reports when she miraculously recovers from her Near Death Experience. “She taught me to heal the sick, comfort the poor, speak for the voiceless.”

Someone mentions this to someone else, and soon droves of indigenous people – Yaqui, Mayo, Tarahumara – gather at the door of Teresita’s mother’s house, pleading for a miracle. Teresita lays her hand on their burning faces, their distended bellies, their shattered limbs. She listens to their litany of sorrows as if there were nowhere else she would rather be than here: bearing witness to their lives. She rides her horse into the village plazas and speaks to the growing crowds, decrying inequality, calling for justice, reminding them that the most important thing is to love each other.

They call her “La Santa de Cabora.” And then they start a revolution in her name. Many villagers die. La Santa is heartbroken. The Mexican government exiles her to Arizona, and sends her hapless father with her. She continues to heal the sick and uplift the poor, and then finds herself protecting the rights of Mexican farmworkers in Los Angeles.

She marries two madmen, for one day each, and then bears two daughters with her translator lover. At the age of thirty-three, La Santa surrenders to the ravages of tuberculosis and releases herself into the arms of La Virgen de Guadalupe, reconciler of oppressor and oppressed, Mother of All, she who transmutes the poison of despair in every heart and distills its essence into hope.

(For a wondrous fictional version, I highly recommend The Hummingbird’s Daughter, written by la santa’s great-nephew, Luis Alberto Urrea.)

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

pre-order here

Mira has offered herself to her Lord.
The single lotus will swallow you whole.
	- From “Mira the Bee”

For decades I was conditioned to believe that to engage a mature spiritual life I needed to “pick one tradition and go deep,” which implied that my attraction to the teachings and practices at the heart of all religions was superficial and indolent. Also, that the path of non-dualism—with its affirmation of undifferentiated consciousness—was superior to my devotional disposition. Also, that my experience of longing for God was an illusion—some kind of unconscious blend of unresolved childhood abandonment and magical thinking. In other words, the energy that fueled my journey was predicated on a perfect storm of delusional inclinations.

It was only when the fire of loss swept into my life and burned the scaffolding to the ground that all conceptual constructs came tumbling down and these insidious messages revealed themselves as 1) unkind, and 2) untrue. From the ashes of grief a transfigured, more authentic self began to rise, and she felt no obligation to choose sides. She was a Jew and a Sufi, a believer and an agnostic. She practiced Vipassana and Centering Prayer, observed Shabbat and received communion. She rested in blessed moments of unitive consciousness and sang the praises of Lord Krishna.

I am not alone. A tribe of people is coalescing around the world to celebrate a reorientation from religious separation to interspiritual connection. While many of us have been pilgrims on this path for decades—sometimes feeling alone in the wilderness, sometimes gathering with other seekers who are similarly drawn to worshipping the sacred in every single holy house we encounter--now, at last, our numbers seem to be reaching a tipping point and what was a fringe phenomenon is becoming a global movement.

The interspiritual path is characterized as much by what it is not as what it is. It is not a new religion; in fact many of its most enthusiastic adherents consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.” It has no creed or dogma, no tenets or prohibitions. No special attire sets it apart and no single symbol represents its core philosophy. Its membership is as diverse as the full spectrum of humanity. It is not about belief, but action. And the only action required is love.

The mystics of every tradition—and those whose hearts thrum with yearning for God but do not have any religious affiliation--embody this Way of Love. The language the mystics speak is the Language of Love. Drenched in love-longing, the mystic dissolves into the ocean of the One. Mystical poetry transcends theological distinctions and neutralizes ideological ultimatums. These love poems to God do not describe Ultimate Reality: they evoke it. The poems of the mystics slip past the thought-guardians and batter down the gates of the heart. In crying out to the Holy One, the ecstatic poets offer us a direct connection with the object of their souls’ deepest desire, and ours. Mystical poetry generates a sacred field, and invites us to step in.

See if these snippets knock on your heart-door:

This longing is dear to me.
This longing makes every place sacred.
This longing,
Too large for heaven and earth,
Fits inside my heart,
Smaller than the eye of a needle.
(Rumi)

When he spoke my soul vanished.
I look for him and can’t find him.
I call, he doesn’t answer…
I beg you, daughters of Jerusalem,
If you find my love
You will say that I am sick with love.
(Song of Songs)

All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered “yes.”
(Zi Ye)

Oh, living flame of love,
how tenderly you penetrate
the deepest core of my being!
Finish what you began.
Tear the veil from this sweet encounter.
(John of the Cross)

Listen, my friend,
This road is the heart opening,
Kissing his feet,
Resistance broken, tears all night.
(Mirabai)

… and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you have not experienced this:
To die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
(Goethe)

The highest calling of the mystic is not to become enlightened, but rather to become nothing, to utterly disappear into the One. What madness! And yet the mystical path is all about paradox. When lover merges with Beloved, all separation melts and only love remains; there is no one left to long nor any object of longing, and this, to the mystic, is good news. Mystics claim their experience of union is ineffable, and yet they cannot resist expressing their encounter in lush poetic language. Mysticism is characterized by annihilation: the soul is the moth inexorably drawn to the flame. In burning to death, lover is transformed in Beloved, individual self yields to its oneness with the Divine, the dream of exile ends and the spirit comes home to its source.

It is here, in the center of the perennial paradox, that it becomes obvious all spiritual paths emanate from and return to the same universal heart. This is where the only possible response to the quiet blessing of union with the One is the passionate outpouring of love-language. Here, longing for God is not a malady to be cured or a broken thing that needs repairing, but a shattering of the cup of the heart so that, within the vast spaciousness that opens, the Mystery may come pouring in and lift us into the arms of Love itself.

This essay first appeared in ONEING, a journal of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

pre-order here

The bubble of illusion is dissolving. We no longer elevate certain beings as enlightened (unlike ourselves), uniquely qualified to dispense their perfect wisdom from on high, and dismiss others as mere ordinary humans (like us), still struggling with the obstacles of this bumpy world, incapable of lighting our way home. We are beginning to recognize that everyone carries the divine spark, and so our everyday relationships become a crucible for transformation.

My friendships with other women have been a special source of soul nourishment for me along the path. I’d like to share a bit about one soul-sister who has walked by my side through a zillion changes, catastrophes and miracles in both of our lives: Jenny Bird.

Jenny Bird and I were young mothers together. Jenny had been a child prodigy singer-songwriter, much loved in our community for her ongoing musical offerings and service to those in need. I had admired Jenny from afar for years before one day walking into the rock shop where she was selling crystals. I had recently adopted my first child and was preparing a ceremony to bless Daniela’s arrival in our family. I wanted a special stone to give to my new daughter as a symbol of our love. After I found myself unloading my whole story, including my self-doubts and anxieties, Jenny Bird ended up gifting me a beautiful specimen of rose quartz – the crystal of the heart, which promotes harmony in relationships and carries the essence of unconditional love.

The next thing I knew, we were having tea, taking walks, discovering how precisely aligned our lives had been, and how lined up our spiritual sensibilities now were. When a house became available to rent next to Jenny Bird’s way out on the Hondo Mesa, my little family moved in and our two families have been one family ever since. Jenny Bird’s younger daughter, Jessie, was the same age as my younger daughter, Jenny Starr, and was her first and oldest friend. I spent a period as Jenny’s road manager, driving her around the country on tour and making arrangements with the venues, but I was so bad at it that we both cheerfully agreed she would be better off with someone who could actually read a map and remember to collect money from the club at the end of the evening.

Jenny Bird is still the person (besides my husband) who reads every word I write before the world gets its hands on it. It’s not even her feedback I require. It is the blessing of her seeing. I need Jenny Bird to see me so that I can see myself. We collaborate on creative projects, tend the dying together, and bear witness to each other’s shattering losses and sweet surprises. When I met Jenny, she had just finished recording her first album and was still nursing her daughter. I had not yet published a single word. Now Jenny has produced over 20 records of original music and is the grandparent of three beautiful children who are lucky to be at the center of her circle of love. I have written almost 20 books and am also a devoted grandma.

The thing about soul friendships is they need room to breathe. My connection with Jenny is more accordion than a fence. We draw close, we float apart, come back again. It is the music from that bellows that fills my life with song.

Visit Jenny’s website here.

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

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This is my “imaginative rendering” of one of my most beloved spiritual guides, Kwan Yin.

Kwan Yin, O, Lotus-born: om mani padme hum.

Once you were male. Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion. Poised on the brink of personal perfection, rewarded for your muscular spiritual effort by being invited to disappear into the light of Nirvana, you opted to remain here, right here in Samsara, to support your friends, all sentient beings -- teenaged mothers and political poets, each breathing creature and every last blade of grass -- until every one of us attained liberation.

But as it turned out, your male form could not bear the weight of suffering, and you shattered. You tried again, this time incarnating as female with the capacity to soften and yield to the pain of the world and so become the source of comfort you yearned to be.

Kwan Yin. Goddess of mercy. She Who Hears the Cries of the World. She who sees every corner of creation and tends it with motherly extravagance and fierce protectiveness.

Concealed by your singular countenance of lovingkindness there extends an endless series of heads with an infinite capacity to listen. Hidden within your two arms, one pouring healing dew from a delicate vessel and the other raised in a mudra of benediction, are a thousand arms, with an eye in the center of each palm, so that you may not miss a single dark pocket of the world where one of your children weeps. Ever barefoot, you are rooted in the earth.

Kwan Yin, we call upon you. Light our way home. Protect all who travel over land, by sea, in the air. Help us cultivate the patience to cultivate our gardens when rain is too much or too little. Give us the courage to bear our babies and the fortitude to raise them to be bodhisatvvas of compassion, all of them, living instruments of peace.

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

“All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.”

Julian of Norwich

Sometimes I can hardly believe what I get to do for a living. As a translator of the mystics, I plunge into the wellspring of their wisdom and remain immersed, until they have told me all they have to say. In the Hindu tradition, this is known as darshan: sitting at the feet of a saint and receiving their transmission. It can be done whether the being is still in the body or has left it. It is not an exchange that is ruled by the common laws of time and space. This flow spills across the centuries and, in my case, across religious lines.

I am Jewish by birth, not-Jewish by upbringing, and Jewish-again by inclination. I have a lifelong Buddhist sitting practice and a Hindu guru. And I translate and write reflections on the teachings of the Christian mystics. One of my favorite encounters was with Julian of Norwich, the medieval English anchoress (1342-1416). I had the good fortune of translating her masterwork, The Showings—an extravagant account of a series of visions Julian had during a near-death experience—and finally visited her cell during my recent travels in the UK.

We do not know much about Julian’s life. In fact, that was not even her real name, but rather a reference to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich to which she attached herself—literally—cloistering herself forever inside a small stone anchorage built against the outer wall of the sanctuary. What we do know was that by the time Julian entered her cell she had already witnessed three rounds of Plague, had probably lost almost everyone she loved, and had nearly died herself. We also know that when she was very young she asked to bear witness to the passion of Christ. Her wish came true. The visions she had on her near-deathbed were of Christ’s crucifixion, which she endured in every cell of her own body.

This kind of corporeal identification with Christ is not unique to Julian. Other saints and mystics, known and unknown, have reported similar experiences. But what is unusual about Julian’s story is that Christ’s death was not dreadful to her. That is, he certainly suffered and she hated to see her beloved in such pain, but he also radiated warmth, sweetness, and a kind of ineffable joy. His countenance was “friendly and courteous.” And try as she might, Julian could not detect one iota of condemnation in him toward any member of the human family. She tried to line up the content of her visions with the “teachings of Holy Church” but sometimes they just didn’t mesh. Like the matter of our fallen nature.

Sin, says Julian, turns out to be “no thing.” This has been a controversial passage in Julian’s work. But she is quite clear: “Nowhere in all that was revealed to me did I see a trace of sin,” she writes. “And so I stopped looking for it and moved on, placing myself in God’s hand, allowing him to show me what he wanted me to see.” In Julian’s exceedingly practical view, “sin has no substance, not a particle of being, and can only be detected by the pain it causes.” When we make mistakes and create suffering, we humble ourselves and God loves us all the more. For those of us non-Christian and post-modern types, try substituting the word sin for shame, or blame, or even karma. In other words, we screw up, but that only opens the tender heart of the cosmos where we can find refuge and come back into wholeness.

The other startling thing about Julian’s homespun theology is her view of the feminine identity of God. Julian sees the Godhead in the Trinitarian context of Christianity, but with this radical twist: the Second Person (Christ) is actually the Mother (not the Son). “As truly as God is our Father,” she says, “just as truly is God our Mother.” Who else but a mother, she asks, would break herself open and pour herself out for her children? “Only God could ever perform such duty.” Not only that, but Julian’s God-as-Mother remains available at all times, especially present in our darkest hours—some kind of spiritual hybrid that encompasses the unconditional love of Mother Mary in the Catholic tradition, the infinite compassion of Tara in the Buddhist tradition, and the indwelling holiness of the Shekhinah in the Jewish tradition.

It baffles Julian that we don’t get this. When we miss the mark, we want to run away and hide. But “our courteous Mother doesn’t want us to flee,” Julian says. “Nothing would distress her more. She wants us to behave as a child would when he is upset or afraid: rush with all our might into the arms of the Mother.” For Julian, the good news is not merely the reward we will receive one day when we slough off this mortal coil and go home to God. Every moment is an opportunity to remember that we are perfectly loved and perfectly loveable, just as we are.

“And so when the final judgment comes,” Julian writes at the end of The Showings, “… we shall clearly see in God all the secrets that are hidden from us now. Then none of us will be moved in any way to say, ‘Lord, if only things had been different, all would have been well.’ Instead, we shall all proclaim in one voice, ‘Beloved One, may you be blessed, because it is so: ALL IS WELL.’”

For a wonderful interpretation of Julian’s relevance for our times, check out Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic and Beyond, by Matthew Fox, for which I had the honor of writing the foreword.

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

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Wedding Prayer

Note: This prayer can be adapted to use as an offering during a wedding ceremony, inserting the couple’s names wherever appropriate.

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When I was teaching Religious Studies at the University of New Mexico in Taos, I often brought in guest speakers to enhance my students’ experience of multiple faith traditions. One day, I decided to invite the late great author and activist, John Nichols. It was unusual for at least a couple of reasons: one, John was pretty much a recluse and rarely appeared in public; and two, it was a course in Christian Scriptures, and John was an atheist.

Sometimes I think I am, too. What I mean, of course, is that the God many of the friends and writers I respect most reject is not the God I believe in or adore, either. My God does not cast judgment, neither punishes nor rewards, but simply calls me to an ever greater, utterly mysterious, direct encounter with love.

In this sense, there are atheists I know who more fully embody God-like qualities than any self-proclaimed believer. John Nichols was one of them. A passionate voice for human rights over the course of five decades, John had gradually softened into someone who did not merely rage against the injustices of humanity but lived the teachings of love and compassion we find in the great sacred scriptures of the world’s religions. I had watched John’s ego identity—much as I had witnessed Ram Dass’—melt in the warmth of a life lived for the sake of love, until he simply exuded that radiance. Like any saint, John Nichols had become love. I had suspected this from afar for quite some time, but that day I bore witness to it up close, and all I could do was to bow inwardly at his feet.

For twenty years, I was the entire philosophy and religious studies department at my community college. During the last few semesters, I made a point of offering classes that stretched me, and gave my students a wider range of choices. In my naivete, I thought a course in Christian Scriptures was a great fit. After all, I had been translating the Christian mystics for years, and had steeped myself in the biblical teachings that inform their visionary wisdom. What I didn’t anticipate was that my class would fill with fundamentalists who were much more interested in testifying to one another and preaching to me than in exploring the socio-political, historical, and archetypal context for these sacred writings--in other words, engaging in critical thinking (with an open heart). In fact, they did not, for the most part, have the slightest idea what I even meant when I talked about inquiry.

So I was really curious to see how my atheist friend, John Nichols, might rock the boat when he came to visit. The reason I invited John (you might be wondering) was because we were discussing Christ’s Sermon on the Mount — which comprises the majority of his teachings on social justice, compassion, and forgiveness — and tying this into Liberation Theology. I had discovered at my friend Sean Murphy’s birthday party a few days before, while sitting next to John Nichols at dinner, that John had been very involved in the Sanctuary Movement of the early 1980’s (I had too, as an interpreter for Salvadoran refugees). He had spent time in Central America, and had been deeply impressed by the powerful faith of the people, and how their religious beliefs were inextricably entwined with their revolutionary activities. My academic side (angel) thought his stories would be illuminating for my students. My rebel nature (demon) may have been hoping to provoke them into a more liberal state of consciousness….

As it turned out, my radical activist friend did nothing to shake up or in any way offend my conservative students. Instead, he told wonderfully engaging stories of his own adventures, and in the end connected it all to what is most beautiful and liberating about the teachings of their beloved Jesus. They were totally captivated. And so was I. And all the while, John exuded this lovingkindness, humility, and wonderment in the face of the human condition. His visit changed something deep inside all of us. That is enlightenment. That is radical and revolutionary action. I was the one broken free of my prejudices and preconceptions. At the feet of an atheist, I caught a glimpse of God.

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

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Over the decades since my friend Fr. Bill first introduced me to the twelfth century German nun, Hildegard of Bingen, I’ve become infatuated with her. It was not love at first sight, believe me. I didn’t think she was my type. She was a visionary, and I am not interested in the supernatural. She was obsessed with cosmology and the architecture of the universe. I yearn for union with the Divine. She was brilliant: a scientist who analyzed and then harnessed the healing properties of plants. I dropped out of high school, and can’t decipher a simple plumbing diagram, nor am I motivated to learn how. Hildegard composed symphonies; I don’t even know how to read music.

And yet, don’t some of the most successful marriages happen between unlikely partners? Passion can sneak up behind us and suddenly our hearts are captured and all we can think about is the unlikely object of our affection. This is what happened to me with Teresa of Avila, by the way, the sixteenth century Spanish mystic. (I know: I have this thing for dead Catholic saints. Which is even more bewildering when you consider my secular Jewish heritage and long-term background in Eastern spiritual practices.)

Teresa first crept in through the door I opened for John of the Cross, her spiritual protégé. I had fallen in love with John the minute I first read Dark Night of the Soul in its original Early Renaissance Spanish. She, I could live without. He was quiet and serious, like me. She was gregarious, cunning, needy. If she hadn’t had such a profound influence on my hero, I would have gladly ignored her forever. But wherever he went, there she was. The next thing I knew we were having tea together. And then planting a garden. And then… publishing books.

Which brings me back to Hildegard. I would probably never have given her more than a passing glance - the way you notice an exotic guest at a cocktail party maybe, one with whom you instantly assume you have nothing in common – if I hadn’t been hired to write a little book about her.

I could have turned down the job, of course. And I briefly considered this. I don’t know German, for one thing. At least with Teresa, I spoke a version of the same vernacular, and knew I could make her accessible to the modern literary and spiritual sensibilities. But the Aryan nun from the Rhineland was alien to me, and a little scary. Teresa was merely madly in love with God and would get to him by any means necessary (the more dramatic, the better). Hildegard was simply strange. Maybe even psychotic.

For instance, Hildegard of Bingen was regularly overcome by a blinding light, out of which issued a voice. This voice, which she fondly referred to as “the shadow of the Living Light,” gave her very specific messages, often in the form of prophecies. When Hildegard was young, the prophetic information leaned toward the prosaic (such as the exact markings of a calf still inside its mother’s womb), but, as her gift developed, the transmissions became detailed explanations of the genesis of the Cosmos and advice about the ultimate purpose of human life (“Do not denigrate anything God has created. All creation is simple, plain, and good. And God is present throughout his creation. Why would you even consider things beneath your notice …”)

Still, as pertinent as these visions and voices may have been, that’s not the part that attracts me to Hildegard. Where she finally broke down the walls of my heart was when I read about how she had resisted her visions and voices for the first forty years of her life. And how suppressing them almost killed her. Literally. She finally became gravely ill from the sheer exertion of ignoring the divine imperative and holding in the truth.

But the Living Light was insistent. “Speak!” the Voice thundered from the nun’s deathbed. “Write what you see and hear.” Finally, Hildegard of Bingen reached for a quill and began to record everything the Voice told her. Her sickness melted away, and Hildegard proceeded to revolutionize a decadent Church with her theological insight and humanitarian devotion. From that moment on, whenever a vision overwhelmed her, Hildegard emerged feeling purified and revitalized, “like a simple young girl again.”

Teresa of Avila has a similar story. Culturally conditioned to be a submissive female who would never dare to question the authority of the patriarchy, she repressed her innate brilliance for as long as she could, but soon grew so sick she nearly died. Once she surrendered to the inner imperative to cultivate a direct relationship with the Divine, in apparent opposition to the mandates of the Church, she flourished and became the brilliant beacon she has been for five centuries.

But it is not only spiritual food these two saints offer us. It is practical inspiration. They give us courage to speak truth to power, at risk to our own comfort and even safety. When everything around us is trying to lull us into complacency (don’t worry about those disembodied starving children in Sudan. Go shopping; you’ll feel better), mystics and visionaries like Teresa and Hildegard model the revolutionary act of speaking (and writing, and singing) what we know in our innermost core. Because they made the radical choice to live authentically, we see the possibilities for actualizing an authentic life. In the face of the to-do list that will never be done, these great beings teach us how to be still. And from that place of deep quiet, we begin to truly hear – really listen, and hear – the divine demand, and then do what it tells us, no matter how crazy.

I carry my friend Hildegard of Bingen with me wherever I go these days, like an amulet, like a homeopathic remedy. She is not always a copasetic companion, but she offers a remedy for our times: the earth is alive, she is Mother, and she loves you with all her heart.

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I am thrilled to share that a new edition of my book GOD OF LOVE will be coming out on September 8, with updated language and concepts, a daring new preface by me, and a funny and moving introduction by legendary priest Greg Boyle (founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles). Monkfish has helped give this interspiritual classic vibrant new life. There is an audiobook version too, which I read myself, except for Greg’s intro, read by my talented brother Roy.

PRE-ORDER HERE

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When I was in the jungles of the Yucatan and Chiapas a few years after my daughter Jenny died, I contracted a nasty double dose of parasites and bacteria, and became very ill. I had been traveling in Mexico for most of my life and had never been this sick. My agent suggested that maybe I was so comfortable there that I let my guard down. Perhaps I was so depleted by the travails of that winter that I had no resistance. Whatever the explanation, I developed a high fever one night and in my delirium I had a kind of vision.

I had just returned home and was hoping a night in my own bed would soothe the fiery pain in my joints. But it felt like I was boiling from the inside and I couldn’t sleep. At one point, as I was writhing in the dark of night, I realized I could call out to Jenny for help. I wasn’t asking for anything in particular. I simply remembered that she was available to me, and so I reached for her. The instant I called, I felt her rushing in to surround me with her love. I felt enfolded, as if by great wings. And then she just held me.

After a few moments, I felt her begin to slip away. I cried out: “Jenny, don’t leave me!” I began to wail. She returned and wrapped herself around me again. “I will never leave you, Mom. I am always with you.” Finally, I felt strong enough to let her go. I thanked her, and surrendered to our separation, as I have done a thousand times. And then I lay in my steaming bed and wept. My husband woke and held me. “Jenny was here!” I told him. “She was just here! Can you feel her?” What he felt was me, burning up. The next day he took me to the doctor. It took months to recover from the disease, but the gift Jenny gave me that night will be with me always.

Not long after this vision, I had the honor to sit with my neighbor Kate, whose beautiful young free spirit daughter, Nina, had been recently murdered, two days after her sister’s wedding in the Caribbean. As the weeks unfold and Kate’s heart was blazing with love and longing, her mind, as minds are designed to do, was busy seeking understanding.

As with every single grieving person I know, Kate felt her daughter very close to her in the first days following her death. Now, two months later, Nina’s presence was starting to feel increasingly tenuous. Kate sensed that Nina was continuing on her journey, and she couldn’t help but wonder where that journey was leading and if her loved one was okay.

As we were talking, I saw a light stream into Kate’s heart. I do not usually experience psychic phenomena, but I knew in that instant that Nina was flowing into her mother’s heart in response to the intense love and pain Kate was feeling. And I had an epiphany.

I realized that the feeling we have of our loved ones being close to us immediately following their death might have more to do with us than with them. In the wake of a profound loss, the limitations of our ordinary perceptions are stripped from our consciousness and we are given a glimpse of that which lies beyond the mundane. When we love someone deeply, we cannot help but try to follow them when they’ve left this world. At first, propelled by shock and supported by grace, we are successful in parting the curtain and stepping through. As time goes by, we, the living, must necessarily return to this world. This distancing may feel like they are moving away from us, but, as with Einstein’s train analogy, that’s an artifact of relativity. We’re the ones who, despite our deep desire for connection, are slipping away, back into life.

This reminds me of an interview I read with Leonard Cohen years ago. He was talking about falling in love, and how popular psychology describes this state in pathological terms as a matter of our projecting onto the blank screen of another all our hopes and dreams about romantic love, rather than seeing the person for who she or he really is. Leonard disagreed with this analysis. Rather, he said, when we fall in love, we are seeing truly. As time goes by, the veils of our ordinary conditioned consciousness begin to drop again and obscure the clear vision we were gifted with at first. Isn’t that beautiful?

I think a similar thing is true with grief. The loving connectedness grieving people report in the wake of fresh loss is sometimes labeled “denial” and is attributed to the shock of losing a loved one. However, I have always perceived people in that state as being filled with grace. Their sense of connectedness to their loved ones does not feel delusional to me, but quite the opposite. Grief and loss have lifted the illusion of separation, and, for a moment, we experience the boundarylessness of love.

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A bereaved woman called the other day and lost no time in asking me if I believed in God. Grieving people get right to the point. Loss strips us of trivial concerns and exposes what really matters. This is a person who has spent her entire adult life advocating for the poor, fighting for water rights in the high desert of rural New Mexico, a dedicated activist, an unsentimental realist. She grew up Catholic, and frankly considered religion to be “silly.”

But the love of her life died of a brain aneurism a few weeks ago and suddenly she is thinking about the world of Spirit. She desperately wants her beloved to still exist somewhere. She wants to know that she will see him again someday.

I had to answer honestly. I do and I do not believe in God. I have trouble affirming the existence of a personified deity who manipulates the strings of our lives, doling out punishments and rewards, blessing certain people with happy relationships while others languish in loneliness, taking the lives of beloved teenagers in car crashes and quickening unwanted pregnancies in others.

But I believe in the Sacred. I believe because I am a pragmatist and I have experienced the Sacred permeating my own life, the beauty of the natural world, and every one of my relationships, for as long as I can remember. I know holiness as a fact in every cell of my body, in the deep quiet I have experienced in meditation, in the rush of ecstasy that comes when I chant the names of God, in the Light that has inexplicably poured into my shattered heart. I believe in the Mystery.

That is what I told the woman on the phone.

“What do you think happens to our loved ones when they die?” This is what she really wanted to know.

I could only share with her what came to me when Jenny died (and has remained with me since). I took turns believing everything I had ever heard or imagined about life after death.

1. That our loved ones cease to exist. I rejected this. I had been too drenched in spirit to buy into cynicism in the wake of tragedy.

2. That their spirit merges with the infinite source, like a drop of water returning to the boundless sea from which it came. This felt right to me: a liberation from the prison of the individual self, a dissolving into all that is, which I intuit to be Pure Love.

3. That something of the essence of the being remains, and we have access to it, that the spirit of our loved one is available to guide us. I began to experience the paradox that my child had become my ancestor. As many wondrous and successful things began to unfold in my life after my daughter’s death, I couldn’t help but see her hand in them, and I still do.

4. That the spirit lingers for a while in an in-between realm, and then reincarnates, to continue the journey of the soul toward full awakening. I could easily imagine Jenny reborn as yet another colorful, juicy character with a new bag of tricks with which to charm the world.

We are conditioned to believe one thing in favor of another. Especially in Western culture, with our Aristotelian legacy that insists on the Law of the Excluded Middle, we feel that we do not have a right to hold two seemingly contradictory propositions at the same time: she has merged with all that is; she is my guardian angel.

But in shattering our hearts, grief also expands our entire being, including our minds, and makes room for everything: unbearable sorrow and profound exaltation; unshakable doubt and crippling faith; a letting go of the physical particularity of the person we loved and an embracing of a new metaphysical relationship that is dynamic and – yes – very much alive.

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Prayer for Creating Prayers

Beloved One,
You who kindle our hearts
with desire for union with you
and infuse our imagination
with shapes to drape over
Your boundlessness,
please open the way for me to invoke you,
place words in my mouth to beseech …

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People often ask for copies of the prayers I compose and share for special occasions: weddings, memorial services, baby blessings. I also write prayers for grief, prayers to the mystics, prayers for peace and justice, and prayers in praise of the ordinary extraordinary moments of life.

In this special series, I am offering my freshly rendered prayers, drawn from life right now—mine, yours, the life of the larger world.

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What happens when we cast our spiritual net wide and drop our bucket deep into the well of perennial wisdom? Where are the treasures in each of the world’s great religions? The pearls of mystical experience, social justice, reverence for the earth? And which are the divisive messages that must be left behind? How do we respond to the yearning of our souls to uncover life-giving truths and activate on behalf of all beings?

Perhaps you, like I, have been drawn to pretty much every spiritual tradition you encounter, and have fallen in love with them all. Those of us who walk an inter-spiritual path are sometimes challenged by the ones I refer to as “the keepers of the jewels” – those souls deeply committed to a single spiritual tradition who serve us all by safeguarding the depths of their tradition so that it will not become dissipated in our postmodern consumerist society – about being “spiritual dilettantes.” How, they wonder, can you find authentic nourishment if you are simply grazing the vast field of the religious landscape?

It took me years to recognize that this question is not fair. Having an interspiritual heart does not make us shallow. In fact, opening ourselves to the wisdom and power of many faiths can result in profound spiritual experiences within each one. We are like bees in the garden of the world’s religions, gathering nectar and bringing it back to the Queen where it is transformed into honey to nourish ourselves and feed the hungry world. We avoid the toxic substances, not because we are dabbling and unfit to grapple with difficult scriptures or manage believers who don’t believe as we do, but because bees know better than to drink the poison.

Cultivating discernment is essential to navigating an inter-spiritual path. Like Jacob, who wrestled all night with an angel of God, we are worthy of meeting the Mystery face-to-face. In fact, it is our birthright. We are endowed, I believe, with a faculty of discrimination that enables us to recognize the teachings of love and say yes to them. We know how to vanquish the easy answers that tempt us to otherize. I believe in us. In our ability to “go deep” in more than one spiritual space. This is not a path for the wishy-washy. It requires both courage and vulnerability. A willingness to abide in radical unknowing. To drop the impulse to figure out Ultimate Reality with our discursive minds and allow the truth of love to guide our hearts. Do not be deluded: grappling with the Holy One is likely to wound us. Jacob’s hip was dislocated in his divine wrestling match and for the rest of his life he walked with a limp. Our scars are reminders of the living encounter with the mystery of love.

The single most effective way I have found to skillfully travel on the interspiritual quest is contemplative practice. A daily discipline of silent sitting helps us to make friends with our “monkey minds” and learn not to believe everything we think. When we show up for what is, with curiosity and tenderness, we begin to recognize our essential interconnectedness with all life – not as an intellectual concept but as a full-bodied reality. In letting ourselves down into the stillness, we become available for a direct encounter with the sacred presence and are able to carry that intimacy back out into the world. Having rested in being, we are more able to engage in doing, free from the need to defend our position and make others wrong. Otherness itself loses its fixed shape. The locks that keep us away from each other slide off the gates and they swing open.

Whether you are rooted in a single faith tradition, embrace a variety of spiritual paths, or consider yourself to be “spiritually independent” or “spiritual but not religious,” I bow to your mystical heart that affirms the beauty in all wisdom ways and seeks the medicine in all sacred spaces that can help heal and transform this broken world.

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To walk an interspiritual path is to travel through the wilderness with open hands and a courageous spirit.  It is to navigate with the heart and a book of prayers from every faith tradition that ever uttered a sacred phrase in any language.  To travel an interspiritual path is to drop to our knees in the presence of Love wherever we encounter it, and to disarm our hearts the minute we have the impulse to otherize a faith we do not understand.  To take an interspiritual journey is to circle ever inward, to a place of holy silence and vibrant stillness, and then to surge back outward with the contemplative fruits we have gathered to feed a hungry world.  An interspiritual life invites us to take our rightful place at the table of the Divine in many Holy Houses, and asks that we kneel at the altars of multiple traditions and drink from the goblet we are offered, and allow it to transform us.  Interspirituality is about saying YES to the sacred in every form and no form, about moving beyond intellectual orientation to active engagement with various religions, about seeking and finding the Love that unifies all paths and affirms our essential interconnectedness.

Mirabai Starr - Definition of Interspirituality

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This is from a free-write I did in my women writers’ group. It’s an example of the irrationality but compelling attraction of the “bargaining” process in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ “stages of grief.” It is raw and unedited. The writing prompt, from the poem “If,” by Rudyard Kipling, was, “If I had done the right thing…”

… she might be alive today, about to turn twenty-three next week, but instead I must have made a series of invisible, seemingly innocent, but fatally important mistakes that contributed to the perfect storm that sent her careening off the shattered guardrail on the downhill trajectory of U.S. Hill, on what may have turned out to be exactly midnight, the day before Halloween, beneath the enormous gaze of the full moon, not long after her fourteenth birthday.

Could this be the source of my mysterious malaise these past couple of weeks: the building up of anniversary memory in my cells? Year #9, and I must still go through this primal unraveling? Each revolution of the full four seasons brings us back to an earth cooling down and dropping its decoration, a world that no longer sustains the life of my baby girl.

It’s been a summer overstuffed with activities that mostly defied my nature, demanding things of me I was not designed to deliver. I am depleted and vulnerable, prone to that nameless sadness that seeps through my broken seams like smoke and chokes me. Maybe even as I recognize the shape of my loss, in yet another new disguise, I can unmask what’s bothering me and be free.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter that every year I integrate what happened a little more, and become more resourceful, and therefore more of a resource to others newer on the path of unbearable anguish. Or that, on many days, between, say early January and late July, I can even bless Jenny’s death as a strange and terrible grace in my life. And look how famous I have made her! Speaking and blogging about her to thousands of people who grow to admire my extraordinary child, dead but never forgotten.

Maybe all those good days are stashed in one compartment, spacious and fertile, while these days of restless sorrow are stuffed into another one altogether, and I catch my foot at the threshold and go tumbling in behind them, and the lid snaps shut, and I can’t breathe.

Maybe it’s supposed to be this way, and there’s no point in congratulating myself on my progress.

Writing practice, or “free-writing” is a great way to get down to the truth of your own experience. Try this: pick up a collection of poetry, open the book to any page, read the poem, and pick out a line that strikes you. Write it at the top of a piece of paper, then give yourself exactly ten minutes to write whatever arises, without editing yourself in any way. When we banish the critical voice, we are free to discover what’s really going on. This can be invaluable on a path of conscious grief.

Feel free to share with us here if you do this exercise. I would love to read what comes up for you.

For more about this practice, see any of Natalie Goldberg’s books.

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Femicide is an ongoing issue around the world. On the average, ten women and girls are kidnapped, raped and murdered across Mexico every day. As a bereaved mother myself, I cannot help identifying with mothers around the world whose children are victims of senseless violence and endless war, perpetrated by men in power. This poem is a grief-stricken love song to mothers. It is written in first person, but it is an imagined situation and not my personal experience. May justice erupt from heartbreak.

Broken Light

The bus pulls into Ciudad Juarez
just as the sun touches the tops of the maquilas
and spills into the filthy factory windows
where my baby ran away to work for the pendejos. 
Sunlight like blood.
Like her blood
which I can't stop seeing whenever I close my eyes.
Flowing from her lips,
her wrists,
from between her torn apart legs.
Blood flowing into the silent desert,
nourishing nothing.

So I try not to close my eyes.

But they accidentally drifted shut on the bus last night
somewhere between mi pueblo in San Luis Potosi
and this borderland of screaming ghost girls,
this infierno that tears and chews and gulps our daughters,
that swallowed my girl,
mi Lucia,
light of her father's broken heart.
Broken light.
Body broken like a pinata.
Like a glass bottle.
Like the yolk of an egg.

I can’t do this.

I cannot fucking do this.
No one could possibly expect a mother
to identify the body of her child.
I got the message yesterday
as I was plucking the needles from a basket of nopal.
Nopal is good for the diabetes,
which I think I have.
As if it mattered now.
I returned their call
from the telephone office next to the parque.
They warned me:
mutilation;
partial decomposition;
anguish carved into her dead face.

I practice picturing these things.

While her father slips into a cerveza coma
I board the bus and imagine her unraveling.
Her long hair yanked and severed.
A nipple bitten off.
Cigarette burns on her neck and eyelids.
A man grunting like a cochino.
Two others laughing.
One more turns away, maybe,
and pukes in the Sonoran night.

There is no one to meet me
when I climb down from the bus.
My knees buckle and I stumble.
Swiftly, I regain my balance,
restore my dignity,
smooth my long braids
which have been suddenly shot with silver
in the weeks since Lucia disappeared.
I shift my satchel across one breast
and unfold for the hundredth time
the sheet of graph paper
with directions to the city morgue.

I begin walking.

Duermete mi nina.
Duermete mi sol.
Duermete pedazo
de mi corazon.

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During the 1970’s, my parents and their friends used to sit around the living room of our house in the high desert of the American Southwest, and generate titles for books they never intended to write. Lulled by homegrown marijuana and a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, it was enough for them simply to encapsulate their idealistic views in a list of singular phrases. I pilfered the title of this piece, From the Monastery to the Marketplace, from my mother. Mom felt strongly that it was time to transcend the elitist doctrines of personal salvation, and incorporate the values of peaceful introspection into acts of social justice.

My mother has made of herself a living example of this ideal ever since, applying self-realization to solving the problems of the world, one human being at a time. My father, who died of cancer in 1993, left behind a thousand fragments of quirky wisdom scribbled on scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, the backs of overdue bills. I have taken it upon myself to pull together their legacy and try and put it into words for the benefit of all beings.

It is clear to me that I did not invent myself. I know many people who have. Born into families in which they stood out as ugly ducklings, they always secretly suspected they were swans, and it was up to them to fulfill their beautiful destiny. They were right. When they came of age, they unfolded their wings, bowed to the mother and father who raised them, and flew toward who they were meant to be, never to return to the alien land they came from. In most cases, theirs was an arduous and lonesome journey.

I am not such a bird. Whatever I may be, I have become because of my family of origin, not in spite of them. It is true that my parents were iconoclasts, who vocally rejected organized religion, while I have been inexorably drawn to every spiritual tradition I have encountered. But, as a result of my upbringing, I am incapable of blind faith.

“I think Christ is great,” my secular Jewish father used to say. “It’s Christians I have trouble with.” What he had trouble with was hypocrisy, in any form, within every religion. If a believer did not back up his religious convictions with righteous action, my father was not interested in hearing about his credo.

* * * * *

I engaged in my first act of civil disobedience when I was in fourth grade. My parents were active in the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. My older brother, Matty, who died of a brain tumor when he was ten, spent the final year of his life memorizing Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. My mother was a folk singer who regularly hosted hootenannies at our suburban Long Island home, where amateur musicians would gather to sing protest songs.

I remember one such night when my mother proclaimed that the National Anthem was a travesty, nothing but a testament to the glory of war, and that war was nothing but an atrocity, perpetrated by a more powerful nation against a powerless one. “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof to the night that our flag was still there.” When she put it that way, I saw her point. I could never again bring myself to hold my hand to my heart and sing The Star Spangled Banner after that.

Around this same time, my parents suggested that I might consider sitting out the Pledge of Allegiance at school, since they personally found it impossible to affirm their support for a country that was causing such devastation in the lives of innocent people far away, not to mention plucking young Americans out of their youth and dropping them into a war zone created by their own government, resulting in thousands upon thousands of pointless deaths.

I was still buzzing with excitement from contact with the three children who had recently spent the night on my bedroom floor because their parents were spending the night in jail for having set fire to the American flag on the lawn of their split level home. It was my turn to save America!

I waited for the most public opportunity to launch my debut peace action. Every Friday there was an assembly at Forest Lake Elementary, when all the classes would gather in the auditorium and the principal would address the student body as a whole, encouraging positive study habits and good citizenship. It was an opportunity for announcements about upcoming book fairs, Spelling Bees, and Glee Club recitals. The Lunch Lady would list the menu choices for the upcoming week, and the school nurse would take a moment to encourage us to wash our hands thoroughly after using the restroom. That was generally about as exciting as things got at Forest Lake Elementary on Friday mornings.

The event always began, of course, with the Pledge. That day, when everybody rose and faced the flag, I remained seated, with my hands in my lap. Heads began to turn in my direction, apparently horrified that I would dare defy such a holy rite. I momentarily feared that I might be struck by lightning, but I held my seat.

When my teacher, Mrs. Kazarsky, glared at me, I looked away. A relatively shy girl, I was not comfortable with the attention, but I knew in my heart that Richard Nixon was a liar and that his war was wicked. When I glanced at Mrs. K out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a small smile flutter across her lips as she stared at me, her own hand held at her heart.

After lunch, I was called into the principal’s office.

“Why didn’t you stand for the Pledge?” Mr. Lichtenstein asked me as I sat trembling in the chair across from his desk.

I shrugged.

“It’s a school rule,” he prompted.

“I know,” I said.

“Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

I nodded, my face hot.

“I’m going to have to call your parents.”

What a relief! My parents would be able to explain everything.

The following week, my mother and father went in for a conference with the principal. Soon after that, Mr. Lichtenstein invited our whole family to spend the weekend with him and his wife and children at their cabin in Woodstock.

We visited the Lichtensteins several times over the next couple of years before we left New York. At their cabin in the woods, we called my principal “Al.” Al wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, listened to Country Joe and the Fish, and read Ferlinghetti poems out loud before dinner. At school he dressed in a suit and tie, and I had to call him Mr. Lichtenstein again.

The school community grew accustomed to my remaining seated when everyone else rose to salute the Flag. Over time, other children copied me. And the war on Vietnam went on and on.

* * * * *

It was my parents who instilled my spiritual inclinations, too, though it took me a long time to recognize this. I mistook their repudiation of the patriarchal abuses committed by the Judeo-Christian hierarchy as evidence of atheism. I believed that I stood alone in my fascination with the Great Mystery. Looking back, I see their spirituality shining from behind everything they ever did. They just didn’t make a religion of it.

My father was something of a local holy man in the small town of Taos, New Mexico, where we moved after leaving New York when I was eleven. Dad read cards. Not Tarot cards, but playing cards – an ancient esoteric system developed to encode the Tarot during the early years of the Roman Catholic Empire. Dad, a Life Master in Bridge, had transferred his love of the game to a devotion to the secret wisdom teachings hidden in the dance between clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. He dedicated himself to unraveling the complexities of sacred mathematics, unveiling the relationships between birthdays and planetary influences, and conveying these insights to the community at large.

In his one-room adobe, beside a pinon fire in the kiva fireplace, a jelly jar of Tokay wine on the table beside him, Dad would receive pilgrims. After cracking his knuckles, he would take their hands in his, close his eyes for a moment while he “tuned,” and then spread out the cards and read the seeker’s soul.

I never saw my mother meditate, but she often spoke of Zen philosophy, and she tended her houseplants and weeded her vegetables with as much reverence as a rabbi handles the Torah. Mom strives to see the goodness in every soul she encounters, and she treats her children as if we were all Avatars, no matter how unskillfully we may sometimes manage our lives here on earth.

Recently, my mother mentioned in passing that every night before she goes to sleep, she pictures a gentle rain of light falling on anyone anywhere in the world who is in pain, emotional or physical. Safe and warm in her bed, she wishes her comfort and ease on everyone everywhere who does not have a place to sleep, or who is lying awake to the sounds of gunfire exploding around them.

“It’s selfish,” she admitted when I expressed my awe and admiration for her vast generosity of spirit. “If I don’t take the time to do this, I can’t rest. The suffering in this world is more than I can bear.”

I aspire to this level of selfishness.

* * * * *

Five hundred years ago, Teresa of Avila, a cloistered Spanish nun, offered a teaching as relevant today as ever: not only must we balance our activism with contemplative stillness, we need to engage the fruits of contemplation in active service to the world. Our personal relationship with the Divine is meaningless unless we take it to the streets and see the face of our Beloved in the face of everyone we encounter.

Teresa makes a distinction between “active and contemplative personalities,” and advocates that we be true to our own nature. We are not all meant to organize rallies, pour our drawn blood on Pentagon documents, travel to underdeveloped countries and volunteer to inoculate children. Holding the suffering of humanity in our hearts in prayer every day can be as powerful a service as finding shelter for the homeless. Cultivating and abiding in inner peace makes a significant contribution to peace on earth. Working on our personal spiritual path raises the level of consciousness of the whole.

Yet, not everyone is a natural contemplative, either. For some, sitting in silent meditation feels artificial, even wasteful. When they close their eyes, they do not sense the presence of the Divine; rather, they experience an overpowering urge to get up and go do something. They may be right to follow this impulse.

Teresa uses the Gospel story of Mary and Martha to highlight this distinction. Mary was an ecstatic. She was all about devotion and rapture. She would fling herself at the feet of Jesus whenever he came by for a meal and she would remain there until he left. Meanwhile, Martha was stuck in the kitchen, grumbling about being left with all the work, elevating herself to a state of false martyrdom.

“Remember,” says the ever-practical Teresa, in an effort to console those who are naturally more active. “Someone must cook the food! …Think of yourselves as favored by being allowed to serve with Martha.”

The important thing, Teresa reminds us, is that by serving one another, we are serving the Holy One, who is continuously dropping in for a visit. “If contemplation, silent and vocal prayer, nursing the sick, cleaning the house, and the most menial labor, all serve the Guest who comes to eat and drink and converse with us, “ Teresa asks, “why would we choose to tend him in one way rather than another?”

As busy citizens of the developed world, we need to fight against the temptation to abandon any hope of practicing meditation. We can try making our daily lives a treasure hunt for free moments between activities. Tucking these jewels into the folds of our robes, we may sit quietly for five minutes at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, or on the park bench after lunch, and let our worldly concerns fall away. Eyes unfocused, breath gentle and even, we can drop down into the stillness, as if we had nowhere to go and nothing to worry about. Only this moment. The rain on the window. The song of a bird rising above the roar of traffic. Our tongue curved lightly against the roof of our mouth.

Into this quietude, a certain truth may come streaming: there is only one of us. The loss I grieve has been grieved by mothers for millennia; mothers everywhere are grieving at the exact same moment as I am; it is inevitable that mothers will share this grief indefinitely. We are each part of a living web, a glorious pattern of interconnectedness. The Buddha called this “dependent co-arising.” From this awareness, we cannot help but have compassion for all beings. There is no actual distinction between me and the sister of a suicide bomber. The suicide bomber and I are one. The prisoner enduring torture is inextricably entwined with the judge who condemns him and the reformer who struggles to emancipate him. Separation is an illusion. Compassion for others is compassion for ourselves.

* * * * *

I once had the good fortune of spending a few days at Jonah House, a Catholic peace and justice community in Baltimore, where I went to visit my friend Elizabeth McAllister, legendary anti-war activist and widow of the great peacemaker, Phillip Berrigan. Two of the Jonah House residents, both middle-aged nuns, had recently been released from prison where they had been locked up for yet another “plowshares action,” invoking the Prophet Isaiah by banging on missile silos with household hammers, symbolically “beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” as Isaiah exhorted us to do.

After lunch one afternoon, we sat around the community living room and the nuns pulled out their knitting. It was difficult to imagine these two grandmotherly women as Enemies of the State. As we chatted, they began praising me for my latest translation of Teresa of Avila’s autobiography, which I had brought as a gift. I couldn’t resist confiding in them. “I feel like a fraud,” I said. “Here I am, reflecting on the esoteric teachings of the Early Renaissance, while people like you are willing to go to jail for your convictions about nuclear disarmament.”

The sisters put down their knitting needles and spent the next hour trying to convince me that by speaking and writing about the teachings of the mystics, I am contributing just as much to peace on earth as any act of civil disobedience in which they engage. These radical Catholics insisted that, through my words, I open hearts and minds, and allow people to look with clear eyes on the suffering of the world, thereby moving them to act with love and compassion.

It was hard to believe them, but I tried. Their words helped to alleviate a secret burden of guilt I had been carrying ever since my first book came out, a translation of Dark Night of the Soul, by Teresa of Avila’s spiritual companion, John of the Cross, which happened to coincide with the launching of America’s invasion of Iraq.

I am trying to find comfort in the notion that we each have our own way of loving God by loving each other. Mine happens to require solitude and silence. For others, it’s more about engaging in prison reform, making calls to the House and the Senate to vocalize their opposition to American Imperialism, raising funds to keep our rivers clean.

Yet this cannot be my excuse to gloss over the fact that the conscious participation of every citizen of this planet is required if we hope to sustain a just world. To protect our own civil rights and the rights of the most vulnerable members of society, we contemplatives need to stretch ourselves beyond our comfort zone and demand that those in power act with integrity and commit themselves to social justice and world peace. We cannot do this is we never get up off our cushion and make our voices heard.

Activists, for their part, need to sit down sometimes and let themselves grow quiet inside, engaging in fearless self-inquiry to discern between righteousness and self-righteousness, moral outrage and hostility. By dipping into the wellspring of simple unknowing, the lines between good guys and bad guys begin to soften. From within that stillness, they may recognize all the players on the political stage as members of the vast human family, a single tribe connected by their common bonds of suffering and love.

Out of the natural compassion that arises from this practice, they can return to the picket lines with a measure of equanimity to mitigate the anger, a deepening level of acceptance to heal the divisions caused by hate. Their actions might be more effective as a result of some time spent in emptiness.

The wisdom teachers of every tradition seem to agree that action and contemplation are interdependent. If every act is offered as an act of love, we all become activists. If the root of all our action is contemplation, then our whole lives become a prayer.

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At night on my bed I longed
for my only love.
I sought him, but did not find him.

I must rise and go about the city,
the narrow streets and squares, till I find
my only love.

I sought him everywhere
but I could not find him.

Song of Songs

There is a longing that burns at the root of spiritual practice. This is the fire that fuels the journey. This is the unrequited love we never get over. The youthful angst fades into a kind of practical acceptance of the pain of our aloneness. The romantic suffering we pretend to have grown out of, but which remains coiled like a serpent beneath the veneer of maturity. We have studied the Eastern texts. We know that separation from our divine source is an illusion. We subscribe to the philosophy that there is nowhere to go and nothing to become, because we are already there and we are already it.

Yes, but what about this yearning? What about the way a poem by Rilke or Rumi breaks open our hearts and triggers a nameless sorrow that could consume us if we gave in? This is not a matter of mere psychology. It has little to do with unresolved issues of childhood abandonment, or codependent tendencies to falsely place the source of our wholeness outside of ourselves. The longing is a recognition of the deepest truth that God is love and that this is all we want. Every lesser desire melts when it comes near that flame.

Not everyone experiences this. For some people, the spiritual journey is not that dramatic. It’s less about the overwhelming desire for union with some invisible Beloved than it is about quietly waking up. It’s about developing compassion, rather than suffering passion. It’s about raising consciousness, not drowning in fire. There are people who never for a moment doubt that God is with them, and so there is nothing to long for. But there are those who have felt the Divine move like an ocean inside them, and, incapable of sustaining an unbroken relationship with that vastness, feel they have been banished to the desert when the wave recedes.

Mystics throughout the ages and across cultures have borrowed the language of romantic love to express the way they simultaneously long for and experience the divine. “The longing is the Christ,” said the great Sufi poet, Kabir. The heart that reaches out for the Divine is filled in the very act of offering its emptiness. Solomon’s Song of Songs is both a lament and a celebration of this love-longing. It never once mentions the name of God. Such naming would be a reduction of the vast mystery. Blasphemy. The Divine is the Beloved. The bridegroom who ignites the soul with his love and then disappears, leaving her blazing and crazy with longing.

This is holy madness. It is anguish and it is bliss. It tears down the walls of the heart and dissolves the trappings of propriety. It turns the soul into Mary Magdalene, the beautiful outcast, who storms the halls of powerful men, demanding to see the One who turned her whole world into blinding light. When she finds him seated at the table, she prostrates herself before him, and, with great tenderness, washes his feet with priceless ointments and dries them with her own hair.

The spring I turned fourteen, my first love, David, was killed in a gun accident. We had a fight a week before he died. Neighborhood dogs had been killing his family’s chickens, and David and his brother were trying to scare them away with their 22 rifles. I accused David of cruelty. He charged me with melodrama. But the underlying conflict was about sex. He was ready. I wasn’t. Then I took off on a spontaneous trip to Mexico with my parents, and while I was away, David had sex with a girl named Maggie, and then he died.

I turned to God. Krishna, actually, the Lord of Love in the Hindu tradition, the peacock-blue deity who plays his flute on the banks of the River Yamuna and lures the gopis to his celestial bed.

I spent the next two decades falling in love with men I mistook for Krishna. It is noteworthy that one of Krishna’s primary characteristics is his unavailability. The god of love is famous for seducing the maidens with his music and then, after having his way with them, vanishing. This is not unique to Hindu mythology. The Beloved perpetrates this kind of harm on the lover in the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Scriptures. Within the mystical literature of Islam, we find Majnun breaking Layla’s heart, a legend that may have inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. East and West, from the Kalahari Desert to Hollywood, we are conditioned to love a God who fails to show up and love us back. Except in fleeting moments. Just enough to make us go mad with longing when he leaves us.

Somewhere in my mid-thirties, I reached my limit with this spiritualized addictive behavior. My father had recently died of cancer. I had left my abusive husband. I had experimented with loving a string of tragic artists, all of whom spontaneously combusted and left me with nothing but smoke in my eyes.

I went on strike against the Lord of Love. I took all the pictures and statues of Krishna off my altar. I committed myself to a year of voluntary celibacy. I found an Apache medicine woman in the southern part of the state and drove down to see her once a month for shamanic clearings. I joined Al-Anon and chose my father’s best friend, Carl, as my sponsor. I climbed the twelve steps as if I were scaling Everest, and when I reached the summit, I planted the flag of my healing in the snow and sang my victory song.

Then I met Jeff.

There was nothing tragic about him. He wasn’t even an artist. He was a grown-up man with a real job as a skilled carpenter. And, like me, Jeff was a single parent of daughters Like me, he had spent years living in ashrams, fasting and meditating and chanting at the top of his lungs to get the attention of the elusive Deity. Like me, Jeff had been annihilated by broken lovers masquerading as enlightened beings. Like me, he had let the Invisible One go. He had dropped magical thinking in favor of the simple holiness of tucking a little girl into bed and reading her a goodnight story, and then, once she was asleep, turning on the desk lamp and balancing his checkbook.

By the time we met, Jeff was not seeking the Divine Mother in human form, and I was no longer chasing the Lord of Love through the forest. Jeff didn’t find angry women attractive anymore, and I didn’t think I deserved to be rejected. He was so kind, so warm and calm, I was sure he would bore me. But I was sick of suffering. So I went out with him. He turned out to be the opposite of boring. He was the antidote to my chronic seriousness, helping me to see the sweet absurdity in it all and laugh at myself with genuine delight. A few years later, after discovering a passion and playfulness I had never known, I married him.

Here’s my theory about what works so well in my marriage. Jeff neither demands nor allows me to project my longing for God onto him, which leaves me free to pursue the divine relationship without inhibition. Unlike the pseudo-Krishnas of my past, Jeff does not pretend to be anything other than an ordinary man, and he does not require me to be Superwoman. Safe within the garden of this sane, solid friendship, my connection with the Holy One has blossomed. And when the intensity of my dance with the Beloved leaves me sated and exhausted, as it sometimes does, my human partner is my refuge, and I rest in him.

	My friend, the stain of the Great Dancer has penetrated my body.
		I drank the cup of music, and I am hopelessly drunk.
Moreover, I stay drunk, no matter what I do to become sober…
Every name He has is praise; that’s the cup I like to drink, and only that.
“The Great dancer is my husband,” Mira says, “rain washes off all the other colors.”

Mirabai

Romantic love is a relatively recent cultural development. Until the age of the troubadours, marriage was more a practical arrangement than an epic drama. It took care of the human need for comfort and connection, provided a safe structure around the powerful urge to reproduce, and helped society manage its resources.

In the Middle Ages, the innate fire of love that ignites the human imagination was mostly channeled to God. Francis of Assisi prayed till he wept tears of blood. Julian of Norwich was fiercely devoted to “God the Mother.” Meister Eckhart risked his life to glorify the absolute transcendence of the Godhead. The writings of mystics and contemplatives are as erotic as any contemporary love story. More so. The intimacy of a soul madly in love with God makes the sexual obsessions of our contemporary culture appear bland and superficial.

And yet spiritual love poetry seems to be embarrassing to our modern sensibilities. While we are likely to drop everything to tune into the latest episode of a nighttime soap opera, eager to hear who has slept with whose husband, we are quick to judge a masterpiece of mystical literature like The Living Flame of Love, by Teresa of Avila’s protégé, John of the Cross, to be insipid and immature. Spiritual passion is a dying art in our culture. Holy awe has become unpopular. We medicate our Fools of God.

In between my bad marriage and my good one, I dated a series of men named Michael. I was in recovery from the continuous dramas to which I had been subjected by my first husband, and I craved emotional detachment. I got what I wanted. Each of my three Michaels was skilled at withholding affection and deflating my enthusiasms. But it was Michael Number Two that almost broke my spirit, and ultimately gave me back myself.

I have always had a tendency to burst into epiphanies. The most ordinary moments become occasions for rapture. Michael Number Two wasted no time in calling these exalted experiences into question. He took it upon himself to sober me up and disabuse me of my illusions. When a sunset or a song on the radio would move me to tears, Michael would point out that the source of my feelings was more likely to be hormonal than divine. A realization about the nature of the masculine inside women and the feminine inside men would dazzle and delight me, only to be met by a lecture on Jungian psychology, the primary lesson being that my so-called insights were hardly original and were, in fact, entirely unsophisticated in light of subsequent research in brain science.

Michael truly believed he was doing me a great service every time he pulled the wings off the butterflies of my spiritual passion. He fed me on cynicism, hoping it would serve as the antidote to romantic delusion. I grew thin and bitter on this starvation diet. The day my mother pointed out that she no longer recognized me beneath the brittle shell of humorless sarcasm, I snapped to my senses, and my disguise crumbled. I rushed to the inner wine cellar and broke into the royal stash. I drank of my Beloved until I fell asleep, and when I woke, Michael was gone.

I have never held back my drunkenness again. A thousand things break open my heart and catapult me into the fire: the birth of a baby; the death of a baby; news of distant atrocities and evidence of local tragedies; my husband’s eyes closed in rapture across from me in the bathtub me; a poem about gratitude; a brown egg in the palm of my hand. I treasure each sacred insight, nurture every noble conviction, give thanks for being able to feel the suffering of the world inside my own body. Whenever the look of love on my dog’s face makes my heart surge with joy, I let the joy take me, and I wave from the window of that train, ready for any adventure.

Jeff is unconditionally supportive of my fiery heart, without being overly indulgent. When a story on Democracy Now! about extraordinary rendition and secret torture makes me cry in the middle of washing the dinner dishes, Jeff takes me in his arms and holds me, and when I finish weeping, he teases me without mercy. Sometimes, after I’ve given a talk or led a group meditation and felt that deep stillness fall over an entire room of people, I murmur in quiet joy as he drives me home. Jeff loves this about me: this weeping and this murmuring. I love this about me, too.

My husband knows that my longing for God far exceeds my longing for him. He takes comfort in this fact. It releases him from the impossible task of being Krishna, and allows him to be a man – a man who enjoys cheeseburgers and sex, mindfulness meditation and East Indian devotional music, his daughters and mine. In the Hindu tradition, our path is known as Householder Yoga, one of many valid trajectories to union with the Divine.

It is not the only way. Many never find this kind of partnership. Our pathologically romanticized culture makes single people feel like failures. We forget that solitude is the jewel contemplatives of every tradition have prized above all else. Undistracted by the uneasy blend of sensual satisfaction and petty irritation that characterizes most human couplings, single people can offer the fire of their yearning directly to God. Their aloneness becomes the fuel for their passage home.

Nor is this to say that human relationships do not sometimes serve as mirrors for the divine. My husband is a living reminder of the Beloved’s most beautiful attributes. As an interfaith minister I officiate weddings, and I witness the radiant presence of the Holy One every time two people stand before me, holding each other’s gaze as they slip the ring onto their loved one’s finger. I have melted into God a hundred times as I kissed a lover’s mouth, lost all sense of separation in the arms of men I no longer even like. And there’s nothing as reliable as a broken heart for rekindling our love-longing for the divine.

There is a story told about Saint Francis and Saint Clare. For years, Clare had begged Francis to share a meal with her, but, in light of the intensity of love between them, Francis was afraid it would be too intimate. Finally, he gave in and arranged a picnic in the woods outside Clare’s cloistered convent. As the two saints shared a loaf of bread and a handful of olives, the people in the village below saw the mountain go up in flames. They rushed up the slope to put the fire out, only to find Brother Francis and Sister Clare lost in ecstatic conversation about God.

One of the great paradoxes of the mystical path goes like this: the soul spends all her life longing for union with the Divine. And when at last she attains the object of her desire, she disappears into him. Completely. There is no one left to enjoy the reward. No distinction between lover and Beloved. There is only love.

The lover of God craves annihilation; she wants to become nothing. The lover of God desires only to lose himself in love, leaving no trace of a separate self. This longing is utterly illogical and totally out of control. It is all-consuming and it is all we really want. It is absurd, and it is our birthright.

Early on my spiritual quest, when I was meditating long hours, reading stacks of holy books, and eating a sparse vegetarian diet, I would sometimes wake in the middle of the night and have no idea who I was. Any sense of individualized identity was gone. Invariably, I would panic. After a moment, the force of adrenaline would call my ego to the rescue. I would rush back into myself like a tide pool filling with water. All the little creatures that live in my psyche would puff up and sigh with relief. Later, I would berate myself for my inability to be present in that blessed state of boundarylessness. I have spent the past thirty years trying to cultivate the emptiness that came so naturally when I was a teenager.

“God, whose love and joy are present everywhere,” said Angelus Silesius, “cannot come to visit you unless you are not there.”

Ultimately, we catch up with the fact that we are simply, gloriously, human. It seems that the secret to melting into the divine embrace lies somewhere buried beneath our shame about being too much, or not being enough. The surprise turns out to be that when we surrender at last to the perfection of our imperfection, the intractable ego we have so long disparaged lets out its breath and relaxes. Gradually, we discover that we can lull ourselves to sleep with nothing but the sweet song of acceptance. Acceptance of our brokenness, of our too-muchness, of our not-enoughness. And when the self is resting, we can slip away for a rendezvous with the Beloved in the Garden, where he is waiting. Where he has been waiting all along.

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