From the Introduction

There is nothing more important, I believe, for the future of the mystical renaissance that is struggling to be born everywhere in the West—and thus for the future of the planet—than an authentic and unsparing recovery of the full range, power, and glory of the Christian mystical tradition. Without such a recovery the spiritual life of the West will continue to be a superficial, narcissistic and sometimes lethal mixture of a watered down or fanatical pseudo-Christianity, hardly understood "eastern" metaphysics and regressive Occultism—and the great radical potential of such a renaissance will go unlived and unenacted, with disastrous consequences for every human being and for all of nature.

What is needed is the flaming-out, on a global scale, of an unstoppable force of Divine-human love wise enough to stay in permanent humble contact with the Divine and brave enough to call for, risk, and implement change at every level and in every arena before time runs out and we destroy ourselves. Such a love has to spring from an awakened mystical consciousness and must be rooted in habits of fervent meditation, adoration of the Divine, and prayer; for only then will it be illuminated enough to act at all times with healing courage, and strong enough to withstand the ordeals and torments that are inevitable. Teilhard de Chardin wrote, "Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, . . . we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." Unless humankind discovers this fire, and uses it to burn away everything that blocks the changes that must come in order to transform the planet into the mirror of divine beauty it is meant to be, it will die out and take most of nature with it.

At the core of Christ's enterprise is an experience of this fire and the revolutionary passion of charity that blazes from it. This passion, as Christ knew and lived it, cannot rest until it has burnt down all the divisions that separate one human heart from another and so from reality. No authority except that of the Divine, is sacred to it; no dogma, however hallowed, that keeps oppression of any kind alive can withstand the onslaught of its flame. All of human experience, personal and political, is arraigned and exposed by it. It demands of everyone who approaches it a loving and humble submission to its fierce, mind and heart shattering power and a commitment to enact its laws of radical compassion and hunger for justice in every arena. Its aim is the irradiation of all of life with holy and vibrant energy and truth, so that as many beings as possible can live, here on earth and in the body, in a direct relationship with God, each other, and nature, in what Saint Paul unforgettably calls "the glorious liberty of the Children of God."

Many forces, even within the "Christian" world, block the unleashing of this "glorious liberty." Anyone who comes to feel even a small spark of the heat of this fire may look in vain to find any of its truth in the churches that claim to keep it alive. Fundamentalism of any kind is alien to its adoration of freedom and its all-embracing love of all beings and all creation; the narrow judgmental ethics that disfigure all denominations of Christianity represent precisely that separation that Christ himself wanted to end forever. Most Western seekers are refugees from hypocritical, patriarchal, misogynistic, and homophobic versions of Christ's message that are tantamount to perverse, even demonic, betrayals of it. The great mystical treasures of all the Christian traditions have been largely ignored for centuries even in the monastic institutions that might have kept them alive. With such a grim prospect, it is hardly surprising that many seekers continue to project onto Christ and his teachings only what they learned from suffering the mutilation of both by the churches. The majority of Westerners interested in spiritual transformation and aware of its necessity know very little about the Christian mystics; they know more about the Hindu or Sufi or Buddhist mystical traditions than about the one that is the hidden and glorious secret of their own civilization. Many more have read the Bhagavad Gita or Rumi than have read Ruusbroec or Jacopone da Todi or Saint John of the Cross; many more have practiced vipassana or bhakti yoga than have attempted the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola or than have prayed the Jesus Prayer with Symeon the New Theologian and Nicephorus the Solitary. The result is that the explosive force of Christ's subversion of all forms of authority and all forms of worldly power goes largely unnoticed, and a vast power for fundamental change on every level goes unused.

This is a tragedy because, of all the mystic pioneers of humanity, Christ is in almost every way the most daring and demanding and the most concerned with the brutal facts of this world. His living out of his enlightenment and his realization of his fundamental unity with God has an unique urgency, a poignantly wild passion, and a hunger for justice that make him the hero of love in the human race. Christ came not to found a new religion or to inaugurate a new set of dogmas but to open up a fierce and shattering new path of love-in-action, a path that seems now, with the hindsight of history the one that could have saved—and still could save—humanity from its course of suicidal self-destruction.

At the moment when the patriarchy was beginning its long, dark triumph in the form of the Roman Empire, Christ revealed and enacted a way of being completely subversive to all of its beliefs and "truths." To a world obsessed by power, he offered a vision of the radiance of powerlessness and the powerful vulnerability of love; to a culture riddled with authoritarianism, false pomp, and greed he gave a vision of the holiness of inner and outer poverty and a critique of the vanity and horror of all forms of worldly achievement so scalding that most of his own followers have contrived every means imaginable to ignore it. To a society arranged at every level into oppressive hierarchies—sexual, religious, racial, and political—he presented in his own life, a vision of a radical and all-embracing egalitarianism designed to end forever those dogmas and institutions that keep women enslaved, the poor starving, and the rich rotting in a prison of selfish luxury. In his own life, he showed what the new life this path would open up to everyone who risked its rigors would be like—how free and tender and brave and charged with healing ecstatic power. Faithful always to the humble egalitarianism of his understanding of divine love, he refused all the glamour of sagedom, constantly undermining all of the fantasies that others tried to project onto him, and he finally embraced horrible and humiliating suffering on the Cross to break through into that dimension of Resurrection and cosmic life from which he continues to guide, enflame, and inspire all who turn to him.