The Way of Love

There are many spiritual paths offered us in life. Some promise therapeutic relief from burdens of sorrow and anxiety. Others achievements of consciousness and the wonders of psychic states. There are forms of spirituality that promise power and gifts, prophecy and knowledge. The Holy Spirit, however, offers another way.

This new way on which the Holy Spirit leads passes across these other paths. It knows relief from anxiety and many other rich spiritual experiences. It is strewn with many gifts, prophecies and kinds of knowledge. A certain stature is realized. An inner strength acquired. A beautiful wisdom grows. Yet none of this is the destination that the Breath of God gently blows us toward or the ultimate purpose for which this Furnace of Love burns within. The vanishing points to which the Soul of our Soul raises us, calls us, and directs us reach out to an unfathomable unity of love. The Creator Spirit etches us into a window through which heaven comes. He forms the clay of our humanity to become a resting place for the Living God. He breathes on us until we are covered with divine life and intimately bound to it. Our Advocate, He floats the light of truth into the deep crevices of our hearts as we ponder the Scriptures so that we might renounce what is not worthy of our dignity and glow with warmth in this cold world. He washes over us through our fasting and prayer until we are purified of anything that might betray the friendship that we are meant to know. Finally, after we are made mature through the difficult trials and challenges of loving those entrusted to us, this Anointing from Above makes us shine with the Light of Christ as if we were icons surrounding the sanctuary of God's presence. Then, when fully having realized in our own personal freedom the unique and unrepeatable creature God has delighted in from before the foundation of the world, we will have become a communion of living signs whose joy - the limits of time and space are too small, whose peace - nothing in the heavens or on the earth or under the earth can diminish, whose love - death has no power to end.