Chapter 2

Passion

Spiritual Passion

—Andrew Harvey

You cannot have an evolutionary vision of love without an authentic, powerful, inspiring vision of God as evolutionary. The two go together. One of the greatest tragedies of our long religious exploration is how we have abandoned the passionate, ever-becoming, creative side of the Divine—the relational side, the experimental side, the side that is inventing new possibilities at every moment—in favor of a static, ethereal and privatized vision of God and of enlightenment. This old vision of the Divine as separate, as peaceful, as purely transcendent, as outside the world, to be connected with through the loneliness of the achieved solitude of the seeker, is now being detonated by the single greatest force in the Universe, which is the Divine Feminine. The Mother has seen that unless she returns to us in full embodied majesty, outrage, passion, and beauty, we will not be able to evolve into the next stage of our evolution, because our evolution depends on being united with the passionate force of creative love that is the Mother’s supreme nature and the gift of the Mother to us.

What we now need is an evolutionary vision of God as the sacred marriage between opposites, the dance of opposites in the One. Unless the full majesty of the transcendent Father and the full majesty of the embodied Mother are brought together and felt and experienced together, we will never be completely human and never be completely divine. We will never know love as the primordial, evolutionary force of the Universe, grounded in, and emanated from, the eternal light. This is the force that we must align with in our love relationships to help us evolve the Divine in us and the Divine in the world.

Four lines by the great Hindu mystic, Kabir, who lived in Benares, India, in the fifteenth century, express this dynamic, evolutionary relationship with the evolutionary force of God. Kabir had a complete realization of the Father/Mother beyond religion and knew himself born into embodied, divine humanity in the center of life. He wrote these four lines, which, for me, are the ultimate celebration of the evolutionary love force. He says,

My Father is the Transcendent Absolute,

and my Mother is the Embodied Godhead,

and I am their Divine Child,

dancing for them both on their burning dance floor.

When you really unpack those lines, you see and feel what a complete human divine life is. First Kabir says, “My father is the Transcendent Absolute”—the infinite light, the unborn and undying light that is the source of all things, while always transcending them. Knowing this “Father” side of the Divine is to know that in your depth you are one with its deathless, serene and blissful consciousness. Knowing this only, however, is not enough. It is one side of the relationship to God, and it is foundational and essential; it’s the side, as I’ve said, that brings you great peace. But without great passion, peace will make you passive, just as without great peace, great passion will make you hysterical and de-ranged.

Kabir goes on to say, “My Mother is the Embodied Godhead.” The Mother is the force of radiant love passion that arises from the heart of the Godhead and creates the Universe and lives in the Universe in all of its particulars. When you acknowledge the Father, the origin, as the eternal, spacious, peaceful light, but also know that’s not enough to enter into your full human divinity, what’s required then is to plunge into the molten, fiery, creative passion of the Mother to unite that passion with the great peace. Then you become what Kabir says he is in the third line: “I am their Divine Child. Dancing for them both on their burning dance floor.”

Evolutionary love is a dancing with the essential nature of this evolutionary God. It is at once profoundly peaceful and profoundly passionate, deeply solitary, and absolutely engaged with relationship on every level. These paradoxes come together in the nature of The One.

When Kabir says, he is dancing on the Mother/Father’s burning dance floor, you get the edge, the excitement, the adventure, the madness, and the urgency of the authentic evolutionary adventure, because as Kabir makes clear, this dimension we must live it out in is burning. It’s burning in time, it’s burning in suffering, it’s burning in endless change. And it’s continually vanishing, so unless we commit ourselves urgently to embody these paradoxes, these opposites, the dance floor will burn away before we can claim and enact our truest, most liberated life.

What Kabir is giving us in these four lines is the image of where sacred relationship is truly born, through unity of peace and passion. As I’ve said, and I cannot say it often or richly enough, we will not be able to get to the authentic, empowering, passion-inducing, passion-inspiring vision of an evolutionary God unless we embrace the full Sacred Feminine as well as the true Sacred Masculine. There cannot be a marriage that builds the sacred power of the Universe in our life without a full return of the power, beauty, ecstasy, and intensity, of the love of the Mother for everything that she has created out of herself, because she lives within everything that she has created.

The great gift of this return of the Mother is passion, and it is the crucial need of our time. The patriarchal traditions have demonized passion as part of their extinction of the Divine Feminine. This degradation of the Divine Feminine has made those who experience passion, and who want to express passion, feel as if they are not holy. They are called “crazy,” “hysterical,” because what the patriarchy wants is a privatized god, an off-planet god to whom you can attune your whole being peacefully while serving the death machine that the patriarchy has created all over the world.

The return of the passion of the Mother, that is at once a passion for life and a passion for the service and work of healing compassion and justice that protect life, makes available to the human race both a revolutionary energy of empowered protest, an energy of “No!” to all the forces that are killing life, and a vast, creative “Yes!” to all the forces of divine tenderness and passion that are now trying to flood us, to help us wake up out of our coca-coma and galvanize our inner lives, galvanize our relationships, so that we can step up to the great task of saving the human race from extinction and enabling the great plan of God to go forward.

When divine passion is released and experienced at the heart of authentic evolutionary relationship and married to the passion burning at the heart of sacred activism—the passion for justice, for the preservation of the creation, for the birth of a humanity united by respect and compassion and embrace of diversity—all the now scattered and divided powers of love will come into unity and birth in all those initiated by grace into the power of this marriage an unstoppable, revolutionary, all-transforming force that, even at this late, tragic moment, can transform apocalypse into the birthing-ground of a new world.