One Light, One Spirit: a Guide for Transformed Living

Publisher Marketing: Although the sun is the source of life on Earth, we cannot observe its radiance directly because of the damage it would cause our eyes. However, when safely seen through a prism, sunrays dazzle with their brilliant colors, from brightest yellow to deepest purple - a rainbow in miniature form. Religions are like that. Just as the one light reveals many colors, so the one Spirit animates a wide variety of religions, resulting in different spiritual colorations or vibratory tones. We can interpret this to mean that each religion has a certain mission and purpose to fulfill with respect to the people to whom its teachings are initially given. In a word, there is no false religion, just as a foreign tongue is not a false language, a different route is not a false pathway and a blooming weed is not a false flower. Based on such knowing, elevating one religion over another would be equivalent to saying that one color is more true than others. To insist that only one color of the entire palette is genuine places a terrible limitation on the creative powers of Life. To do so is, in fact, a serious misinterpretation of the Divine. Rather, the great Mystery, the unbroken Wholeness, the inseparable Oneness is the underlying reality of all religions. And each religion is an opportunity for transforming lives. And every one of them can guide us back to the abode of Love from which we originated - a place, according to T. S. Eliot's famous phrase, that will be truly known to us only when we complete the great cycle, with no limits placed on the time required. Meanwhile, with Oneness as the underlying reality of existence, there is no place where the Creative Spirit cannot be found. Nor is there any point where it is not fully accessible. For, as Scriptures remind us, it is in God that we live and move and have our being! Because of this, there is truth in the smallest particle of creation. In humans it can be discovered deep within as the truth of our being. It is not something abstract, but immanent and intimate, the life of the spirit within us. The passage to it can sometimes be hidden by fear, lie buried under mountains of denial and pain, or made inaccessible by self-forgetting. But just as no tyrant or system can kill an idea, so nothing can eradicate the truth, the spirit within us. We exist simultaneously in a visible and an invisible world. Gravity holds together the visible, Love the invisible. Love and spirituality are synonymous. To be spiritual or loving means to wake up and consciously strive to be what we already unconsciously are: one with all. To be spiritual or loving means to be whole and authentic. When we have reached that stage, we have made the shift from self-interest to self-sharing, from wanting to get to needing to give. We have become committed to something greater than ourselves. Spirituality, in other words, moves us beyond our ego and its agenda, beyond our little self with its insatiable cravings, its thirst for control, its fearful attachments and grinding competitiveness, into the spacious realm with room and sustenance for all. It endows us with the power of goodwill, compassion and generosity, as well as the gift of feeling at home everywhere and with anyone, while celebrating our common humanity. Enhancing the relational, spirituality thus unites us with the community of all beings, while heightening our sense of responsibility to the Whole. Above all, spirituality calls us to reclaim the sacred in our lives and live mindfully, caringly. The 14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart recognized, "The more spiritual a thing, [or act] the more inclusive and thus universal it becomes." This potential for inclusiveness and universality can serve as an inspirational blueprint no less in our time. We live in a fractured and wounded world in desperate need of spiritual healing. One Light, One Spirit is meant to be a source for the in-depth work required to birth a more humane and generous way of life.