“Serve the Cosmic Christ”
Whether You Are Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist….

In my last post I offered the three things that – whether you are a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Catholic or a Protestant or a Taoist or an atheist–will change your life with the realization of this new evolutionary energy that was birthed by Jesus. First, we all have to realize that it is one minute to midnight. We don’t have time to take a less glorious adventure. Second, any deep meditation on Jesus and the path that he offers will show you that this is not an easy path. This great birth is only going to happen if we engage in naked truth with an evolutionary path that is going to burn us down before it re-creates us.

And third is the experience that birthed sacred activism, an experience of Jesus as the Cosmic Christ, inviting the whole of humanity, beyond religion, into the fiery cauldron of an alchemical evolutionary transformation.

And I want to end this series of posts with that experience, because it goes to the core of the evolutionary enterprise of our brother and my beloved, Jesus. These four words that I’m going to share with you are, for me, the key to this great evolutionary path. If the global soul that is being born now does not hear the voice of the Christ making its illuminations scaldingly real in action, it will be yet another abortion. Because until all of these tremendous understandings are focused in action to preserve this planet, we will not be completely real.

So Jesus isn’t the one who established a religion in his name, claiming that all the others were false. Jesus is the one who went up to all of the greatest masters, before and since, and respectfully bowed to them and said, “And how does this illumination change the horror and madness and injustice of this world? How do we birth this? Get real.”

When Bede was dying, half of his mind had been totally shattered, and the other half had been opened up to the divine in such a way that he became the vehicle for cryptic koans that those who were around him cherished like diamonds, because we knew that at this last stage of his life, this man who was being transfigured into the Living One was receiving direct dictation from the divine. We knew it because it was obvious. And one night I was sitting by his bedside and holding his hands, speaking tenderly to him. And suddenly, naked in his bed, he sat up. He looked at the door, and it seemed that someone very extraordinary, perhaps even the One himself, was there in the door, because his face was lit up with an ecstasy not of this world. And I was almost frightened because to be in the presence of such holiness is a very frightening thing.

And then he said again and again and again and again four words that sum up, I believe, our whole evolutionary moment. He said: “Serve the growing Christ. Serve the growing Christ. Serve the growing Christ. Serve the growing Christ.” And because grace was flowing like a torrential river all around that holy moment, I knew that he meant four related things. I knew he meant, “Andrew and everybody who’s listening, everybody who can listen, serve the Christ growing in you.” Serve the divine human trying to be born in you, in your heart, mind, soul, and body. Give everything to that discovery and give everything to its birth.

I knew he was also saying, “Serve the growing divine human in others.” Know that everyone you meet now, black or white, Hindu or Buddhist or Taoist or lesbian, cabaret dancer in Rio, all of us are all together in a vast alchemical cauldron of transformation in which we will either be transfigured or die out. And serve the divine human that is trying to be born in all beings. Serve it with your passion, serve it with your wisdom, serve it with your vulnerability, serve it with your heartbreak, and serve it with your action.

And the third thing he meant, I believe, was “Serve the Christ force as it tries magnificently to unravel all the patriarchal forms of domination and exploitation.” Serve it, be brave, stand up, witness, claim your prophetic courage, speak truth to power, because it needs you to join with it, to birth it in all the arts, sciences, economics, politics, and institutions of the planet, so that we can avoid extinction and bring in the birth.

And the fourth meaning was one that I had not been prepared for, so it shattered my mind open and my heart. The fourth meaning is, “And serve the growing Christ in the universe”—in the universe. St. Paul talks of the pleroma, the unimaginable moment in which the whole universe will be gathered up into origin consciously. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of epektasis, the endless expansion of authentic transformation. Teilhard  gave us this astounding vision of the whole universe becoming one with Omega Point in a totally differentiated unity in which all things realize their divine uniqueness and their divine origin, together in a final marriage of East and West, in a final consummate union with the total transcendent.

What I understood, my friends, at that moment, was that the Christ path is about the birth of a divine, embodied humanity acting out its truth in sacred activism on an earth so devastated but so open for that action that the very terms of life in nature and in matter will be altered by this transformation. And that will mean that the altering of those terms in nature and in us will have a massive ripple effect throughout the entire interconnected universe. Which is why it is so important at this moment to see who Jesus really is, to see who the Cosmic Christ really is, to listen to the radical challenge of radical embodiment and passionate enlightenment that he holds out to us, and to get down and to get going right now.