Love is the most powerful force in the universe, and for centuries mystics have understood the transformative potential of divine Love.

Love draws us back to Love, Love uncovers Love, Love makes us whole and Love takes us home. In the depths of the soul we are loved by God.

This is the deepest secret of being Human, the bond of Love that is at the core of our being. And yet we have forgotten this essential nature of our being; we are hidden from our own deepest Love.

The mystical path is an uncovering of this Love, an awakening to our own capacity to love and be loved.

Like everything that is created, Love has a dual nature, positive and negative, masculine and feminine. The masculine side of Love is ‘I love you.’ The feminine side of Love is ‘I am waiting for you; I am longing for you.’

For the mystic it is the feminine side of Love, the longing, the cup waiting be filled, that takes us back to God. Longing is a highly dynamic state and yet at the same time it is a state of receptivity.

Because our culture has for so long rejected the feminine we have lost touch with potency of longing.

Many people feel this pain of the heart and do not know its value; they do not know that it is their innermost connection to Love.

The mystical path of Love may begin with making a relationship with one’s inner light, but the mystic is drawn on a deeper journey toward Love’s greatest secret: that within the heart we are one with the divine.

The fire of mystical Love is a burning which destroys all sense of a separate self, until nothing is left but Love itself.

While the spiritual seeker is drawn to the light of this fire, the mystic is the moth consumed by it’s flames.

Rumi, Love’s greatest mystical poet, summed up his whole life in two lines:

And the result is not more than these three words
I burnt, and burnt, and burnt.

The truth of mystical Love is one of humanity’s great heritages. It should not be confused with its cousin, spiritual life.

The moth who feels the warmth of the fire is on a very different journey to the moth drawn into the flames themselves.

The mystical path of Love takes us into the center of the heart where this mystery of Love takes place.

Initially this Love is often experienced as longing, a deep desire for God, the Beloved, Divine Truth, or simply an unexplained ache in the heart.

Mystics are lovers who are drawn toward a Love in which there is no you or me, but only the oneness of Love itself. And they are prepared to pay the ultimate price to realize this truth: the price of themselves.

In the words of the Christian mystic Hadewych of Antwerp:

Those who were two, at first,
are made one by the pain of love

He is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.

But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.