The search for enlightenment, fulfillment, happiness, even success — it is all inspired by one driving need: the longing for love. The most potent motivator of all is the longing for Divine Love, for this is the source of all other loves.
In Apprentice of the Heart, Guy Finley takes us along on his own journey to Divine Love. He begins by explaining the essence of love, in all its many forms. Then, in melodic prose punctuated by soaring poetry, he offers a spiritual seeker's journal, prepared during a critical period in the awakening process.
This revealing work conveys, like no other, the yearning, the passion, the disappointment, and the moments of sweet fulfillment met by every traveler along this higher path. In the valuable final chapter, the author takes a practical turn and explains how all of us, regardless of what we wish to pursue in life, can find the love that enriches each moment and insures the ultimate attainment of one's true desire.
Excerpt From the Book What This Book Is About In Less Than A Few Heartbeats
Seated in the center of the heart, as surely as the essence of a tiny seed holds the promise of a towering tree, lives within us the Presence of a Power that can dispel any gathering darkness and change what is unkind into conscious compassion. What is this great Presence and Power lying latent within us? It is Love. No matter who we are, all of us have known some kind of love in our lives. Love has as many forms on this earth as there are human hearts to reflect and reveal her countless expressions. There is the love we may feel for objects and places, the love we know through relationships with those closest to us, and there is the love of excellence, of natural beauty, and of all things shining bright with unfulfilled promise. But as stirring, fine, and noble as these loves may be, they tell but a small part of a much greater story hidden from plain sight, yet evident to those with "eyes to see"; for just as radiant energy from the sun, which is not the sun itself, reaches down into creation to animate all of its myriad forms, so is it true that behind and above the everyday loves we have known there dwells an abiding Love of a far greater magnitude; an unseen and supernal Love whose emanations make all other loves possible. It is this higher, Divine Love that teaches us about love in all its forms, initiating us into the mysteries of our own heart by gently wiping away the borders that stand between our love and our beloved, so that two become as one. Beethoven, Rembrandt, Curie, and Einstein — these and other great souls didn't so much master their respective arts, as much as a great love for their art served to master them. Love educates whoever will embrace her. So it can be for us; to become masters of our own lives we need only learn how to let Love master us. Apprentice of the Heart is a seven-year chronicle — the story of a beautiful and mysterious dialogue between the author and his Beloved — Divine Love "herself", who —as he reports, "stole into his heart and then ran away with it." In very personal tones this book touches upon dozens of delicate lessons that are part of our preparation for Love; through them we are helped to realize a timeless Love without whose relationship we cannot hope to know the inner wholeness that is happiness itself. But what are these lessons? Each heartache, every disappointment, all crowning moments by which we win or lose the object of our desire —that at the time seem the very summit or valley of our lives — each such moment is but one small step along the path that Love has prepared for us to learn her Ways. And that all of us share in these kind of everyday experiences — whose touch deftly transforms our collective heart — proves the point: the Divine Love of which we speak is not meant only for elected sages and hallowed saints. If this were true, then we would have nothing within us to recognize the glow of that small ember in our hearts toward whose warmth and faint light we are drawn. So be assured that where there is an ember, there can also be a flame. And that by the light of such a fire burning in each of our hearts, if we so will it, our world can be as the Divine intended it to be: a realm of reality that has realized the promise and the fulfillment of Love itself. —Guy Finley
Endorsements His love and his passion give wings to his words, and the reader is lifted up to a whole new realm — a rarified region of the soul . . . a very beautiful piece of work and will no doubt be read for many generations to come.
—Joseph Polansky, Diamond Fire Magazine