"I once knew an Anglican priest who was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia, a tireless champion of racial equality. Yet he slept with a baseball bat next to his bed in his west Philadelphia house so that none of them would get in and steal his goods. We all live with this terrible, heart-breaking hypocrisy in Christianity, when the teaching finally leaves us in the dust. How do we die before we die? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we bridge the gap between what we believe and what we can actually live? I believe that Jesus does leave us with a path for getting across that gap. We will be exploring it very shortly; it's what this book is principally all about. But honesty begins with admitting the gap exists. The attempt to make the gap invisible, as in so much of Christianity — thinking that because we believe it or can preach about it or know where in the gospels it's written, therefore we can do it — only leads us further into denial. This path has been attained by only a very enlightened few, the St. Francises of the world, the Mother Teresas of the world. And when it's attained, it's always in the same way: by somehow managing to fall all the way through the egoic operating system, with its inherent rigidity and fear, into the fullness of love that can be known only in and through the heart."