Consciousness awakens in much same way, doesn't it? One moment, everything is dark and still. Growth begins and we are excited by movement and its vibrant promise of what is to come.

I have a sense of our world awakening to peace: not a blind pretense that we are coming up roses, but a soul-deep vision of seeds of peace within us, just waiting for warmth and light needed for them to flourish. In quiet stillness of centering prayer and meditation, we connect with this warmth and light, and become it. Our joy sweeps across green valleys and white-clouded blue mountains kiss sky.

That's how it was for Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Mohammed, Mother Theresa, Buddha and so many others who became our great peacemakers. They were divinely illuminated in silence and carried this peaceful inner light back into our world.

I remember power of this impulse in 1960s and see it taking hold again today, as people tire of war and destruction. It is a telling co-incidence that Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ" comes along now to rip away veils concealing our brutality. When people see in this movie raw atrocity of violence, and know it for monster that it is, then perhaps we will begin to reject it on our airwaves and refuse war in our lives and as a nation.

This awakening to peace is deeply needed in our suffering country, and I believe our silent prayers have brought an opportunity to choose a new symbol of who we are, in U.S. Department of Peace. It is an impulse whose time has come, for within it is potential to shift consciousness of war to peace.

Decades ago, I saw a metaphysical movie that wonderfully illustrates alchemical power of love. In "The Enchanted Cottage," a homely, self-effacing maid and a blind, crippled war hero fall in love. She blossoms into an attractive, self-confident woman and he into a charming, handsome country gentleman, both happier than ever before.

Oliver and Laura ascribe their transformation to legendary enchanted cottage, but one day, its spell is broken by pitying comments of people who see them as ugly and broken. The magic disappears until a magnificent tone poem played on piano by a composer friend opens their eyes to true alchemy in every life: beauty and music of love.

Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn't it? Yet this is exactly what happens in romantic love. The world is suddenly beautiful, and we laugh open-heartedly in joy, walking on air. In Buddhist psychology, this is a state of "attraction." Its opposite, "aversion," disenchants us from love.

Life is precisely what we make of it, isn't it? Love resides within each heart, waiting to be recognized as transformer that it is: an infinitely powerful vibrational expression of One Word, literally "uni-verse." This transcendent viewpoint, with its singular quality of attraction, makes it easy to love without conditions or expectations, and to forgive and forget what is said and done by others, if we so choose. Love, a tone poem, makes life beautiful and harmonious.