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Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. I hope persons of varied faith paths will find inspiration here. Please share this ministry with others, and please return soon. There is a new offering daily. And to be placed on the daily OneLife email list, to request notifications of new writings or submit prayer requests, write to briankwilcox@yahoo.com .
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader, Spiritual Counselor, and Chaplain.
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is called OneLife Ministries An Interspiritual Contemplative Fellowship. Hope to see you there. Blessings.
WISDOM SAYINGS
Implicit in
[mystical] contemplation is the concept of obedience; human life must be brought into conformity with a pre-existing divine harmony.
The pious gesture of genuflection captures the implication of this notion of contemplation.
*Ronald Rolhesier. The Shattered Lantern.
In the present order of things, divine providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which by men's efforts and even beyond their expectations are directed toward the fulfillment of God's superior and inscrutable designs.
*Words by which Pope John XXIII opened the Vatican Council, Oct. 11, 1961. In Thomas Merton. Life and Holiness.
SCRIPTURE
16Don't you know that you are slaves of anyone you obey? You can be slaves of sin and die, or you can be obedient slaves of God and be acceptable to him. 17You used to be slaves of sin. But I thank God that with all your heart you obeyed the teaching you received from me. 18Now you are set free from sin and are slaves who please God.
*Romans 6.16-18, CEV
Stop here ~ now, proceed by meditating prayerfully on the Romans passage. Okay, let us continue, together...
WISDOM STORY
A widow who was fond of cleaning had two little maidens to wait on her. She was in the habit of waking them early in the morning, at cockcrow. The maidens, aggravated by such excessive labor, resolved to kill the rooster who roused their mistress so early. When they had done this, they found that they had only prepared for themselves greater troubles, for their mistress, no longer hearing the hour from the rooster, woke them up to their work in the middle of the night.
*Aesop's Fables. Elbourne.org .
DEVOTIONAL THOUGHTS
Obedience is not popular today. In fact, persons often assume surrendering either to the Universal Spirit or to the authority of a human person is diminishing or a sign of weakness.
Gestures of the body can, indeed, reflect attitudes and postures of the heart. Rolhesier refers to the pious gesture of genuflection. Genuflection is the ritual of bending the knee or touching it to the ground or floor as an act of reverence or worship; also, such bending of knee can imply surrender in obedience. Rolheiser, while a progressive Catholic, still sees value in such a traditional gesture. Such, as he notes, reflects and confirms an attitude of surrender and obedience to the Divine. His concern is that growing un-popularity of this type of practice evidences a growing lack of spiritual concern for reverence and obedience. I would tend to agree with him.
Certainly, true Love implies sacrifice, an obedience to a higher order of Grace and Self-Giving for another's good. Thomas Merton, in Life and Holiness, writes, Love implies preference and preference demands sacrifice. And such sacrifice cannot be relegated to a special apparently spiritual domain separate from the contexts of relationships with other humans, and even responsibility to all Nature. To be obedient to God means an obedience in love to the other, the other whom I share oneness with in God. This means to each person and all creatures, for we each have our sacred role and nature within Nature.
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I live in a context of obedience in my service as Chaplain. I work in a jail. Many of the rules I do not understand. Inmates have many requests that would violate the rules. The rules provide me a structure of obedience to the good of the whole system. I can appeal to the policies of the jail and politely note that I cannot do what an inmate wants me to. I have told some inmates that on the outside I could and would do this for him or her, but not here. In this sense, the structure and logic of obedience frees me better to focus on my work; I do not find the obedience limiting, but liberating. Likewise, by obedience I am seeking the good of all, not just the advantage of one or a few. So, obedience can be a means wisely to love, rather than let wishes and impulses subjectively control decision-making.
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Obedience to the Divine rightly understood is a way of wisdom, not a staid rule thrust upon us by a higher Being who delights in seeing us suppress our native passion for action. Spiritual obedience is a means to channel wisely eros, or soul-energy, so that the life force will lead to freedom for not only ourselves, but for others. In this sense, obedience is loving and compassionate.
This makes obedience a profound communal rite, even when I am obeying only in what I might call a personal way. My act of obedience resonates within the entire communion of creaturely life forms. There is no individual, or individualized, obedience. Even as I sit in obedience in private devotions, an obedience to my vows, I am participating in a mysterious way for the good of all Nature, all creatures.
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Obedience, then, as Rolheiser notes, is within a "pre-existing divine harmony." We do not decide alone what is and is not obedience. Just imagine everyone on the roads in vehicles saying, I can make my own rules. Imagine them saying, I don't have to respect the law. Imagine them saying, I will do as I feel. Imagine them saying, If you tell me what I ought to do, that is violating my rights. Well, imagine that, and you get a picture of much Western civilization. And, also, you see what goes on inside many churches. Persons want the benefits, but not the compliance to sane terms of obedience to provide a context of blessing for all involved.
The harmony resultant of obedience is illustrated in the maidens killing the rooster. Everything has a sacred place in the divine-natural economy; everything must be respected for the good of the whole. A rock obeys by being a rock; you obey by being a human person. Indeed, you obey by being the person you are, not the person someone else is. When someone tries to get you to violate your own natural-divine person, then, they are saying, I want you to please me and be disobedient to your Source. Yet, again, this happens frequently in religion and in other contexts, as in families. Many children suffer as adults from the failed affirmation of parents in honoring the particular person of the son or daughter. Indeed, many adults only find who they really are after both parents die.
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I have a dear friend who has the heart of a poet. So, I encourage her to write. I affirm her writing. I let her know I am proud of her. What am I doing? I am respecting and enjoying her being who she is, and being the poet I see in her poetry. When we have spiritual love for someone, we delight in them obeying who they are, within the divine-natural gifts he or she is endowed with for the blessing of this world.
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The rock and you have designs of action within the entire divine Design. If anything goes awry in the economy through disobedience, as in a cancer cell or a person not "obeying" its natural place and action, the balance of the economy is upset and needs to be restored to integrity, or wholeness. Seen in this way, the Gospel shows us Jesus seeking to restore an original wholeness.
What are, in the words of Pope John XXIII, "God's superior and inscrutable designs"? We discover that only on the journey. Indeed, the path is realization of that through surrender to the overarching design, a design that calls forth our best by being both inscrutable and superior.
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Rolheiser writes, in The Holy Longing, the following sane reminder: Everyone worships at some shrine. The question of final obedience remains for each of us ~ and we have to make it daily, moment-by-moment even ~ , and the answer will be a matter of what we devote our lives to as warranting our time, attention, energy ~ that is, our obedience ~ : What shrine will I choose?
Spiritual obedience ~ and all healthy obedience is spiritual ~ is not a matter of obeying some rules just to please God or anyone else, or to be a good person, or to be a good Christian, or good Buddhist, or good Hindu, or good Muslim, or good citizen, or decent human, or ... Spiritual obedience is an actively-surrendered placing of oneself, in trust and by Grace, within the superior plan evolving out of the Mind and Heart of the Divine for the healing of all creation ~ including your healing.
SPIRITUAL EXERCISE
(1)How does the teaching on obedience above compare and contrast with teaching on obedience that you have been taught?
(2) Write out your own definition of obedience? What implications does this definition imply for your life?
© OneLife Ministries. Jan 23, 2010.
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*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis. While within the Christian path, he is an ecumenical-interspiritual teacher, author, and chaplain. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Jail, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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