Saying For Today: The more I know this Something, or Someone, the more outside yet within this world I discover this Something, or Someone, to be. I am both, thereby, drawn from words for the immediate knowing of this Lover, while drawn to words to attempt a witness of this Unwordable Word.
*Brian Wilcox. 'Pure Love ~ A Rose on a Winter Day'.
Coming to the end of another year of posting writings, I see I write so much about love, possibly partly for I felt so unloved much of my life. This not for love was not present, for Love, my Friend, appeared to me as a child, and I felt the truth of being unconditionally and freely loved, and I felt the freedom and peace when I said "Yes." Later, I looked in the wrong places and, possibly too, I had not learned how well to receive love. If we are shown this love, we have to grow into the capacity to welcome it. Having met it, we learn how to live with it and allow it to live through us. So, really, this has long been my only message, and the only I need to share and wish to share, and live. May it be so! For once I had met this Lover, I was forever the captive of unspeakable Grace, and could only seek to live with and from Grace and forgive myself when I appeared to fail to do so. Thankfully, I am still learning how to say "Yes" to the "Yes" spoken within and upon me as a child. And, thankfully, at age 59, I no longer live in a sense of being unloved or not loved enough. Love is simply, always present, offering all of Itself to me, to you, and, I now know, to everyone in Its fullness as presence and mystery; even when we cannot receive the Lover loving, the Lover never withholds Itself from anyone. I pray to trust this Love, now in this body, and beyond and, thereby, to serve while in this body and then without this body.
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More and more, now even more than ever before drawn silently into this mute Mystery more and more into the living Silence my resting awake in this Something, or Someone, I cannot name only reply love with love in this Temple of Quiet
And is this not the same Beloved I met, loved, was loved by when a little child ~
Yes, You! still You as then, now, always?
Is not my wish still, more now than then, to be a vessel through which in word and act You pour Yourself out upon this world in the intoxication of beauty and bliss?
Having tasted You, again and again, how could I wish or be otherwise, my Lover, my Friend?
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Yes, You! My Lover, My Friend."
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A pastor was asked by a congregate, who came to him with Holy Bible in hand and angst in voice, "They're some things in this Holy Bible that do not seem loving to me. What do I do about those scriptures?" Replied the pastor, to the befuddlement of the other, "Well, if something in any Scriptures is unloving, seems there are two sensible options." "What are those?" came the reply. "Either keep it in and ignore it or cut it out and throw it away." This, too, befuddled the congregate. "But," the congregate asked, started that any pastor would say such and pointing downward at the Bible in his hand, "Isn't the Bible inspired by God?" To this, the pastor inquired, "If God is Love, how can Love inspire anything not loving, so not of Love?"
Video can be played on original site, which can be accessed below via upper left artist-title...
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I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love ... I sought what I might love, in love with loving.
*Augustine of Hippo
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Doris Grumbach, in her 20s had an experience of the Divine Presence that stunned her into belief in God. She, in her The Presence of Absence, tells of the experience, which she knew to be the presence of God, though an atheist Marxist and never having had belief in God. This led her into a five-decade plus search to recapture the initiatory epiphany.
Grumbach says, in a letter to a friend, regarding her search and about love...
You question whether it is possible for anyone to know "the pure love of God." Good Lord, did I ever say I hoped to know it? I must have, or you would not be questioning me. I rarely if ever associate "love" with what I am seeking to recapture or experience again. I have avoided the word because it seemed presumptuous to me. I wanted to sense God’s presence, but I found it very hard to believe He loved me, or returned my affection for Him. Purity of anything, especially love, is an absolute I have never believed in.
I have experienced a like revelation of Divine Presence, and on a number of occasions since a child. Two of these stand out, one at age 9, one in my early 40s. On both occasions what was central to the meeting was the sense of the pure love felt and known in the body and around me, the pure love that Grumbach spoke of not believing in, though she sought God. Yet, I cannot separate the experience of the Sacred apart from the fact that this Presence is Itself Love and loving.
Apart from the experience directly of this pure love and pure Lover, I see pure love everywhere. I often, likewise, feel this pure love. How can one not see it everywhere? Feel it often? Know it as true? And is love itself not pure? And where arises this pureness? How not from Love Itself ~ what I, as others, sometimes refer to as the Beloved?
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Now, how do I refer to this Lover? This cannot merely be It, or He, or She, for so much more, these being only pointers to Something, or Someone, before and beyond all our divisions into word and thought and name and title. The more I know this Something, or Someone, the more outside yet within this world I discover this Something, or Someone, to be. I am both, thereby, drawn from words for the immediate knowing of this Lover, while drawn to words to attempt a witness of this Unwordable Word. When will the Lover guide me to let all the words rest, and I rest wordless in the Word, nothing more to be said of this Something, or Someone?
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The Quaker comedic writer, Philip Gulley, in Book 1 of Home to Harmony, writes with humor but, as he is skilled, to share a vital truth to our communal and self well-being, and in regards to this we call love and naturally wish to share in all its innocence and grace ...
We drove on, pondering a no-meat future. A bleak prospect.
A few miles further, my father asked, "Why would a man wear an earring?" "Probably for the same reason a man pretends to be a Quaker," I told him.
"For crying out loud," he said.
We don’t think people will love us as we are, so we pretend to be someone we’re not.
My father pretending to be a Quaker.
Roger making believe he’s a vegan.
Wrinkled women lifting their faces, chasing their youth.
Fat men sucking in bellies.
Poor folks putting on airs.
Sinners acting like saints.
All of us keeping pace with our companions, stepping lively in this dance of deceit.
It is so hard, in this world, to be who we are.
My mother reached across and rubbed my father’s shoulder. She said, "I’d have married you whether you were a Quaker or not."
"Really?" he asked.
"Really," she said.
"How come?" he asked.
"Because you’re worth loving," she told him.
My father blushed.
"For crying out loud," he said. "For crying out loud."
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Is it not amazing, how Love shows up in the most simple ways, and possibly most sensed and felt when we know we are loved, not for whom someone thinks we should have been or ought to be or can be, but for whom we are now? Such is the innocence and gracefulness of pure love, the pure gift Grace always is.
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Recently, sitting with a friend and listening, I was asked, "Does the pastor have any advice to give?" This was said with humor, she knowing I am not a pastor anymore ~ have not been for a decade. I thought, and the response was I had no advice to give, she did not need my advice. Still, in the being-with, the heart-with-heart, and listening ~ not just hearing ~, while consciously putting my thoughts aside, as I reflected on this later, I realized the beauty of the pure love of that action of loving. Yes, pure love is showing up everywhere. Yes, when we truly are being-with someone, are truly listening to him or her, that is pure love manifesting, becoming. This pure love finds us, then, through its expression in the other, as other communes with other spirit-with-spirit. So, for me to be receptive to the love of the Sacred, I must be receptive to the pure love arising to meet me and join with me through and from the other. While I have lived, and do live, much of my life in solitude, even in solitude I have found a communion with the other that is pure love, for pure love does not necessitate being in physical proximity, for heart-with-heart is free of the confines within which lives the physical body.
As with my friend, and she with me, ~ for pure love arises within the Withinness formed between and among ~ I find a sufficient means to be the means of the expressing of pure love. That is, to realize in myself, the human being aspect, I cannot often or consistently ~ possibly never ~ offer pure love to anyone, anything. Yet, when I relax the body, with the mind, and enter into a being-with, then pure love is seen to be already present. So, I do not have to be concerned, "Can I love purely?" For pure love arises from the Beloved, the Lover, and it is wonderful that we see this Mystery in diverse ways, as long as through our seeing we are led into the openness to be a channel of this loving Grace loving. Then, Love happens, not for I give love, but Love gives Love, so loves.
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Such is the destiny of the person who thinks
she can escape the embrace of Love
She runs Love giving her Grace to run
She runs Love holding her hand each hurried step of the Way
She runs to run into those same open Arms when exhausted with the futile fleeing
Yes, Love waits always there, always present ~ with her
for Love can do no other than Love ~ yes you yes everyone
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Into Open Arms, Again."
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Video can be played on original site, which can be accessed below via upper left artist-title...
