One Love Making

The Mystical Marriage

Feb 4, 2010

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, and others, will find inspiration here.

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.

The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it, from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love, because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life.

*Thomas Merton

And we are certain that for those who love the Universal Spirit, all things fit together for good, for those called to fit in the universal design of that One.

*Roman 8.28

Our lives are designed within a universal design. We are on a transient stage, but with an eternal Purpose. As long as we identify ourselves with actors and stage, we cannot appreciate the Great Plot, which gives our lives wondrous meaning. We get loss; we reduce the Grand Story to small plots, plots circulating around a little phenomenal self – a sense of “I.” We forget, taking this to be real. We forget who we are and why we are here, or we never try to find out.

Scripture reads, "Since, therefore, you have been raised with the Christ Presence, give your attention to things above, where the Christ Presence sits at the right of Universal Spirit. Set your minds on things above, not things on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with the Christ Presence in the Universal Spirit" (Colossians 3:1-3). Now, go beyond all the metaphors, here.

Being "raised with the Christ Presence" and setting "your minds on things above, not things on the earth," speaks of a transformative redirection of energy. Conversion, being born again, is the beginning of this radical, but natural, redirection. "Raised with…" means the Higher Self awakens the self-system to its partnership with Spirit. This is salvation, enlightenment, and liberation.

This conversion is not to a church or religion. One is converted, or turned toward, All Spirit. Now, one aspires to serve and love God, or Goddess. The converted one learns, over time, to place everything in the context of this Pattern of Love, surrendering everything. Indeed, "you have died," that is, "the identification with the mind-body self and its little plots" has died, once for all.

Your "life" is, now, "hidden," with "Christ in God." You no longer claim your body, your mind, or your soul. You belong to Spirit, for you are in Spirit, as two lovers are joined in intercourse, being one and sharing the joy of love for each other. Spirit is in you, as well. You hold each other, you are considerate of each other, you respect each other, and you please each other. Desire becomes refined in the Fire of this Love. Gradually, you find your thoughts progressively become the same. This is wonderful; this is Love, the Convergence.

You come to trust more that everything that happens to either of you fits for good. Then, you enjoy your relationship more, and you feel freer to relax. The love between you and the Lover, the Beloved, with whom you make love daily, opens into the confidence that nothing you undergo threatens the relationship. The relationship adapts, as need, to new shapes, but is safe. Rather, you see all is shared by both of you, equally. Pleasure or pain, gain or loss, togetherness or absence, … fits together for benefit.

Love transforms us, not force. Sometimes, Love can seem forceful, for our resistance rubs against the wooing of the Lover, the Beloved. Initially, our self-life resists the perceived intrusion of this other Life, even though it is a larger life.

We know deeply that Love will always change everything, restructuring all priorities, rearranging our inner and outer lives, and calling us to die to past loyalties that no longer serve this new Loving. But, when we relax, letting ourselves be carried over the threshold between resistance and surrender, into the divine marriage, saying, "I will let you love me," sense of negative intensity subsides. The perceived loss is seen to have been illusion. The surrender we feared as loss is experienced as gain, the very gain we longed for.

Even resistance fits together to form a stronger bond. Everything fits into that Design of Love, to bring all, together, into One in the Universe, into Eternal Being that is aware of pure bliss, contentment, and ever-unfolding, always rejoicing Grace. This is the Sacred Marriage.

"I Love You"— words that create worlds of possibility. "Yes"— the response that frees us from our fearful small selves into spacious Gratitude, Peace, and Joy! The body-mind will, yes, still be subject to suffering, loss, loneliness, and death, but the Loved-Loving-Self will be known to be in constant intercourse with Luminous Divinity. Life becomes one Love Making of ever-unfolding discovery of each other. … you discovering, you being discovered... Wonderful!

Are there ways Spirit is presently teaching you about Love, in ways you did not experience before?