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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 wisdom paths will find inspiration here.
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox
MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Teacher, Author
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is OneLife Ministries A Contemplative Interspiritual Fellowship.
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The devotee bowed in Prayer. Oh, God, he pleaded, give me Love! To which he heard, Friend, I already have, I have given you Myself, but you must be willing to receive.
*Story, Brian Kenneth Wilcox
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This strange awareness arises within me, I am not trying to love anymore, to love anyone anymore. I am not even trying to love the person who most hurt me, who betrayed me, who denied me, who threw me away as worthless rubbish, who threatened me. I do not have to. I have no intent to love her, to love anyone. I am not a dispensor of love; Love is living through me. No effort, no need; just Is, is This. Freedom! The pain has opened me up, and now God is pouring through, while I look and laugh, and smile with bliss.
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox
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The New Testament Greek word for Divine-Love, Love that is God, is agape (ag-ah'-pay). I John 4.16 speaks of the Love:
So we have come to know-by-experience and to trust in the agape that God has for us. God is agape, and whoever lives in agape lives in God, and God lives in that one.
"We have come to know-by-experience
trust in." "Know," like its Hebrew counterpart yada, implies intimate knowledge, or knowledge through union. "Believe" is "to trust." So, "we have come to know intimately and to trust the God-Love by which God loves us."
We enter a mystery: "God is this Love, the Love by which God loves is one with God. God and the Love we are loved with by God are not something other than God, which God gives. God loving us means God is giving us of God's Self. God is Love; Love is God." This is Marvelous Mystery.
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The Mystery extends to response. If one remains in Love, since Love is God and God is Love, one lives in God. God, being Love, is in organic symbiosis with the one living in oneness with Love. Through Love, we are in God. Through God, we are in Love. Through Love, God is in us.
We think of "God" and "Love" as distinct. We say things like "God loves us." Yes. However, this passage shows us that such duality is not the absolute truth. We are speaking on a linear, human plane of reason, when we speak of Reality and Love as separate. Rather, saying "God loves us" is saying "God gives us of the Nature of God, Love."
The essence of God is Self-Outpouring. God cannot choose not to give in this way, for Love is Self-Donation. God and Love, then, are not separate. Love is not an object apart from God or within God but distinct from God. God does not merely give us Love; God gives us God, for we are already in a sacral-natural confluence with Divinity.
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To mature in Godness is to live into this nondual Reality. Even as God can only love, we, as we take more on the God-Nature, enjoy Intercourse with Love increasingly. As we mature spiritually, we find ourselves less and less making a choice to love. We find more and more that we love with Love, or Love loves in and through us.
This Love is the way out of self-righteousness. Self-righteousness still has a claim on what one does: "self." "I am good" or "I love" or "I am fair"
all have the "I" and tend to perpetuate self-obsession. This Love, in becoming Love pouring through us, releases us from all claims of being loving or loving. We, as self, have no claim on Love; Love claims all of who are are.
Love is. In Mutual-Indwelling we are loved through by Love and we give Love a place in the world. This, then, is no longer "my" experience or "my" loving.
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This Love is not a sentimental feeling, for God is not a sentimental feeling. This Love will not, necessarily, make you more likeable, gain you more friends, or have persons speak about your being nicer. No, this Love is strong, daring, sacrificial, and does not invest priority in pleasing persons. This Love, being God, is directed from a Supernal Plane that leads us to participate in the ongoing Self-Giving of God in Nature.
Thus, as noted in the passage below, in Love we join in union with the Self-Donation of Love Loving everyone, everything, wholly and purely. Only in Self-Donation, freely given, do we have daily intercourse with this Real Love.
Dear children, let us stop just saying we love (agapao) each other; let us really show it by our actions. (I John 3.18)
©Brian Wilcox, and OneLife Ministries. 03/06/2010
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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.
*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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