Hogs, Sheep, You

Your Real Identity

Mar 9, 2010

Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. Please share this ministry with others, and I hope you return soon. There is a new offering daily.

Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox
MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Teacher, Chaplain, and Author

You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook – A Contemplative Interspiritual Fellowship.

A married couple, who were childhood sweethearts and had settled down in their old neighborhood, are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They walk down the street to their old school. There, they hold hands as they find the old desk they had shared and where he had carved "I love you, Sally."

On their way back home, an armored car drives by and a bag of money falls out of the armored car practically at their feet. Sally quickly picks it up. They do not know what to do with it, so they take it home. She counts the money - fifty thousand dollars. The husband says, "We've got to give it back." The wife says, "Finders keepers." She puts the money back in the bag and hides it in the attic.

The next day, two FBI agents are going door-to-door looking for the money and show up at their home. They say, "Pardon me, but did either of you find any money that fell out of an armored car yesterday?" Sally says, "No." The husband says, "She's lying. She hid it in the attic." She says, "Don't believe him, he's getting senile."

The agents sit the man down and begin to question him. One says, "Tell us the story from the start." The husband explains, "Well, when Sally and I were walking home from school yesterday." The agent looks at his partner, rolling his eyes, and says, "Let's get out of here."

This is a difficult job. It can only be done by a lifetime of genuine humility. But sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment it is. We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty but also in its very great and very simple dignity: created to be a child of God, and capable of loving with something of God’s own sincerity and His unselfishness.

*Thomas Merton. No Man Is An Island.

Why does a hog wallow in mud? Is it not that a hog by nature likes wallowing in mud? A sheep does not like wallowing in mud. What if you could convince a hog he is a sheep? What if you could convince, also, the sheep she is a hog? Then, can you not see the hog behaving differently, avoiding the mud hole, while the sheep wallows in it with delight?

We can forget who we are, or possibly we have never come to know. Yet, in knowing who I really am, I can more likely live who I really am. Possibly, often religion fails here – It seeks to inspire persons to live in a way not in agreement with whom they see themselves to be. Would it not be better to help persons see who they truly are? But, just possibly, that would be the undoing of religion as we have known it. Would we need religion, at least as we now see it, if we knew? And – If I see myself as Love, how can I not be Loving?

To be what I am meant to be, inherently by God and as arising from God and returning to God, I must come to know my self. I must come to know my self progressively as I am. I cannot know my self as I am without knowing my self as I am in I AM – for the fruit bears the likeness of the Tree.

Even as the Completion of Christ is distinct in its incommunicability, Christ's reflection in me is incommunicable. I cannot know my being-in-God by knowing my self in my self or as society reflects its understanding of my self to me as one of a mass of like beings apart from God.

Therefore, salvation for me is turning from a lie to a truth. This lie says I am separate from God. This lie says I must get an identity. Rather, I must return to my identity, which is of God, for nothing out of God can be totally without God, even if it lives unconscious of its being part of God.

This identity is the I am that brings the total self and offers it back to I AM. I am, then, a means of my own salvation; I am, then, with Grace, the way, the truth, the life. I come to know in this the mysterious integration of God and who I am in Love. God heals me, but God heals me with my self, not merely in spite of my self; and not in a mere abdication to God, but an active surrender to God in fidelity to who I am and who I have come to realize I am.

Therefore, in some sense, mysterious, coming to know my self is becoming conscious. Coming to know my self is admitting that I have lived asleep, as most persons live asleep. Coming to know my self is admitting that religion, even what many call Christianity, helped me stay asleep. But this means admitting, also, that Christianity helped me onward to Love, to waking up. The very flaws of my faith path showed the Way. This has taught me that Christianity apart from Christ is an impediment to my coming to know my self in God and glorifying God by the particular, personalized manner in which my being witnesses to God in its existing in Christ, Whom I am One with and in, in God.

This substantial self is both one of poverty and dignity. Poverty in that it is empty of all but God. Dignity in that it participates in God and, thus, substantially is in God and God in it.

To return to God, then, is to return to truth. However, this truth is not a mere avowal of philosophy or religious teaching. This truth entails the truth of God and my self. Without God, without Truth, I cannot arrive at the truth of my self, for only Truth can give birth to this truth that saves me from the lie that holds me captive to a felt-separation from God and Nature in awareness, will, and action.

Then, in knowing my self I can better live from my self, which means to live from God and for God. In knowing my self, I can consciously better draw, through loving surrender and active free-will, upon the Life of Christ and, thus, bear more markedly the Fruit of Love. I can say, with the Apostle Paul:

Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth. For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 And when Christ, who is your life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory.

*Colossians 3.2-4 (NLT)

1)Is it possible you are seen by God to have essentially more dignity than you see in yourself from the perspective of your personality? Explain.

2)Who are you, really?

3)Who is “God” to you? How does that influence how you see yourself? See others?

4)Share how you see your spiritual path helping you to better understand yourself?

©Brian Kenneth Wilcox, and OneLife Ministries, March 7, 2010

*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 is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.

*You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.