|
Easter Season 2009
Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. While it focuses on Christian teaching, the writer hopes persons of other faiths find inspiration here. Indeed, "God" can be whatever image helps you trust in the Sacred, by whatever means Grace touches you. Please share this ministry with others, and I hope you return soon. There is a new offering daily.
Blessings,
Rev Dr Brian K Wilcox
Ecumenical Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader,
Spiritual Counselor, Chaplain
LISTENING TO THE SCRIPTURES
So these three things continue forever: faith, hope, and love.
And the greatest of these is love.
*I Corinthians 13.13 (NCV)
RECEIVING SACRED TEACHING
John Main, late founder of the Worldwide Community of Christian Meditation, wrote of inner Harmony to which meditation leads us.
The truly religious view of man is not found in terms of reward and punishment, but in terms of wholeness and division. The supreme religious insight in East and West is that all our alienations are resolved, and all our thinking and feeling powers united, in the heart...".
Too often Scriptural salvation is merely taught as making bad persons good, forgiving bad persons of bad. This focuses on action, not on being. This focuses often on avoiding punishment and getting rewards. This easily becomes just another program to get what I want: I want to get good things from God, and I do not want to get bad things from God. I is still at the center of a divided self.
Main presents a better view for our times, and one in sync with the Gospel depiction of Jesus. In his healing Jesus is acting out a restoration of Creation as harmonious, whole, and ordered as a divinely ordained symphony.
Love is the Harmony we come from and are led to. Returning is not a project to get anything. In Love we lose the I pulling all it wants to itself, using religion or spirituality to get it, and creating conflict among persons to get it.
Love has one goal, even if goal can be rightly used - I doubt it. Love seeks to discern what Spirit is doing and find some way to be part of what God is doing.
* * *
The greatest of faith, hope, and love is Love. Yet, we shall never understand that Love from the I that thinks it is a good Lover. Rather, the knowing of this Love is outside the knowing. Even the feeling of this Love feels differently, for it arises from the spiritual senses, not the human faculties.
Yes, this Loving infuses Itself into the human faculties. Yet, It participates in a Harmony the human faculties, to enjoy God and know peace, must accord with. Otherwise, there is discord - the alienation of the human capacities from Love.
Therefore, as in Prayer, so in Love. In Prayer, as we mature, we no longer are like little children, the same applies to our whole life in Christ, and as brothers and sisters in Spirit.
* * *
Writes François de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon (1651-1715), in Spiritual Counsel.
We must not be ever children, always hanging upon the breast of heavenly consolations; we must put away childish things with St. Paul. (1 Cor. xiii. 11 [When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I stopped those childish ways (NCV)]) Our early joys were excellent to attract us, to detach us from gross and worldly pleasures by others of a purer kind, and to lead us into a life of prayer and recollection; but to be constantly in a state of enjoyment that takes away the feeling of the cross, and to live in a fervor of devotion, that continually keeps paradise open, this is not dying upon the cross and becoming nothing.
*Edited by James W. Metcalf.
* * *
For Divine Loving to abide, to remain, means It is not reliant on the lower order of human faculties or their sensibilities. This Love is super-essential.
This leads to logical conclusions. First, I cannot rightly deny I love you, simply if I feel no love for you. You can Love everyone you meet on the street, as you walk along, but you have no feeling arising from past experience with any of them. Yet, if one fell before you and was injured, then, would that Love not arise? Yes, if the Love is in you. And, for example - and a common one-, a person may have hurt you deeply. You may feel everything but love for him or her; yet, this does not mean there is no Love in you for the person.
This means, you can, in Christ, give yourself to Love - not a love - that is not reliant on your capacities, efforts, or feelings. Indeed, you do not have even to want to love me, to have Love for me. For Love is of a higher order than wanting, which is usually a very self-centered thing for most of us, most of the time.
So, this leads into the freedom to affirm Love for one I have no sense of love for. He or she could potentially be someone I will never feel love for. I say "potentially" in the abstract.
Now, what happens with surrender to such Love. Well, I is not in control. We find, then, arising of spiritualized sensations of Love, through the human faculties, and this can occur at any time.
* * *
Yet, we can practice conscious awareness of the same openness we have in Silent Contemplation to others. This opens us to the actual potential of inviting Love in our human faculties. This is one of the reasons Contemplative Prayer needs to be taught to all persons willing to engage it.
I offer an example of this consciousness practice. I meet each morning at 10AM with a group for prayer, outside the Sheriff's Office. This morning I was among about eight others, and we held hands, while two different persons offered prayer. I practiced conscious openness with each person praying.
How did I do that? Well, first, such only is possible on consistent willing if you are a person practicing that before the moment. Conscious openness is something a person trains in through spiritual practice.
What I found was a sensate inner connection with each person who prayed. This came through the words of the prayer and feelings each offered through it. Such began with will: I chose to open unconditionally to each person - the I is consciously placed aside. This, again, is of a different, higher order than identifying with the feelings or words of the person. I identified consciously with That before the feelings and words, but largely through them the deeper Order arose.
We rarely do this pure Loving. Why? We experience the other person through a filter of judgment - good or bad. We have a complex system of conscious and unconscious "labels" we shift every person through. We are thoroughly "judgemental," and, so, we find it difficult to express Love. Oh, we might show kindness, politeness, goodness: but Love? Often what goes as kindness and politeness is called Love - at best, such is a tint of It, at worst, a facile fraudulence.
So, growing up in Spirit, we slowly detach emotionally from relying on sweet, affirming consolations in how we esteem our relationship with God, others, and ourselves. Then, the irony: We become, with less effort, persons of spiritual Love.
* * *
In Love we find a paradox at first hard to accept. The paradox is: In Love action is a lower order to being; when the being of Love is in place, the action of Loving follows. And, again: In Love feeling is a lower order to being; when being is in place, spiritual sensations of Love arise. Then, we can act for we do Love, even when we do not feel Love. And we can claim Love for someone, without waiting to feel love for that someone.
Then, we are free to escape the knot of the felt-feelings contrary to Love - we can find inner Harmony beyond the human faculties. To begin this is what I have said: Know you can affirm a Love you do not feel. However, we can drive even this Love from the undercurrents of being. Is this what Jesus refers to in the following?
21You know that our ancestors were told, "Do not murder" and "A murderer must be brought to trial." 22But I promise you that if you are angry with someone, you will have to stand trial. If you call someone a fool, you will be taken to court. And if you say that someone is worthless, you will be in danger of the fires of hell.
*Matthew 5.21-22 (CEV)
Jesus seems to be clarifying there is a progressive move from Love that can occur in a person, with successive consequences. The final being - the loss of all connection with God, who is Love. And this is hell.
Yet, then, the more we fall in Love, the more we move into Heaven. Then, we are growing more into hell, or more into Heaven - not just later, but now.
So, if you feel yourself being captivated by the opposites of love, do something. Do what? Go to Love, to God, and pray for help. Love always responds to a sincere, willing invitation. Inner Harmony signals the healing of God. We sense the release of the alienations that once defined our sensations and beliefs.
Blessings!
Rev Dr Brian K. Wilcox
Thursday the First, Easter Season
April 16, 2009
QUIETLY RESPONDING
Is there someone you know you Love, but presently you feel no Love for? Do you know what might be blocking the feelings of Love? What might you do to open your heart again, for Love to arise within your sensations for him or her?
Is there someone whom you may have driven out all Love for? What do you need to do to address that matter?
Spend some time in pray, and pray for any person whom you are finding it difficult to want to love. Petition for grace to allow Love to love that person through you.
* * *
*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian K. Wilcox, of SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis. Brian is an ecumenical spiritual leader, open to how Christ manifests in the diversity of Christian denominations and varied religious-spiritual traditions. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings or submission of prayer requests at barukhattah@embarqmail.com .
*Contact the above email to book Brian for Spiritual Direction, retreats, or workshops. You can order his book An Ache for Union at major book dealers.
|
