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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
13Moses answered, "I will tell the people of Israel that the God their ancestors worshiped has sent me to them. But what should I say, if they ask me your name?"
14-15God said to Moses:
"I am the eternal God. So tell them that the LORD, whose name is 'I Am,' has sent you. This is my name forever, and it is the name that people must use from now on."
*Exodus 3.13-15 (CEV)
RECEIVING SACRED TEACHING
A Christian mystic was approached by an agnostic seeker who had traveled a long distance to ask the sage two questions.
The agnostic said, "Sir, I have asked two queries to many so-called wise Christians. Their answers have never been such to aid me to any certainty. I remain agnostic, but I do what to have faith."
The mystic sage asked, "What is the first question?"
"Who is God?" inquired the agnostic.
The sage said, "I really don't know. I once thought I did."
The sage said, "Now, what is your second query?"
"Do you know God?" inquired the agnostic.
Said the Christian mystic, "No. Do you?"
The agnostic smiled joyfully, and asked, "Sir, may I ask you a final question?"
"Yes," retorted the sage, "you may."
The agnostic asked, "Sir, how soon may I be baptized?"
*Brian K. Wilcox
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This is what you are to do: lift your heart up to the Sacred, with a gentile stirring of love desiring the Divine for Its own sake and for Its gifts. Center all your attention and desire on Sacredness and let This be the sole concern of your mind and heart. Do all in your power to forget everything else, keeping your thoughts and desires free from involvement with any of the Sacred's creatures or their affairs whether in general or particular. Perhaps this will seem like an irresponsible attitude, but I tell you, let them all be; pay no attention to them.
[I]f you ... fix your love on Sacredness forgetting all else, which is the work of contemplation ..., I am confident that the Divine in Its goodness will bring you to a deep experience of the Mystery.
*The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. William Johnston. References to "God" adapted by Brian K. Wilcox.
Faith's impulse is not to provide a substitute for anything less than can be known. Rather, faith wants to trust in more than can be known.
*Robin R. Meyers. Saving Jesus from the Church.
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Mystical Christianity, indeed, all true mysticism, is a path of faithing. The question is, Can you faith in Something past the horizon of your present ability to fathom?
For many professing Christ, being a Christian means being a "believer." "Believer" is synonymous with "Christian." I hear, also, "Christian believer."
Equation of believing with faithing in is a reduction of the Way of Christ. Jesus did not give a set number of teachings to believe, affirming which would make a "believer," a "Christian," or a "Christian believer." He did not equate "disciple" with "believer."
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We need an out from believing. We need an experience of Something not confined in the intellective compound "belief."
Contemplation takes one to a consciousness, an awareness, where we faith in what we cannot image - cannot see - or believe: or it would not be contemplation. Love takes us There. Love is not settled, cannot be, with what can be known of the Other. Love stretches outward to touch and be touched by Otherness. In this touch is the darkness of faithing, for the Light of God eclipses all intellectualization.
Love goes out of Itself - meaning Its center in Itself, as love in Love - and expands outward in eroticism, whereby love enters into union of the Mystery at the core of the Self with the Essence of Divine Truth. This Truth is personal, which is Unconditional Grace. This Love, now encompassing love, and, thereby making love Love, the self in the Universal enjoys without belief and with certainty.
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Is this an unnatural thing? No. A particularly religious or spiritual act? No. This is seeing, where love into Love is re-formed in the union initiated and consummated by Love in the Source of the eroticism, or loving out-going, and through an act of pure attention. This seeing is realization - a process of pure realizing.
How can you have contact with the Divine purely, except in this pure self-offering in love to be Love, whereby Eros, as love in the Self out-going, goes outside itself, while finding - thus, losing-, the self in Agape - or Unconditional Being?
Can you meet this Love and be such Love - for in the meeting of This you become This, while not ceasing to be what you were - , if you cling to be Love by a label - a measurement of belief in time?
Can you meet Love and know It, as experience, as definable by Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Taoist, ...? Or is Love not the Source and End of all thought, and with it the measuring of differentiations?
Now let us try to understand disorder, which is our daily life, understand it, not intellectually or verbally, but observe it, how one has separated from others by being a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian (the Christian with his god, with his ideals and the Hindu with his ideals, the Muslim with his ideals peculiar to him, and so on), observe it, come closely into contact with it, do not have prejudices, otherwise you cannot come directly into contact with another human being [How much less with "God"?].
*J. Krishnamurti. "The Sacred." In The Awakening of Intelligence.
For example, when I see purely another person. I see beyond all conditioning, all measurement - which are confined within space and time. I no longer am thinking, "He is a Christian," or "She is a Hindu," ... This is contemplation; in the act of pure seeing is Prayer as a mystical rite of contact of the Mystery in you with the Mystery of the other - One Mystery, One Love. This is Prayer.
Again, how much more, this with God - the Other, Otherness? All we think of - not know of - God is a construct, all we believe-within-belief about God is a construct? Where is it - ideas, concepts? In the brain.
Then, where is God? Beyond "God." Beyond the horizon. There you meet, paradoxically, the Mystery - that in time you rightly call "God" - though, do not confine God to what you think about God in your brain - that is mental idolatry. Such says to the rest of the world: "Only my God - as constructed in my brain by tradition, culture, measurement in time, ... - is the true God?" Oddly, that is to say, "This collection of ideation in my brain is what all the world needs to worship?" Odd, but we say those things. Then, we say we love the world. Do I not see an inconsistency here?
* * *
So, what we signify by words, like "God," we truly long to know outside our conditioning. We let, in meditation, the act of meditating open to what the unknown author of the Cloud says is: a gentle stirring of love and desiring.
This yearning is to dissolve believing into Knowing, or Knowing is the summation of the dissolution of belief. This is not an intellectual grasp, but a self-abandonment into experiencing that Something to Whom, or What, you cannot form into ideas or words and, thus, create a belief about.
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Does this mean, for example, a Christian is being unfaithful? No, he or she is being most faithful to faithing, for this one is allowing the unfolding of the ways of the faith - by means of faithing - to lead to a direct experience of Grace signified by the faith. Rather, less faithful is he or she who holds "God" within that faith, and, thereby, defies Love by condemning the rest of the world for having another version of a construct of the Mystery.
Therefore, the contemplative is released to Love, for loving, by Love. He or she loves the Essence of the other, for he or she loves from the essence that is one essence with the other in the Essence, That is the Other.
Yet, again, this arises from a blind stirring of Love - God. This expands beyond horizons of faith and religion, and all else, for Love is free from all horizons, prejudice, and definition within measurement with which we order our world - and, thus, create so much disorder.
Contemplation is the ordering of the Self in God, and, thus, the contemplative brings an offer of order to dis-order, not as much in word or deed, as by his or her be-ing in Be-ing. The Quiet in contemplation is the Fruit of ordering the energies of the Person in Life.
QUIETLY RESPONDING
How do you prepare yourself to enter the Quiet without the disorder that so characterizes our world?
Blessings!
Rev Dr Brian K. Wilcox
Monday the Second, Easter Season
April 20, 2009
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*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.
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