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Today’s Scripture~I Corinthians 14.13-14 (CEV)
13My friends, we want you to understand how it will be for those followers who have already died. Then you won't grieve over them and be like people who don't have any hope. 14We believe that Jesus died and was raised to life. We also believe that when God brings Jesus back again, he will bring with him all who had faith in Jesus before they died.
Wisdom Story
A Buddhist monk set off on a long pilgrimage to find the Buddha. He devoted many years to the search. He, finally, reached the land where the Enlightened One was said to live. While crossing the river to this land, the monk saw something floating towards him on the water. As it got closer, he saw it was the corpse of a person. When it drifted so close he could almost touch it, the monk recognized the lifeless body~it was his own! He lost all control and wailed at the sight of himself, lifeless and drifting along the river's currents. That moment was the beginning of his liberation.
Comments
Eternal Life is liberation, through Grace, from attachment to our small lives apart from the Divine Life.
This, in Eternal Timeless, is already happening now~for you enter the Mystery of the Gospel and live it in the one moment of Infinity when you enter God and God enters you now: this means to be in Christ. In Eternal Timelessness, God is always bringing Jesus back to us, leading us toward being fully en-godded. Whenever we are in intimacy with God, God is offering Christ, His returning, to us, and through the Holy Spirit. God is bringing to us all who have died in the Love of Christ, for to be One with God is to be One with All in Christ. We are immersed in the reality of the Saints that have resurrected out of the confines of space~time in Christ, into the full liberation from materiality, as signified in the ascension of Christ Jesus.
This does not mean that materiality is evil. Rather, materiality is one aspect of the spectrum of energy~matter and suited to life on this earth. This divine gift of materiality is meant to be the means of release in ascension to the Divine, Who is Pure Spirit, through Whom we receive life and light.
God, however named, is a sign of the all-inclusive, boundless Love that is our sole freedom from the tyranny of space~time, with its dense matter. Being in Christ means growing to see, truly, all our attachments to materiality, even our love of our own bodies, and the bodies of those we love, is transforming away in its present form of dense materiality to a spiritual body.
We will not die; rather, the body, as we know it, is dying moment~by~moment. This is not bad news, rather, this is good news!
8 Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! 9 Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! 10 But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.
11 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
13 Three things will last forever~faith, hope, and love~and the greatest of these is love.
*I Corinthians 13.8-13 (NLT)
Realizing the temporality of our material selves, and with all its emotional attachments, we are on the path to true freedom. This is the realization allowing us to know intimately the spiritual center of each living creation. Living from the spiritual core, we come to realize the beauty and priority of the practice of love.
The "living" in living creature is the boundless, timeless Center ~ the Center without a center. All is the outflow of that OneLife. The OneLife is God, Grace that is the Light Effulgence in all space~time. The Effulgence is the Word wording the Presence of God in all creation; the Holy Spirit is the God-ing effecting liberation by, in, and through Love, Joy, and Peace.
Suggested Reflection
1. What, to you, is Eternal Life? Is it now or later? Or both?
2. What do I mean when I say … “Christ is always returning to us”? And ... "In Christ, we are always ascending to the Father"?
3. What might Paul be implying by placing a message about Eternal Life in the midst of a passage on love?
See next page for Invitation to writer's contemplative village, purpose of OneLife, data on ordering author's book and upcoming devotionals 2008, and material on citations.
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