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Wisdom Saying
There is nothing more beautiful and freeing than living with conscious dedication to love. The way of love invites us to become vessels of love, sharers in grace rather than controllers of achievement. It invites us toward increasing freedom from all slaveries and addictions. It encourages us to ease our grasping and striving for false security. It asks for vulnerability rather than self-protection, willingness instead of mastery. It beckons us toward participation in the great unfolding of creation, toward becoming one with it rather than standing apart and trying to overcome it.
*Gerald G. May. The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need.
Musings of a Modern Contemplative Mystic
When I approach the sacraments of the Church, I learn an important lesson. Grace, which is Flowing Love, is not about efficiency, functionality, or practicality. I learn faith is not about mastering a set of principles or propositions. I find being in Christ is a mystery ~ indeed, Christ is Mystery. I learn this mystery is one entailing my living into a way of being in the world that, rather than offering me efficiency, functionality, practicality, or mastery, offers me dying to the sense of the separate self. This false self seeks to define its worth by meeting these criteria of normality imposed by persons who themselves have not learned to live in spiritual Love and holy mystery.
My only positive option is to find freedom in Love. This means facing its societal impractical but freeing mystery. The potential is of disapproval from the majority of all persons ~ and possibly the majority of those who call themselves Christians as well as my colleagues in ministry. The other potential, though, is to live within the confines of definitions of worth sanctioned by those who know little of true inner freedom or its self-worth. For these must be received as gift, not by personal or communal achievement.
To chase the tyrannical circle of self-esteem or God apart from mystery and True Love will be only to a perpetual reexhausting of the unfree, self-exhausting self. This self will continue to validate its selfish self-imposed misery. This false self will refuse to surrender to its own inability to gain and control grace, so as to discover grace and life as pure gift.
Live as divine gift is only possible, as the sacraments indicate, in dying to the self that creates the cocoon of hellish self-confinement. I am dead until I die to that self that refuses to relinquish its right to mastery, even mastery in spiritual matters. I live when I die into the true self that accepts its rightful place in Creation and turns from asserting a presumed right to personal power against surrendering to receive grace, with its True, Self-Replenishing Life.
*Brian K. Wilcox
Suggested Reflection
What spiritual lessons that apply to your life have you learned from the rites and sacraments of the Church?
Does this writing encourage you to explore the depths of mystery in the sacraments? Explain.
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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