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What persons most need when in need is not our personally caring for them. When we are absent, Grace is more present. This Grace is not personal or impersonal, even as compassion can freely express itself, can arise and act without our effort to be compassionate or intent to express compassion.
When we say Emptiness, we speak of an absence that is a Presence, a Fullness. In the sense of absence of self, your sense of being a someone or somebody, your thoughts, your effort, what remains? When you are not thinking of yourself, who or what is present? That is much more capable of caring for others than we are as ego, as a self, and this self is not a stable presence at all, for it is a sense only when we are thinking of I, me, mine, myself. This self is based on memory, only a thought, nothing more. Could it be your purest moments of caring for the other is when this self-sense is absent? Could it be Fullness is present, Grace fully working, in that absence?
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I walked out of the hospital, where I met a family and dying patient. I gave all, it seems. Present. Caring. Professional. Yet, an odd feeling, again. A thought, maybe longing, from the past slowly seeps in through the wall of yesterday - or is it today? -; I stop to ponder. A thought, somewhat like, "I miss the feeling I used to feel in times like these, caring and serving others." Then, a truth without words, conveying a subtle, rarely known verity - now, to put into words what did not arise from words, but was seen that day...
You cannot go back, back to when you yourself as a self, a person, a personality were out front, even when used by Grace to serve others. Every good act was touched deeply by you yourself. Now, that cannot be, not for that is forbidden or wrong - it was not and is not -, but for Grace has led to this place. Years have led to a transformation, a reversal - you could say a lessening - that Life may be more.
Here and now, this day, as for many months, you have served without you yourself being in the lead, the agency; the Work has arisen from somewhere else. Indeed, you yourself were not even being led, as you once spoke of being led by the Spirit. Spirit was acting, you were there in the background seeing Presence happening, acting.
If you wish to speak of you at all, you were more present, but present to Presence, as Presence to you - witnessing, being-with the other through the Oneness, even in the Oneness. You are now to accept this as the inevitable, even what you chose - to decrease so that you no longer claim any right to have a personal feeling in caring for others, not even a personal feeling of love for them. Yet, they are loved, and more fully loved, for the love is not your love and not mediated through you, as in the past, through your effort and sensations of love.
Now, accept this, and you will be brought to Grace within it, so that you relax and the unease dissipates. This is a Movement, but not of or even through you. You cannot go back. Sense the feeling of this Grace untouched by you, a Grace that calls you to be with It in the moment It is with others and giving to them. And, you, in some way, are gifted to be more deeply present to and with others precisely in your being less personally present to and with them. Yes, there may, and will, be moments of that felt-sense of personal feeling of caring and connection. Well, and good, but it will pass, and quickly, as it must.
Relax into this new way of being, which is not new really, but is always fresh. You will find it more a joy in time, and by acceptance, that you are no longer out in front and feeling that prior need to be in control. Remember what Christian Scriptures say of John the Baptist in the Gospels. John the Baptist says of Jesus, "He must increase, I must decrease."
You are blessed! to be brought here. Be with it. See it. You will come to rejoice in it, you will grow to trust it more, even as you are beginning to already.
*Copyright 2018, Brian Kenneth Wilcox
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