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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, I hope persons of varied faiths will find inspiration here. Indeed, "God" can be whatever image helps us trust in the Sacred, by whatever means Grace touches us each. Please share this ministry with others, and please return soon. There is a new offering daily. And to be placed on the daily OneLife email list, to request notifications of new writings or submit prayer requests, write to briankwilcox@yahoo.com .
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader, Spiritual Counselor, and Chaplain.
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is called OneLife Ministries – An Interspiritual Contemplative Fellowship. Hope to see you there. Blessings.
SPIRITUAL TEACHING
You say, "Brian,
just drink from this"
I say, "No, More"
You say, "Here is the
cup"
I reply, "When one rides
the waves of the Ocean,
how can he do obeisance
to rules and ways of
the land?"
I ask, "When one sees
the Face in the open Expanse,
how can he keep gazing
in a little, bounded
mirror?"
To say, "Our Father
in Heaven," is to say, "My heart
was shaped to hold Infinity"
Is to say, "My experience cannot
be held inside any religion,
philosophy, or tradition"
I once danced on a floor, until
Love claimed my heart, now I'm
sailing the currents of the
Sky
Jesus peeked through
the veil, and my heart
melted and was reborn in
the same Fire
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox, Jan 4,2010
* * *
The Jesus of John's Gospel says, in chapter 7: 37-39, the following about Living Water...
Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If any person is thirsty, let that one come to Me and drink. The person who trusts Me, as the Scripture said, 'From that one's innermost self will flow rivers of living water.'" But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who trusted in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
Likewise, in John 4, we read the following about this mystical, inward Water...
Therefore, the Samaritan woman said to Him, "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink, since I am a Samaritan woman?" ... Jesus answered, saying, "If you knew God's gift, and who it is who says to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water." She said to Him, "Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water?"
* * *
The theme of "living water" was already well known to Jesus' contemporaries. An example from the Hebrew Scripture derives from Jeremiah 2.13: For my people have committed two wrongs; they have left me the fountain of living waters [or, waters of life, life-giving waters], and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that cannot hold water.
Remarkable is the insight given by the Jeremiah passage, as it addresses a tendency to resist surrender to the One Who is living water, in a pride that refuses to humble oneself to receive. Indeed, acquisitiveness is one of the chief obstacles to being infused with living Grace.
* * *
Contemplative prayer and living is an opening to that which Itself lives in and from Itself. This Self-Subsistent, Self-Giving One pours Itself out for all, without losing any of its fulness. All life derives from It, and It loses nothing in giving all of Itself to all, always.
Thus, reception of life, flowing like fresh water, is the receiving of Love. This Love never needs to be replenished, for it never loses any Love in giving all Love, for the nature of Love is irreducible, is infinite.
* * *
The Jeremiah passage identifies the "life giving water" with the Spirit, as does Jesus. That is, God is Living Water, and to partake of God is to partake of Life, for God is Life, living Life.
This is a reason we meditate. We go to the "innermost being" and find that point at which only One lives. Essentially, we are of God and God is of us.
Being in the Image of God, we all together, as one, are living water, the Presence of the Divine. Meditation, then, leads us to the realization of the plentiful, abundant Life in which we participate in all things and as part of everything, as God, without God being other than God or you and I being other than us.
Then, through meditation, we drink of what we are, imbibing the Truth not as idea but as living, vivifying Wisdom. With this, we are reoriented to our true Identity, an Identity-in-Communion, and refreshed to live presently and in service through a particularized expression of the "innermost being" and the God-in-Life we embody, integrally, in service with others.
* * *
So, why meditate? Why accept the challenges of spiritual evolution? I share words, in closing, from a Tibetan Lama, in a chapter "Why Meditate?," in Lama Christie McNally, The Tibetan Book of Meditation. What she writes applies to all persons seeking to transcend thought and mental faith, and enjoy loving-becoming with the Divine and others in Grace...
Tibetans say we have only just begun the process of awakening - that we still have quite a way to go in our evolutionary process. And it has nothing to do with building spaceships or computers. The next step in our evolution takes place within.
We were born with this incredible potential, but it mostly lies dormant inside us. We are like baby birds still enclosed within the egg completely unaware of the vast open sky above us that could be ours. We think this is all there is to life, confined to a body and mind which limit both our vision and our activity. ...
And if you think about it, perhaps you have always sensed this to be true. Perhaps you can feel this constant subtle yearning in your heart for something higher. We were not brought here just to eat and sleep and make babies and die. No, you life was meant to be far more.
* * *
*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis. While within the Christian path, he is an ecumenical-interspiritual teacher, author, and chaplain. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Jail, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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