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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.
SCRIPTURE
If you keep living within the Truth I have shared with you, you are truly my student companions. You shall intimately and experimentally know the Truth, and the Truth will liberate you.
*John 8.31-32
SPIRITUAL TEACHING
Being who we each are in Spirit, with our unique texture and flow of being, that is the way of spiritual life, and the longing of the human heart. That is true freedom – to do freely that in agreement with one's own created, essential being.
How we exteriorize, each one of us, this sacred particularity, and in Love, will take as many shapes as there are persons. Lanza del Vasto (1901-1981), an inclusive Catholic and one Gandhi gave the name Shantidas (“Servant of Peace”), founded the peace and justice movement Community of the Ark. To the modern eye, Stantidas was an eccentric. His clothing was homespun. He walked with a tall staff, with a beard and mane of white hair. His community lived in but separate from the dominant values of our Western world, which he saw filled with violence and crippled by a fascination with efficiency, rather than peace and conscience. Ironically, this Western man was impassioned with his calling while spiritually seeking in India, after western philosophies and theology had not offered him the answer to his questions. When Shantidas was born in Italy to a noble family, who would have dreamed he would find his meaning in the East and become the eccentric prophet of peace and justice, one even the Vatican revered highly?
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Once we surrender ourselves to Divine Providence, we have no certainty of the shape and calling our lives will take. Yet, if we are to submit to the power of Truth, and its loving influence in our world, we submit to honoring the unique tincture of our being and life. Simple obedience and being formed by the larger currents of society and religion cannot be allowed to be determinative for the formation of our soul in this world. These matters can be positive in influence, but not finally decisive. As Jesus says: “No one can serve two Masters.” No one can lovingly surrender to the Truth within the self, and surrender in compliance to others. That is, One Love shapes us, One Passion, expressed personally and uniquely.
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This is where meditation, and all spiritual practice, comes to bear upon our lives. We discover, as shared by John Main and regarding meditation, founder of the Worldwide Community for Christian Meditation...
We turn aside from everything that is passing away in order to be open to absolute and ultimate Truth. Wisdom teaches us that arriving at the Truth is experiencing the graciousness and loving goodness of God.
*Moment of Christ: The Path of Meditation.
Therefore, in the mystical Christian view of Truth, we go into our Center. There we do not find merely an impersonal principle, energy, or force, and we do not find the God of traditional-conventional faith; we find a gracious and personal, living, communioning Truth. This is the primary message of the Incarnation of the Word into space-time.
Again, applicable to us, Main's words about meditation apply to the entirety of our life journey and its unveiling of Truth:
People often ask, “Why should I meditate? Why do you meditate?” I think part of the answer is that in the experience of meditation we come to know ourselves as true, as real, not ourselves as acting a role, not ourselves fulfilling other people's expectations of us, but the experience of being who we are. Meditation is important for us because each of us has to learn how to be true, how to be faithful to the truth of our own being. … The freedom is the freedom to be ourselves and the freedom to let others be themselves.
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When I think of the sacred particularity of our lives, I am amazed at who I am compared to what I wanted to be years ago, and what others wanted me to be. I am eccentric, in that I do not fit any traditional way. I love Jesus, but I am almost totally cut off from all Christian religion, still seeking where my love for Jesus can fit in the discipline and love of faith community. I am interspiritual, living under vows, practicing celibacy, and admire the teachings of Buddhism – as well as all truth in all religions and spiritualities. I prefer to associate with the unchurched poor, not the churched folk. I am mystical. I am poor. I am one of the most highly educated persons you will ever know – though born in a rural community of mostly persons without more than a high school education. I could go on, but I say all this to say that I am totally unlike what anyone would have thought I would become and be. Yet, this is the truth of my being, the call on my life given me, and I have learned to rejoice in the truth of my being. I am convinced Christ does, too. I am not concerned to get human approval for that Truth within myself, in Love.
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Finally, this freedom of the truth of your being is not an excuse just to choose what you want to be and do. No. This is a very demanding way, and is one with the Truth of Love, God, Christ, the Spirit, … Your truth of being is a reflection of the one Truth, your being an expression of Being. Persons look egocentric and immature when they are in ego trying to assert who they want to be or think they should be. Rather, this Truth is loving; this is given you as gift, not something you decide from ego, from personality. This is chosen for you by the Divine, for the blessing of others and yourself, in Love.
What are traits of your being you sense given as divine gift for you to know and share the particular expression of the Truth, in Love?
© OneLife Ministry. Jan 5, 2010.
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*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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