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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.
Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere,
cloudcover thick. I try to stay
just above the surface, yet I'm already under
and living within the ocean.
*Rumi. The Essential Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks.
Every day, every night, even
during sleep, You throw up
before me a thousand
mirrors. Each one shows
me Your face. So adorable,
Your many ways of telling me
how much You love me, “Wow!
Friend, how could I not adore You,
just like this...?”
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox, “Just Like This...”
SPIRITUAL TEACHING
WISE SAYING
“In Love, the divine gift, perfects human nature until it makes it appear in unity and identity by grace with the divine nature.”
*St. Maximus (b. c. 580). De ambiguis.
STORY
A discouraged follower of Jesus had a vision. In the vision Jesus led the disciple across some sand and to the shore of the Sea. The disciple carried a cup and a sieve. At the edge of the Ocean, the disciple and Jesus stood on a rock, the Sea breaking around them in frothy swirls. “Show me how to fill the sieve with water,” said Jesus. The disciple stooped down and filled the cup with water. He poured the water into the sieve. Cup after cup he poured into the sieve, but no matter how quickly he poured, only the smallest remnant caught in the bottom. Even that soon formed a drop and was swallowed in the vastness of the Ocean. All the time Jesus watched silently. In the end, the man faced Christ and shrugged. Hopeless was the task, he concluded. Jesus spoke, “It is so with the life of the spirit, also,” he said. “So long as we stand on the rock of I, of myself, and seek to pour the divine Life into that self, so certainly shall that Life escape us. This is not the way to fill a sieve with water or the human spirit with divine Vitality.”
Jesus reached out a hand and took the sieve from the disciple. He thrust his arm far behind him and launched the sieve out into the face of the deep. For a moment it lay glinting in the sunlight on the face of the water. Then it slipped below. “Now, it is full of water,” Jesus spoke. “It will always be full, and that is how you fill a sieve with water and the spirit with divine Vitality. You throw the myself, the I, to sink into the Sea of the divine Life.”
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox. "Immersed in Divine Vitality."
REFLECTIONS
How am I to be a spiritual person? This is a logical question. Many diverse answers can be given; yet, I offer the essential, yet simple, foundation immersing ourselves in the Divine Life, and growing into union with Its heart-mind, and with creation. We draw from the words of the esteemed Eastern Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky (b. c. 1904). He writes, in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church: “Without the heart, which is the centre [center] of all activity, the spirit is powerless.”
To immerse ourselves in the Divine Life, we immerse ourselves in this human journey, this life. Giving our heart, our vital-feeling-essence, to the ordinariness of daily life, we discover the Divine and ourselves growing in love, joy, peace.
Indeed, with regard to our life, we can see spirituality as a divorce from it. We can seek to be spiritual by withdrawing within in a caricature of true holiness. Yet, each aspect of life has the fingerprint of the Divine, the opportunity of loving union with Life.
So, we seek a balance within the one Life. We need a praxis integrating the inner and outer. We must have times of aloneness for nurture. And we are to translate that inner freshness, the fidelity to the inner life, into the world.
* * *
Recently, being without full-time work, I interviewed to do work, along with my part-time Chaplain role, at a nearby facility. So, here was a man with two Master's and a Ph.D. applying for janitorial work. I had experience in the work. And I needed the money. After applying, I felt myself emerge, immediately, from months of inner struggle. I can experience the Divine as much cleaning floors as in any other worthy role. This is possible if I wed the inner and outer life, which includes seeing that I am one with those I work for, around, and meet in the highways and byways of life. I did not get the job, by the way, but willingness to do it was a confirmation of the sacramental grace of living the everyday life, not as less than other vocations, but as equally valuable in the economy of Grace.
* * *
So, if you want to be spiritual and be becoming in Spirit, One with Divine Grace, do not resist the life you are given. Seek to immerse yourself in it and its daily duties. Devote all your past, even your perceived failures, betrayals endured, losses lost, … to the purpose of spiritual unfolding in Love.
I am not saying never to want better. Possibly, the life you now have is not what you need; that is, you may need to make changes. Yet, the life you now have is Sacred. And if you want to discover the Sacred in your life, begin where you are. To move into where your heart longs to be, put your heart faithfully into where you are. Faithfulness leads to faithfulness, now to then, and here to there.
In what ways can your spiritual praxis integrate the inner and outer life in your spiritual Devotion?
© OneLife Ministries. Jan 18, 2010.
* * *
*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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