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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. Please share this site 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
WISE SAYINGS
If we love our spiritual brothers and sisters, it proves that we have passed from death to life. But a person who has no love is still dead.
*I John 5.14
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspaper that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
*Joseph Campbell
STORY
A young African visited a school and watched some girls sewing. He noticed that the thread always followed the needle, and he saw in that a spiritual truth. Later that evening, he prayed, “O Lord, You are the needle, and I am the thread!”
REFLECTIONS
The spiritual journey is a practical positioning. Practical in that a theoretical or doctrinal claim does not empower us to become spiritually infused with graces like love, joy, and peace. All our beliefs in loving our enemy, for example, do not give the needed inspiration to so love. Knowing I am to forgive a person who deeply hurt me does not enable me to forgive him or her.
Then, we can ask, “Can a person truly abide in the Divine and not be overflowing with the fruits of the Spirit?” Often Spirit has to do much healing work within us before there is an overflow of Fruitfulness. What begins, however, as a rivulet, can become a river.
As soon as a person is truly positioned in Grace, she or he is on the spiritual pilgrimage, even if one so immature in this as to lack almost all evidence of being spiritual. But at that moment a new tendency begins. That tendency is the expressing of the animating Life within. Life begins expressing in and through the person. We have been under the guidance of what the Greeks and the Christian New Testament terms bios, fleshly life, but now, we are under the blessing of zoe, spiritual life.
In zoe means you and I are placed within a supernatural order, a supernatural alignment with Love. The resulting tendency will be evidenced quickly in a fresh life orientation and inspiration. This Life does not do away with bios, rather, all the bios energies are taken into the inspiration and orientation of zoe. We could say that bios serves the will of zoe.
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Colossians 3.3 has, “For you died to this life [bios], and your real life [zoe] is hidden with Christ in the Divine One.” We die to bios as the determinative force in our life. We are given to the higher Life, spiritual life, or zoe. This begins the process of sanctification, which is having the total self animated by Love.
This repositioning in zoe is an actual spiritual event, not a mere metaphor, and entails having the self taken into the Spirit in intimate, personal union. By means of this new position, we each are taken into the One ~ as St. Paul has it: “hidden with Christ in the Divine One.” The same reading can be “hidden in Christ in the Divine One.”
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We can experience this being in Christ, in God, in many ways. One way is engagement with the world. As the Spirit of zoe progressively influences our self, we begin to experience the Divine in the natural order more, and this includes experience of the Sacred in the other. This other can be a person or another creature. The simplicity of some nonhuman creatures might make it easier for some persons to experience the Divine in and through them more easily than in persons.
However, serious disciples of this Path have taught us to go within. They have affirmed that the within is essential, even more so than experience of without. Indeed, the general person is so attached to the outer world and its relationships, so immersed in bios, that he or she will never enjoy Grace deeply without practice of inner solitude. The flood of external stimuli is enough to deaden all receptivity to zoe inspirations and presence.
Your solitude, which is an inner path to realizing zoe, is a most unselfish act. For in this aloneness, which is an intense and conscious alertness, you come most in contact with the richness of zoe. This richness and life is where your aloneness is discovered to be, paradoxically, most one with others. This means that unless I enter into inner quiet, I will fail to meet others from the center within. Indeed, I will not likely respect the need of another for spiritual solitude, and I will not try to provide the context to honor this human need of inner solitude.
This means others may not understand your need of time alone with Spirit. They may even see you as selfish or fear your difference, seeing you no longer live off the bios energies. As Thomas Merton writes, in No Man Is An Island, “Indeed, the soul that does not seek to dress itself in possessions and to revel in purchased or stolen satisfactions will often be left completely alone by other men. The true solitary does not have to run away from others: they cease to notice him, because he does not share their love for an illusion.”
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Hence, for us to grow spiritually, we cannot do that simply by external works and teachings. We go within. We honor the need of the other for the same inner solitude. We can do this knowing that he or she will be most in communion with us, most love us, by being in intimate communion with his or her being in Spirit. We are, yes, most intimate in the Divine One, which is to say, “We are most loving," when we are drawing off the gracing energies, the zoe, of Love itself. And to be in God means our lives alone and together pass through Love, as the thread passes through the needle.
In what ways are you seeking to orient your life by the inspirations of zoe, in contrast to bios? What are attitudes and actions that will be inspired in and through you by a genuine spiritual orientation of inner and outer practice?
© OneLife Ministries. Jan 19, 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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