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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
Plunge into the Ocean of Love,
where heart meets Heart,
Where sorrows are comforted, and
wounds are mended.
There, melodies of sadness mingle with
dolphin songs of joy;
Past fears dissolve in the deep harmonic tones,
the future – pure mystery.
For eternal moments lived in total surrender
glide smoothly over troubled waters.
Hide not from Love, O friends,
sink not into the sea of despair,
the mire of hatred.
Awaken, O my heart, that I drown not
in fear!
Too long have I stayed where'ere
the winds have blown!
Drop anchor!
O, Heart of all hearts, set a
clear course,
that I might follow!
Guide me to the Promised Shore!
*Nan C. Merrill. Psalms for Praying. “Psalm 137.”
SPIRITUAL TEACHING
Bonnie was my first love. When she broke up with me, for she was not ready to have a monogamous relationship, I was heart-broken, deeply wounded. My mind was obsessed with Bonnie for many months. What made it worse was she and I started attending the same college. I could not avoid her. I could not escape feelings I had for her.
I prayed to be free of this wound of love. The ache would not go away. She seemed to have continued life free of wounding. Not I. I hurt much. All my prayers seemed to no avail.
I was surprised one day. There was no feeling of the Bonnie-wound. I felt as though during sleep the night before, it was as though someone said, “'Enough,' and had come and closed up the wound, pouring salve over it, and breathing Peace upon it.” I was free. The Bonnie wound never opened again.
* * *
I sit in waiting with
this familiar Silence, alone, again.
Solace takes wings to fly
and finds a way out, temporarily.
A wound opens up wider
with the new departure.
Memories walk through, slowly,
leaving bloodstains on the floor.
Shadows creep in and
a bud drops, now in decay.
Darkness settles in,
while light recedes behind clouds outside.
A swarthy shroud
rests over a bereft heart.
I am a man alone;
with all, God alone is Here.
May my tears
descend to wet the bruised seeds of hope.
A new growth maybe will arise to
herald the coming of another Spring.
*Brian K. Wilcox. An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love. “Another Spring.”
* * *
I am leery of anyone speaking too freely of love. Leary in the sense that love, or Love, is too often seen as something beautiful, pleasurable, comforting, and thrilling. Rather, most of us must be deeply hurt once, a few times, or many times by our efforts to love, before we can speak consciously of Love.
Possibly, this is part of the Jesus story. Possibly, the Cross signifies what Love must do to us each, before we are prepared to share in Divine Love with others and God, at a mature level.
So, while my central message is Love, I do not use the word lightly. Love's path is as much strewn by blood-drops as scented with roses. Indeed, we all see the Rose, the consummation of Love, but the hymen that blocks the entrance of True Love must be broken, before Divine penetration is possible. Wounding is the way to the penetration of the bliss of Grace.
The classic book on Grace is Cheap Grace. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote it, stressing the difference between Grace that demands our all, and “grace” that is seen as a free gift that costs us nothing. Bonhoeffer witnessed to the costliness of Grace, when he was executed for opposing the Nazi regime. Possibly, we could speak, then, of Cheap Love, a “love” that seeks the delights of Love apart from the fiery wounds inflicted by Love. And, possibly, the Bonnie-course was a beginning class for me in Costly Love.
* * *
John of the Cross, whom we could call the Christian Mystic of Divine Love, utilized the language of romance to speak of Divine Love transforming the self into Itself – Love transforming us into Love. A biblical precedent for this is the Book of Hosea, which uses highly erotic imagery to speak of God's Love for us. Yet, the eroticism is covered over by translation. Hosea is so sexually explicit in its native tongue, however, it would be considered “R” to “X” in rating.
One of John's classics is The Living Flame of Love. In this work he compares transforming Love to a cauterizing in the substance of the soul:
O sweet cautery,
O delightful wound!
*The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez.
John continues with a remarkable expounding of the wound of this cauterizing upon the human surrendered to God:
O happy wound, wrought by one who knows only to heal! O fortunate and choicest wound; you were made only for delight, and the quality of your affliction is delight and gratification for the wounded soul! You are great, O delightful wound, because He who caused you is great! And your delight is great, because the fire of love is infinite and make you delightful according to your capacity and greatness. O, then, delightful wound, so much more sublimely delightful the more the cautery touched the intimate center of the substance of the soul, burning all that was burnable in order to give delight to all that could be delighted!
Earlier, John had written that the delight of the wound corresponds to the increasing sublimity of the fire causing the wound. Indeed, “The Holy Spirit produces it only for the sake of giving delight, and since His will to delight the soul is great, this wound will be great, for it will be extremely delightful.”
* * *
Nothing here, of John, makes "common" sense. We do not associate Love with intentionally inflicting wounds on a beloved. We do not equate increasing Love with increasing wounding and delight. We do not equate delight with wounds, but we do with Love.
John speaks a different kind of cauterizing and wound. Likely, all of us have been wounded by a human love, and we, likewise, have wounded others. This kind of wounding usually has the tint of selfishness, even if not intended. John, however, speaks of a spiritualized wounding and wound – for the wound agrees in extent and form with the cauterizing.
I do not believe that this delightful wounding occurs only in our relationship with the Divine directly. Spirit can use this delightful wounding to transform us, and utilize other relationships in the process, for Love is Love in any relationship or form It takes.
Still, in whatever form I am wounded by Love, one sign of a pure response is to transcend blame and resentfulness, and transmute the Loving into a direction of offering it to Christ. This does not mean a withdrawal of affections from anyone, or persons generally, but a focusing on my relationship with Christ. Then, all other forms of Loving are enriched, even toward one whom I may feel denied by or betrayed by.
Therefore, a sign of this maturing of Love, by means to delightful wounding in the substance of the person, is a more full immersion in loving others. Yet, now the loving is not centered in the personality, but in the Heart – the substance of the soul transcending thought and feeling.
All the great Love mystics offer this path to us. Central in this tradition are the mystic poets of Bhakti Yoga in Hinduism, the Sufi branch of Islam, and the tradition of Bridal mysticism – or Love mysticism – in the Christian faith.
* * *
Once, a young lady responded to my poetry in a negative way. I write in the Love mysticism genre, using erotic symbolism for Loving God and being Loved by God, and loving others. She said, essentially, “I don't know what is going on with you, but I sense you have a sexual problem.”
Possibly, anyone fully honest with himself or herself would admit having a sexual problem. By this I do not mean a negative issue with sexuality. I am saying, instead, that we have all been wounded in sexuality and, likewise, we have never found in the consummation of sexuality and its physical intercourse the fullness of Love we sought. For most persons, loving sexually, when in spiritual intimacy, gives possibly the closest taste of Pure Love, mystic Embrace, in this life. Yet, in another way, such Loving is drinking salt water from the Sea. We get a momentary fulfillment, only to be left with a greater aching for more. That is, human loving is not meant fully to satisfy us. Rather, such intimacy is to remind us of a call to return to a Re-Union with the Love we came from into human interlude. Could it be the wounds of human loving is a means, if we choose, to allow Spirit to open us more to the delight of the Fullness of Divine Intimacy?
* * *
I am not suggesting human loving is separate from Divine Love. Indeed, I am not convinced we can rightly speak like John does of Love, if we do not immerse ourselves in the joys, wounds, and healing of human loving - and this can happen in many forms, and not all human loving sexually is genital. I, also, believe human loving, in any form, including sexual, can be a means of stilling and tempering the ego in a manner that transmutes basic urges into a Loving delight resonating with the Love we all seek. And, I would consider it beautiful if two persons did consciously enter this seeking together, knowing that each is means for the cauterizing and wounding, and delight, John speaks of. Yet, one does not have to find this Love with a human, not in its consummation, but with God. A person could argue, however, such fullness of Divine Love is not possible without the preparation of knowing the wounding and bliss of human loving intimately. I, also, allow that two persons, or more, together can experience a pure, erotic love, and be celibate.
* * *
*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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