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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. I hope persons of varied wisdom paths will find inspiration here.
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox
MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Teacher, Author
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is called OneLife Ministries – A Contemplative Interspiritual Fellowship.
A SAGELY WORD
God is God-ing, creation is creation-ing, every aspect of creation is in process and continuously unfolding like an infinite flower opening its petals. In this reality, “knowing” is a moment-to-moment phenomenon, past and future are only in our minds, we are copartners with God-ing in the cosmic process, and each person has the full freedom of choice.... Nothing we do, say, or think is inconsequential; every action affects not only this reality but also other realities, ...
*Rabbi David A. Cooper. God is a Verb. Jewish mystic.
SPIRITUAL TEACHING
The late East Indian, Catholic priest, and mystic Anthony de Mello shares the following story in The Song of the Bird, in a section entitled “The Baby Stops Crying.”
The master was once asked by a disciple,
“What is the Buddha?”
He replied,
“The mind is the Buddha.”
Another day he was asked the same question and he replied,
“No mind. No Buddha.”
The disciple was confused:
“But the other day you said, ‘The mind is the Buddha.’"
Said the master,
“That was to stop the baby crying.
When the baby stops crying, I say,
‘No mind. No Buddha.'"
* * *
De Mello integrated stories and teaching from varied religions and attacked head-on the childishness that is common to much religion. De Mello was not against persons having baby faith. He did speak strongly against remaining crying babies in the faith, however.
Growing up is hard work. Growing up entails vulnerability and risk. Growing up entails getting lost. Growing up spiritually is the same. Growing up spiritually is hard work, entails vulnerability and risk, and means you will get lost at times.
* * *
I had served as pastor for a congregation for a number of years. I realized I had been preaching a continual summons and example, lived out in my life, to go beyond their past to a new horizon, as persons and church. I recall the day I spoke, on a Sunday morning, “I share with you things other pastors would not, for I trust you can handle it.” I spoke to them of the opportunity of becoming a church unlike any other in the area, a distinctive congregation offering a place for persons who felt alienated from the Christian faith, a church with an emphasis different from any other of the same denomination in town.
The nature of the city made the ministry I proposed a means to accept a large part of the town as a mission field. The summons was a demanding one, in that it would have entailed growing beyond the horizon that had defined the congregation for its entire history. That summons was to go where the congregation had never been, which would entail everything I noted above: hard work, vulnerability, risk, getting lost.
The congregation did not accept the challenge. Now, five years later, the church is barely surviving and pretty much the church it has always been - trying to fit in a traditional, mainline denominational mode in a progressive, university context.
* * *
We are invited each moment to go where we have never been. The Isaiah 43.18-20 writer challenges exiles from their homeland to welcome the dawning newness. To accept this summons is to live into the promise of Spirit doing something new, now, something the people alone, apart from Grace, could never do:
18Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
19Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
20The wild beasts will honor me,
the jackals and the ostriches,
for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,… (ESV)
We cannot grow up individually or collectively if we seek to define the possible by the past. To go with God means to quit crying about the challenges ahead and to accept the “new thing.”
* * *
In the opening story the Buddhist master provided an answer to satisfy the immature faith of the seeker. His second answer was to lead the student beyond what de Mello calls “baby crying.” The master was saying, essentially, “Okay, you asked again, now I will give you an answer, not to please you, but to push you to grow beyond the elementary answers you are seeking. Growing up means you do not have to have those same old answers anymore, answers from the past. I challenge you to live beyond the answers.”
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, like de Mello, addresses the stuck state of the Christians he addresses:
By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics on God again, starting from square one—baby's milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago!
*Hebrews 5.12, The Message
* * *
What do we need to keep growing up? Bernard Glassman, in Instructions to the Cook, writes of five main courses essential to a diet for spiritual growth. The courses for the meal are spirituality, study and learning, livelihood, social action or change, and relationship and community. Other writers present other lists of ingredients; these ingredients remind us that growing up entails working the means of grace to serve up a daily nourishment. The nurture will lead us to grow into a more mature faith that is able, as example and contribution, to advance the over-all spiritual emergence of others. In growing up spiritually, we inspire other persons to do the same.
SPIRITUAL EXERCISE
1.Reflect on the opening saying by Rabbi David Cooper. What does it imply about spiritual growth?
2.What ingredients do you see as vital to daily spiritual growth? Come up with your own course of ingredients.
3.Can you recall a time when God was calling you beyond the previous boundaries of your life journey? Explain.
4.Do you have a group that encourages you by word, listening, and example to keep growing spiritually?
5.What is the relationship between Divine Grace and Human Choice in spiritual growth?
6.Do your daily meditation and spiritual reading, and other daily nutrient practices.
© OneLife Ministries. Feb 17, 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.
*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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