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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, the writer hopes persons of other faiths find inspiration here. Indeed, "God" can be whatever image helps you trust in the Sacred, by whatever means Grace touches you. Please share this ministry with others, and I hope you return soon. There is a new offering daily.
Blessings,
Rev Dr Brian K Wilcox, MDiv, MFT, PhD
Ecumenical Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader,
Spiritual Counselor, Chaplain
LISTENING TO THE SCRIPTURES
Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It's way over our heads. We'll never figure it out.
Is there anyone around who can explain God?
Anyone smart enough to tell him what to do?
Anyone who has done him such a huge favor
that God has to ask his advice?
Everything comes from him;
Everything happens through him;
Everything ends up in him.
Always glory! Always praise!
Yes. Yes. Yes.
*Romans 11.33-36 (MSG)
In him lie hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
*Colossians 2.3 (NLT)
I can't understand all of this!
Such wonderful knowledge
is far above me.
*Psalm 139.6 (CEV)
RECEIVING SACRED TEACHING
In the Eastern mystical tradition of the Church, theoria speaks of knowing God, outside logical, imaginative thought. This is experience of God - contact with Spirit - unmediated by the senses. This nakedness of knowing is communicated through the senses, almost always. Mystical contemplation entails the dropping of the senses that a Presence of Love arises from outside, or within, and through the senses.
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon all things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and good abide.
*Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Spiritual Emerson. "The Over-Soul."
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"Ignorance" means, literally, "not knowing." Not-knowing, the absence of knowing by means of a direct contact with the Mystery of God, is a rite of reverence. There is reverence to not-knowing as a rite of passage, contemplative in nature.
To not know we must un-know. As a friend told me today, as we spoke on spiritual matters, the spiritual Journey is mainly a path of un-learning. St. Augustine wrote in one of his sermons:
The soul must be careful not to form an idea of God that its imagination may suggest. It must first learn to "un-find" the one it wishes to find.
*Donald X. Burt. Day by Day with Saint Augustine. June 13: "Unfinding God."
Not-knowing does not mean not-experiencing, even as un-finding does not mean losing the Divine. Not-knowing is not ordinary ignorance; not-knowing is an experiential wisdom, an innate insight, a sure certainty. To know God more fully, to find, or be found by God, more wholly, the very finding is a losing, an un-finding.
An image in spiritual Christianity is nakedness. To be clothed with the knowledge of God, a knowing of God-in-God, you are to be un-clothed of your knowledge of God in yourself, arising from your environment, tradition, culture, religion, and mind.
Indeed, at the edge of knowing, we step off into not-knowing. Not-knowning is a deeper knowing, a more mature knowing of the Unknowable.
A door opens in the center of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.
*Thomas Merton. A Book of Hours. Ed. Kathleen Deignan.
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How do we un-find God, to find God, or, better, be found by God? St. Augustine writes of the way:
I sought my God in creatures but did not find him. I sought him in myself and I did not find him there either. Now I realize that God is above my soul. For my soul to reach God it must pour itself out above itself.
*Burt. Day by Day. "Reaching Out to the God Above": Commentary on Psalm 41,8.
"Above" speaks of the spiritual transcendence of God "outside" human thought. To know God, then, St. Augustine would say to us: "To know God-in-God, un-know all you have come to know of God outside God."
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As the icon is a material, stylistic means for in-sight into and mediation of Reality represented, you and are, the whole world is, a means to open to and receive the Imageless.
Then we, too, can be efficient means of the Imageless to others who see God-in-God through us. We are designed to be mediators of the Divine, matrices of Love, portals of Divinity.
Man is a stream whose source is hidden. ... As with events, so it is with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am ... a surprised spectator of this ethereal water, that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.
*Emerson. Spiritual Emerson. "The Over-Soul."
QUIETLY RESPONDING
1. Have you had a moment or time in which you sensed a certainty of Something moving without, within, or through you, but this Movement could not fit into any ways you had thought of God? Share this, as best you can.
2. Why is unlearning essential to growing in knowing God?
3. Rest in Silence. Drop all ideas about God. Simply, purely, rest in Silence. When any idea of God - even as unknowable - enters your thought stream, release the thought.
Blessings!
Rev Dr Brian K Wilcox
May 4, 2009
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*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian K. Wilcox, of SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis. Brian is an ecumenical spiritual leader, open to how Christ manifests in the diversity of Christian denominations and varied religious-spiritual traditions. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings or submission of prayer requests at barukhattah@embarqmail.com .
*Contact the above email to book Brian for Spiritual Direction, retreats, or workshops. You can order his book An Ache for Union at major book dealers
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