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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
Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader, Spiritual Counselor, Chaplain
Brian encourages support of the 4-Star Christian organization Compassion, which supports children worldwide; for more see www.compassion.com .
OPENING PRAYER
Blessed are You, O Lord our God,
Wellspring of all that is.
You are the sea on which we float,
You are the wind that fills our sails,
You are the storm that buffets us,
You are the calm that brings us peace.
Open our ears to hear Your word,
Open our eyes to see Your beauty,
Open our hearts to be warmed by Your love.
Free us from our lonely prisons of fear and selfishness,
And make us over, day by day, into bearers of Your peace.
*Richard Rosenberg. www.worldprayers.org . "Invocations - Christian."
LISTENING TO THE SCRIPTURE
He restores my soul.
*Psalm 23.3a (ESV)
RECEIVING SACRED TEACHING
Over a century ago the eminent evangelical pastor C. H. Spurgeon wrote to his preaching students about the need for balance between work and rest:
Even beasts of burden must be turned out to grass occasionally; the very sea pauses at ebb and flood; earth keeps the Sabbath of the wintry months; and man, even when exalted to God's ambassador, must rest or faint, must trim lamp or let it burn low; must recruit his vigor or grow prematurely old.... In the long run we shall do more by sometimes doing less.
*Helmut Thielicke. Encounter with Spurgeon. Trans. John W. Doberstein.
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The psalmist confesses, through affirmation that, at times, he needs restoration of soul. As the Jewish community sang from the Psalms, they admitted the same. We, also, using the Psalms admit the same. There are times we need restoration of soul.
There are vital lessons in the faith affirmation: "He restores my soul." Today, I will share some of these. I pray this will encourage you to keep returning to rest in God:
Be still in the presence of the Lord,
and wait patiently for him to act.
Don't worry about evil people who prosper
or fret about their wicked schemes.
*Psalm 37.7 (NLT)
First, the Psalm leads us to confess: He. Inherent in the song is an explicit faith that God companions the psalmist, and us. We are in a dependent and inferior relationship to the Divine Presence, as sheep to a Shepherd. The potential of this restoration of soul depends on our recognition of our place in the Order of God. Pride blocks restoration of soul; humbleness opens us to this given relief to the soul.
This means for the Christian there is no inward rest apart from his or her relationship with God. Even as work revolves around the Center, or God, so does rest.
This He must be found more fully in a relaxation of my usual sense of my self, my self-assertion, my self-importance, my self-effort, my self-defense, my self-protection, even any of my self-loathing. What word does each of these share with the others: my self?
The things we really need [i.e., spiritual rest] come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless "I" that is all we know as ourselves.
*Thomas Merton. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.
One challenge we face is not to allow our sense of self, which is not really who we are in God anyway, to block our openness to God. Opening to be refreshed in Grace facilitates and is aided by relaxing of clinging to that false self, which is really a constructed self, not the True Self in Christ, in God. In Prayer, we find that our Self is a mystery, for who we are - who you are - is truly from and in God, and such is not the socially-constructed portrait of who we think we are. Indeed, this constructed false self is what leads us to so much restlessness and divisiveness within and without.
Second, the psalmist leads us to sing He restores. In the relationship from which we confess, we do not restore our own souls - the Shepherd does.
How does the Spirit of Christ restore the soul? By two ways: immediate, proximate. The two work together. Immediate implies the Holy Spirit works in us without outside mediation. Then, the proximate means the Spirit works through outside, created means of grace; included in this are Scripture, nature, events, persons, the Lord's Supper and other sacraments, ... God works through proximate means of grace, generally.
I was raised and pastorally educated in a non-sacramental view of Christian life and worship. After serving as a pastor in a sacramental fellowship for a decade, the sacramental aspect has vastly enriched my experience of Christ and faith community. As pointed out by Richard Foster, the sacramental, or incarnational, dimension:
[F]ocuses upon making present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit. This spiritual dimension addresses the crying need to experience God as truly manifest ... in daily life.
*Renovaré. www.renovare.org .
This is where the proximate means intersect with life. Through the manifest world, the unmanifest Spirit ministers Grace to us.
Third, the Psalm 23 notes my. This returns us unto the writing yesterday. There is a distinction to each of our being that makes each one of us of incalculable concern to God. When we each need a restoration, we do not need a general one, but we need one through personal inspiration of grace from God to each of us. Personal means a personal God to a personal soul, for our personableness is in the image of God, who is not a vague force or impersonal power.
Now, great spiritual theologians have long asserted God is so far "above" us, God is not personal in the same way we think of personal. God would be personal in an absolute sense.
Certainly, God being absolutely personal means God being personal can include things we tend to exclude from personality:
I cannot think of God as a person. But I can think of God as energy and light and love, both in me and around me, and five thousand billion miles away. The universe is too wonderful not to have a cohesive and purposeful power behind it. It cannot be an accident. It must be a uni-verse. God is the term that I use to describe the naturalness and the miraculousness of the power and the wonder of all life.
*Rev. Ann Fox. "Is God Personal, Impersonal, or None of the Above?" From Rev. Dana McClean Greely. Forward through the Ages. www.uufairhaven.org .
So, when we speak of my and He, we speak by analogy. When we recall this, such does not diminish our respect and awe before God, or faith in Divine nearness; rather, reverence is enhanced and relationship with this ever-near Shepherd of us sheep is enriched.
Fourth, we affirm the Shepherd restores our soul? The soul refers to the whole person, or the vitality of the entire self - excellent renditions of this include: "He gives me new strength" (NCV); "He renews my life" (HCSB); "and You refresh my life" (CEV).
The implication is something is lost. The Hebrew "restores" is the usual word or "return, repent." Literally, the passage can read, "He repents my being." The Shepherd turns us back to the vitality lost.
* * *
This reminds us of a purpose of private prayer and spiritual reading, as well as other means of Divine grace - including public worship. Everything we do in spiritual devotion is a means to renew the self, to receive spiritual refreshment. Some spiritual practices tend to fatigue. If we are to remain healthy spiritually, as persons and faith communities, we need balance between work and rest. We need to balance means of grace that lead us to expend energy, as in, serving others, with practices that help restore our energy, as in, solitude.
* * *
The Story of Creation provides us an intuition into the innate need for us to have rest from our active work. We see this in Genesis 2.2 (CEV):
By the seventh day God had finished his work, and so he rested. God blessed the seventh day and made it special because on that day he rested from his work.
On one occasion Jesus and his disciples were weary. He told them to leave with him to a place alone to rest away from the demands of helping others; we see this in Mark 6.31-32 (CEV):
But so many people were coming and going that Jesus and the apostles did not even have a chance to eat. Then Jesus said, "Let's go to a place where we can be alone and get some rest." They left in a boat for a place where they could be alone.
This last example reminds us of simply resting as a potential means of grace. One of my past Spiritual Directors told of going on a silent retreat. She had looked forward to enjoying time alone with God. But, after she got there, she was so tired, all she could do was simply rest. She came to see that was okay, that was a way of being with God, a way she needed for her spiritual renewal. We do not have to be doing something to be enjoying being with God, or for God to be enjoying being with us.
QUIETLY RESPONDING
1) Have you had a time when God renewed you through a direct inner inspiration? What was that like?
2) What are the usual proximate means of grace God uses to restore you?
3) Is there a healthy balance in your life between spiritual practice that tends to loss of energy and that which tends to restoration of vitality? Explain.
Blessings!
Rev Dr Brian K Wilcox
May 25, 2009
barukhattah@embarqmail.com
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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 . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*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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