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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 pray 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 I hope you 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.
Brian encourages support of the 4-Star Christian organization Compassion, which supports children worldwide; see www.compassion.com .
Opening Prayer
God, while many of us impatiently wait Your paradise, we have the power in our hands to be in paradise here and now. Help us to enjoy You, which is for us paradise, by:
loving as You love,
helping as You help,
giving as You give,
serving as You serve.
*Prayer based on a saying of Mother Teresa. See Mother Teresa. Everything Starts from Prayer. Chapter: "The Fruit of Prayer." Ed. by Anthony Stern.
Today's Scripture
8 “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and sweep the entire house and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she finds it, she will call in her friends and neighbors and say, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost coin.’ 10 In the same way, there is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one sinner repents.”
*Luke 15.8-10 (NLT)
Spiritual Teaching
When God breaks into your life, it is as if you are lifted up and plunked down in a new spiritual neighborhood. To your friends, you appear unaltered. You still part your hair on the left and speak with the same slight lisp. But you know, if no one else does, that your thoughts and ambitions and loves-your soul-have moved to a new zip code. You're not in Kansas anymore.
*Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Fingerprints of God.
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Have you ever moved physical addresses? Likely, all you have - some of us many times. Moving is disorienting. You may have felt like the new place could never be home. Then, over time, the new place became home.
This is much like spiritual emergence. Along the way we can grow gradually into a new spiritual zip code, or something can throw us into it. The first is like a move, the second like a plunge.
We do not initially, after a spiritual move, feel like we are home. The new place might be what we have been seeking, yet, we need time to move into it fully.
This raises a pertinent question. The question: "What moves or plunges us into a new zip code?"
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Hagerty explored varied triggers of spiritual breakthroughs. Her search led to the "usual suspects" - high on the list are emotional and physical trauma, and a brush with death. Other triggers include a dysfunctional relationship with parents, stress, and low self-esteem.
Ironic among the leading triggers is a surprise maybe for many of us. None of the top triggers inherently are "positive."
The triggers open a person to receive spiritual Influence. The very "negativity" of their content is part of the humbling of the body-mind system to receive the intrusion, or inflow, of Grace.
Hagerty cites the conclusions of George Valliant, a Harvard psychiatrist. Once, Valliant thought spirituality could be explained by Freudian principles, temperament, or as a stress-response. He followed two groups of men from when they were aged eighteen. He chronicled their lives for more than six decades. His radical conclusion: "Looking at those who are spiritual, it has nothing to do with mental health, and nothing to do with good fortune. It has everything to do with recovery from brokenness."
This does not mean that one has to have brokenness to be a spiritual person. Yet, research indicates persons who have been broken by life are most likely to be more spiritual and have a spiritual, life-changing breakthrough.
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The key here is the turning of brokenness into openness. Some persons get broke and harden. They close up. Here are those persons whom you feel sad to see. They may strut around as a bully or like they have it all together; they have turned their brokenness into a massive denial project. Other persons open up to the Sacred, offering brokenness to God. These persons become beautiful witnesses of Grace.
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I am convinced, looking back over my life, I did not pursue spirituality with a passion simply out of love for God, or Truth. Rather, partly, the pursuit of Grace has come from a lot of brokenness. I would not hang a picture of my life up with a caption: A Model Of Functionality.
Indeed, I would not recommend my psychological struggles to anyone, and I would not my brokenness in different areas - romance, vocation, health ... - to anyone. Looking back on childhood and youth, apparently I was never "normal." I never remember being a youth who felt he belonged anywhere in "this world" - rather, I was a loner, feeling lost in this world and longing for something I could not reach - something of the Sacred -, but I did not know how to discover it. I felt in another world. This brokenness included suffering from acute low self-esteem, depression, marked lack of social skills....
I recall vividly being attracted to a book by Keith Miller, entitled Please Love Me, when I was in college. I rarely read a book. I bought it and read through it quickly. In those pages was my life story - a yearning for a Love I seemed unable to find.
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The major turnabout in my spiritual journey occurred when serving as a professor in religion. I, in my mid-thirties, could rarely pray. I had lost all sense of passion for God, except on an intellectual level. I was haunted by severe physical and psychological problems. I was discontent being a skeptic in a conservative-fundamentalist institution. I was suffering in a marriage that for many years was more like a best friend relationship, not a man-woman one. I was falling apart - or had already fallen apart.
Then, I discovered, through Grace, the contemplative path. I learned and enacted new spiritual practices from the monastic tradition. Shortly afterward, I began exploring, for over ten years, and practicing with practices from, other faith traditions. Finally, I returned to embrace fully my Christian faith, but in a radically new way, and a broad inclusiveness to other spiritual paths.
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I spent the next over ten years, also, exploring other spiritual paths. I had left my professorship and reentered the pastorate, as well as graduating from another Master's program. Then, during another vocational crisis, when I could see time had come for me to leave the church I had served for six years, I had another spiritual redirection.
Broken, confused, and alone - I had undergone divorce twice - I walked a prayer labyrinth in Ocala, FL. I "heard" a voice speak, while I walked meditatively. I heard that I was to come back fully into my Christian tradition, and from my home there I could relate with other faith traditions. So, from that day, I began coming fully home, again.
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For some among us, we may seem to be pushed against our will into a new experience of Grace. Yet, for most of us we move due to a determined will to turn all over to the Hands of God.
Psalm 73 tells of a poet who moved from profound discomfit about his faith and life to a new degree of faith experience. He moved there - or was moved there - by choosing to struggle with his experience and offer it in prayer to Grace.
In looking back after his new conversion, the psalmist in prayer to God:
21 Then I realized that my heart was bitter,
and I was all torn up inside.
22 I was so foolish and ignorant—
I must have seemed like a senseless animal to you. (NLT)
What led him to the leap in faith? The poet writes of a visit that changed his life: "Then, I went into your sanctuary, O God, ..." (v. 17). From that point the poem changes to an affirmation of renewed faith. And the poem concludes:
23 Yet I still belong to you;
you hold my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
leading me to a glorious destiny.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
I desire you more than anything on earth.
26 My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak,
but God remains the strength of my heart;
he is mine forever.
27 Those who desert him will perish,
for you destroy those who abandon you.
28 But as for me, how good it is to be near God!
I have made the Sovereign Lord my shelter,
and I will tell everyone about the wonderful things you do. (NLT)
The key is the poet went into the sanctuary. He made a choice to bring his broken self, his fractured faith, into a place to offer all to the Sacred. Then, conversion of spiritual unrest happened.
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Possibly, some of you are feeling broken. The brokenness can take many forms. It can manifest as shame, anger, sloth, confusion, physical symptoms, low self-esteem, broken relationships, ...
You can go to the "sanctuary." You can present the hurt as an offering to the Spirit. You can choice to rely on Grace to use your brokenness to open you to receive a level of spiritual enlightenment and experience you have not known.
What is the "sanctuary" for you? Well, first and foremost, the "sanctuary" is you. Then, going to the "sanctuary" can entail a decision to enter into prayerful receptivity in a physical place where you can be alone with God.
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Our Scripture for today, from Luke 10, reminds us of the joy of Heaven over one who turns to God - a spiritual redirection. This passage tells us we are not alone in our seeking. Spirit wills for us to be found, and, sometimes, to be found is to be refound or to find ourselves at a new, deeper experience of Grace than we have known before.
This often occurs after brokenness. We, like the woman looking for the lost coin, seek an answer to our suffering. We do not give in to despair or denial. Rather, we keep surrendering to Love, which is an openness to cooperate with Grace in healing and discovery. We are not so much discoverers in this, but are discovered by a Loving that brings healing balm. Our seeking ends in Joy, with Heaven rejoicing, too!
Quietly Responding
1. Have you had an experience of brokenness leading you to a new, deeper opening to the Spirit? Explain.
2. Are you undergoing brokenness in your life? What is the nature of the brokenness? How might you use this to lead you to "sanctuary"? What does going to "sanctuary" mean for you?
Brian Kenneth Wilcox July 31, 2009
briankwilcox@yahoo.com
Facebook: Brian Kenneth Wilcox
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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, with friends and under a vow of simplicity. Brian is an ecumenical-interspiritual leader, who chooses not to identify with any group, and renounces all titles of sacredness that some would apply to him, but seeks to be open to how Christ manifests in the diversity of Christian denominations and varied religious-spiritual traditions. He affirms that all spiritual paths lead ultimately back to Jesus Christ. 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 briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*Contact the above email to book Brian for preaching, Spiritual Direction, retreats, workshops, animal blessing services, house blessings, or other spiritual requests. You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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