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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.
Brian encourages support of the 4-Star Christian organization Compassion, which supports children worldwide; see www.compassion.com .
Prayer
Help me daily to accept the challenge to grow up into the Christ, and the Mystical Body that makes up Love. May my embrace grow to be more Your Embrace. May “heaven” and “earth” become more a unity in me. Continue to free me from remnants of mythic, tribal faith, with its exclusionary postures of mind and heart, to an integral-mystical vision of all things summed up in the Beloved, eternally. May I not be judgmental of anyone, but see all persons as sacred, blessed beings. Grant me wise compassion to see with such eyes of Love, yet wise conviction not to act tolerantly of any expression of religious or social thought, group, or program that is exclusionary and devoid of the openness of Grace to all persons in all our valid differences. Amen.
Scripture
I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding.
*Philippians 1.9 (NLT)
Quotes
There is a “blessed unrest” at work in the universe and in our own lives that causes us
to yearn for and realize an awakening of consciousness to Spirit, and deeper expres-sions of compassion. Revelation never stops.
*The United Church of Canada – Canadian Memorial Church & Center for Peace. Www.canadianmemorial.org .
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.
The modern world lies under a pervasive sense of anguish, of being abandoned, or at least experiencing God as absent. Yet events that seem to turn our lives upside down and inside out are part of God's redemptive plan, not only for us, but for the world in which we live. God may be preparing a great awakening for the world, if God can find enough people to cooperate in this mysterious plan.
*Thomas Keating. In.integralinstitute.org .
Spiritual Teaching
The late East Indian, Catholic priest, and mystic Anthony de Mello shares the following story in his 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 was an in-your-face writer. He integrated stories and teachings from varied religions and attacked head-on the childishness that is the trait of much religion. De Mello was not against persons having to have a baby faith. He did speak strongly against remaining, however, crying babies in the faith.
Growing up is hard work and entails vulnerability and risk. Growing up entails getting lost. And it is no different with growing up spiritually. Growing up spiritually requires discipline and entails vulnerability and risk. Growing up spiritually means you will get lost and have to be refound.
* * *
I had served as Pastor for a congregation a number of years. I realized I had been preaching a continual summons and example, lived out in my life, to go beyond the past toward a new horizon. I recall the day I said on a Sunday morning, “I share with you things other pastors would not, for I trust you can handle it.” I spoke to the church 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 people with an emphasis different from any other of the same denomination in the city. And the nature of the city made the ministry I proposed a means to accept a large part of the city as a mission field. My summons was a demanding one, in that it would have entailed growing beyond the horizon that had defined the congregation for its entire history. The call was to go where the congregation had never been, which would entail everything I noted above: hard work, vulnerability, risk, getting lost – and getting refound.
The congregation did not accept the challenge. After six years I moved on. And several years later, the church is in the same past-bog.
* * *
Of course, faith community and persons are mutually interactive. When a faith group is growing, that stimulates growth among the persons in it. When the persons accept the joy of spiritual growth, the faith group benefits with growth. However, typically, there must be enough persons, and enough in positions of leadership, to tilt the group in the direction of new horizons. Also, if the key leader is not a person growing, the group will likely not accept the challenge of finding itself moving toward a more embracing Life.
* * *
We are invited each moment to go where we have never been. The Isaiah 43.18-20 writer challenges exiles to welcome a dawning newness. To accept this summons is to live from and into the promise of Spirit doing something new, now, something we 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. And the movement of spiritual evolution in community cannot happen without enough persons within the group accepting the challenge to grow up and onward in Spirit. We are to honor our past, but we cannot live in 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 gave 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, “Okay, you asked again, now I will give you an answer, not to please you, but to urge 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 past answers.”
Truly, we find new answers when we ask new questions. We ask new questions when we evolve to a consciousness from which those questions emerge out of the Universal Mind.
* * *
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, like De Mellow, addresses the stuck state of the Christians he addresses:
By this time you should be able to teach others. But you need someone to teach you God's word again from the very beginning. Like [little] children, you need milk, not meat.
*Hebrews 5.12 (WE)
* * *
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. An example of a sagacious maxim on ingredients of spiritual growth comes form the Desert Father, Abba Poemen: “To throw yourself before God, not to measure your progress, to leave behind all self-will; these are the instruments for the work of the soul.”
The differing lists of Means of Grace remind us that growing up entails working the Means of Grace to serve up daily nourishment. This 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 all peoples.
Therefore, spiritual growth is not merely about the development of your soul. Spiritual growth advances the entire body of human kind. Spiritual growth is a gift to others and yourself.
Responding
(1)Reflect on the quotes by Canadian Memorial Church & Center for Peace and Rabbi David Cooper. What do they imply about spiritual growth?
(2) Reflect on the social implications of your spiritual growth, in light of the quote from Thomas Keating.
(3)What ingredients do you see as vital to daily spiritual growth? Come up with your own course of ingredients.
(4)Can you recall a time when God was calling you beyond the horizon of your previous spiritual experience? Explain.
(5)Do you have a group that encourages you by word, listening, and example to keep growing spiritually? If not, would you consider starting such a group?
(6)What is the relationship between Divine Grace and Human Choice in spiritual growth?
(7)Do your daily meditation and spiritual reading…
* * *
*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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