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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
Dear Lord, help me to align myself so with the Holy Spirit that I shall receive daily inspiration to leave all need to please others in any way other than being true to whom You have called me to be. Grant me friends and acquaintances who will honor who I am in You, not just what they think I am to be or do. May I seek to understand and honor each person in my life, for who they are in their own special way of being. Amen.
Scripture
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and said to them, 26 "If anyone comes to me but loves his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, or sisters—or even life—more than me, he cannot be my follower. 27 Whoever is not willing to carry his cross and follow me cannot be my follower. 28 If you want to build a tower, you first sit down and decide how much it will cost, to see if you have enough money to finish the job.29 If you don't, you might lay the foundation, but you would not be able to finish. Then all who would see it would make fun of you, 30 saying, 'This person began to build but was not able to finish.'
31 "If a king is going to fight another king, first he will sit down and plan. He will decide if he and his ten thousand soldiers can defeat the other king who has twenty thousand soldiers. 32 If he can't, then while the other king is still far away, he will send some people to speak to him and ask for peace. 33 In the same way, you must give up everything you have to be my follower."
*Luke 14.25-33 (NCV)
Quote
Prayer is surrender - surrender to the will of God and cooperation with that will. If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.
*E. Stanley Jones. Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome.
Spiritual Teaching
Prayer challenges our selfish felt-need to appear successful to others, to be successful as defined by society - even by those close to us. Prayer is not that we might be "successful," but that we might be real, and to be real is to be yourself. Sadly, many of us in religion use religion to become more fake, not more real.
And many so-called Christians are threatened when a spiritual brother or sister gets real - and gets real about the Will of God for him or her. As a Pastor, I learned that many of my members did not want me to be real, they wanted me to be fake, for to be real meant my presence - without my saying a word, and even better in my silence - challenged their hypocrisy.
Indeed, possibly one reason many resists Silence is they cannot seem to live with their own realness, and must, then, hide behind a facade of noise. Could not constant motion and sound be one means we evade the lie of the false self we live - which is to say, to drown out the Word of our Self in God - our Soul?
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Being real is being who you are. At times, persons never inquire as to whom we are. To be, and do, so as they want, would mean to them, we would be okay - which is to say, successful, or to say, in an image they give us. They might even feel they are doing this imposition as best for us.
Now, these persons may mean well. Yet, their role is not to seek to discern the Will of God for us. Their assumed role is to seek to impose what they think is the Will of God for us, for it fits their idea of such, which fits what they are comfortable with for themselves in us. So, really, they are not that interested at all in your or my doing the Will of God, are they? They are more interested in our pleasing them, but use their claim of loving us as a means of manipulating us to their own comfort.
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Anthony de Mello addresses this in his book Awareness. I share some words and an anecdote from the De Mello. He writes:
The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don't want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don't like it. You don't want to be happy. Want a little test? Let's try it. It will take you exactly one minute. You could close your eyes while you're doing it or you could keep them open. It doesn't really matter. Think of someone you love very much, someone you're close to, someone who is precious to you, and say to that person in your mind, "I'd rather have happiness than have you." See what happens. "I'd rather be happy than have you. If I had a choice, no question about it, I'd choose happiness." How many of you felt selfish when you said this? Many, it seems. See how we've been brainwashed? See how we've been brainwashed into thinking, "How could I be so selfish?" But look at who's being selfish. Imagine somebody saying to YOU, "How could you be so selfish that you'd choose happiness over me?" Would you not feel like responding, "Pardon me, but how could YOU be so selfish that YOU would demand I choose you above my own happiness?!"
A woman once told me that when she was a child her Jesuit cousin gave a retreat in the Jesuit church in Milwaukee. He opened each conference with the words: "The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is unselfishness." That's marvelous! I asked her, "Would you want me to love you at the cost of my happiness?" "Yes," she answered. Isn't that delightful? Wouldn't that be wonderful? SHE would love me at the cost of HER happiness and I would love her at the cost of MY happiness, and so you've got two unhappy people, but LONG LIVE LOVE!
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Prayer is about aligning ourselves with the Will of God. And this may put us at variance with well-meaning persons around us. They may think our determination to be true to ourselves is selfish, even unloving, when, in fact, not to be true to ourselves is selfish and unloving.
To be stubbornly unselfish, by being true to yourself, is good - even if defiant. To be true to yourself is to be true to the Will of God, for you can never fulfill the Divine Will except through integrity to the unique configuration of you as you and the life you yourself are given in Grace. To deny who you are is to deny Grace, and is to act un-gracefully. To die to yourself spiritually is to deny the person you acted out, but never were. So, do not use this deny and die to yourself talk as an out to live a conformity to what others expect of you, or what you think they expect of you, while you do not honor whom God has made you.
Therefore, much that goes under the word unselfish is selfish. And much that goes under the word selfish is unselfish. Much that goes under the word love is unloving. And much that goes under the word unloving is love.
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When you live from your True Self, you have no need to appear successful. You do not live in tyranny to persons' expectations - but you are not a defiant, adolescent-like rebel, either. You, yes, can wisely surrender your will, at times, in Love, but this is not the same as denying your True Self.
Ironically, then, as you Pray spiritually and inwardly, who you truly are becomes more clear to you. - So, if you do not want to confront who you truly are, you would be safer not praying. - As you grow more deeply in Prayer, your Soul emerges more - your True Self - and how that Self is to be expressed through you in a manner unlike anyone else.
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So, to align with God means to align with who you are, which is the union of a timeless Soul and a personality-life within time. To live spiritually is to grow toward a closer integration of the apparent opposites of the Will of God and your will, until, hopefully, if not in this life, the next, there is no difference between the one and the other.
St. John of the Cross, writing of this Union in the "afterlife," in his The Spiritual Canticle, speaks of this union of wills as a union of Loving. To be in oneness with God is to be in a spiritual marriage of Love, and, thus, the Divine Will becomes more than a duty, it becomes the natural outflow of a Loving reaching out into love and love reaching out into Loving - and one cannot tell the two apart, such is the conjugal Oneness:
As her intellect will be the intellect of God, her will then will be God's will, and thus her love will be God's love. The soul's will is not destroyed there, but is so firmly united with the strength of God's will, with which he loves her, that her love for him is as strong and perfect as his love for her; for the two wills are so united that there is only one will and love, which is God's. Thus the soul loves God with the will and strength of God himself, united with the very strength of love with which God loves her. This strength lies in the Holy Spirit in whom the soul is there transformed, for by this transformation of glory he supplies what is lacking in her, since he is given to the soul for the sake of the strength of this love.
*In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. ICS: Washington. 1979.
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The Holy Spirit works like a Spiritual Director. When I do Spiritual Direction, I am not there to decide the Will of God for the person, I am there to facilitate the person seeing that Will and receiving Means of Grace to fulfill that Will. There is a tension between my insight into such and the person's need to discover for himself or herself. That is our relationship to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not so much One who makes clear for us the Divine Will, but One who works with us in discovering the shape of that Will for us as persons in community with other persons.
Responding
1) Who are you, really? Saying something like, "I am a child of God" is not enough. I asked you, "Who are you, really?"
2) Do you find yourself not living from your True Self, so as to please others? In what ways do you see this not living of your True Self?
3) In what ways would you like to be more true to your Soul, your True Self?
4) What ways do you see yourself growing to be more true to who you are, and not what other persons expect you to be?
4) How is the unselfishness of being your True Self, true to your soul, personality, and life, different from the childish claim, "I can do what I want, and it is no one else's business, if it does not hurt anyone else"?
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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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