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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.
Quote
Marcia Ford, in her Traditions of the Ancients, on her decline from her first Love for Christ following her conversion to the Christ Way:
I became a “victim” of my society-which, by the way, includes the church-... I conveniently forgot that my passion as a new believer was to become like Christ. Instead, I became like … well, everybody else.
Affirmation
The Presence of the Holy Spirit is flowing through my body.
Scripture
26 From one man [Greek, “one”] he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. … 27 “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. 28 For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your [ some manuscripts, "our"] own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”
*Acts 17.26-28, NLT
Spiritual Teaching
Today, I first share comments from Paul Ravenhill, a Quaker, on the present state of our spiritual condition in our society. I share this, and following will elaborate, after offering a personal testimony.
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How much have we, in our generation, denied the spiritual dimension of mankind? How much have we denied the vast areas of spiritual knowledge which can only be known as we walk them through the pain, longing, seeking and questioning of our own experiences?
It seems that today we have reduced all spiritual life down to a simple process of following the rules - and limited the immensity of the life of the soul to a process similar to that of laboratory mice running through a maze by tripping switches and opening doors.
It seems that today we are trading the glory for an escape from the pain - eager to avoid suffering no matter what we lose.
Without the true spiritual dimension[,] life becomes a mere "jumping through the hoops" - something to be fulfilled through a series of mechanical acts, which grow in our consciousness until they become the reason for our existence.
What of the "dark night of the soul"? What of the God of the Psalms? - the God who passed His own through fire and blood and the bitterness of utter emptiness and despair. What of the God whose treasures are too valuable to be so lightly bestowed as we would like to believe?
God desires for us to know His glory, but also wants us to know that the path of the spirit cannot be learned through the mind or by any mechanical theory. God's world is a spiritual world and we begin to understand the spiritual pathway that leads there when we come to places where all our theories don't fit. Only as we reach the place where "only God is left" can we start to find that higher realm where He quickens and where He teaches.
"Thy Kingdom come on earth" is, I believe, not only (and not first) for the world around but for the earth which we are - our lives! When He sheds the Light of His Presence within then we can "arise, shine" in the world which surrounds us.
As our desire leads us to press on through the darkness of the things not yet made manifest, God will cause us to know deep within how sure is His grace, how certain is His fulfillment. What we are, and what our world is, will disappear as we find ourselves in Him. The God whom we have known "graven in words and theories" will disappear and we will find our wondering eyes beholding Him as He is.
*“Looking in the Mirror.” Copyright © 1998 by Paul Ravenhill - www.ravenhill.org .
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One of my most vivid memories of seeking spiritually was of my self, a mid-teen prostrate with face toward the ground in the wood, among the pines. I was in the midst of an awakening to Something More, a painfully felt realization that what I had received of God was much less than what there was of God for me - for everyone. I did not know much about What I was being grasped by. All I knew was a feverish search to meet a longing set afire for all of God possible for me to receive. This was my first dark night of the soul, an anguish deeply felt for what of God each of us has been shaped for.
That late afternoon, about 1976, prostrate and crying out to be filled with the Holy Spirit, I did not know the prostration and prayer was a harbinger for the life I would live, and the unction I would be given to help other persons find as much of God possible for them. In a sense, spiritually, truly, I have lived among those pines, prostrate, pouring my heart out to God, for the last over three decades. Yet, I have not been alone, for Christ has been my Friend, and many friends have come to seek God with me, and many have allowed me to be their guide. Hopefully, I have helped at least a minority of them faithfully to continue the search as a life-long, joyful commitment of ardent Loving and being Loved.
And, in the churches, what I have seen is a growing spiritual lostness. I see a myriad of churches that have lost the capacity to feel and know their hunger for God. I see denominational leaders and other church leaders appealing to meet increasing budgets and attract more members as a sign of success. I see too little of the spiritual pressing on that Paul Ravenhill, and many other spiritual seekers, writes about.
I hear, however, of Christians who have lost faith in the churches as spiritual bodies, and are tired of the dead institutionalism and arid dogmatism that is strangling the Life out of local communions. I see a desert filled with persons who have lost even the sensitivity to the truth that religiously, in our culture, the church often has lost its capacity to discern its own thirst for a spiritual Life – indeed, I see denominational leaders who evidence no clue on being truly spiritual leaders, as they attempt varied means to buttress the church as institution and show themselves as successful leaders in transforming the church. I see leaders refusing to transform and lead in transformation to higher, more embracing levels of experience of the Divine.
I see churches stuck in trying to save themselves by claiming a past that is dead and gone, rather than seeing the quenching of the Spirit is their refusal to seek the Divine at a level of knowing and loving they have not known and cannot know without a transformation that means, to some extent, the death of the church they have revered and, indeed, the death of the experience and perception of God they once rightly enjoyed.
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For the person and churches, both, the Dark Night that Ravenhill and many others refer to is a painful loss to gain. The capacity to find God newly at a deeper, more embracing level of experience depends not only on God, but it depends on how badly we want more of God – not the God we have known, but more of God as God. This newness depends, also, on the extent to which we are willing to lose what has proven rightly helpful and precious spiritually, regardless of how lost we may feel for a time before the emergence of a new clarity and more whole knowing of God as God.
Responding
1.Relate the quote from Marcia Ford and the Scripture to the following Spiritual Teaching.
2. By the choices you make daily, how would you esteem your priority on your spiritual life? How much time do you spend in devotion and prayer? How much time in watching television? In listening to music? In talking on the phone? What changes might you need to make in your use of time to place more of a priority on your relationship with God?
3.Do you recall a time that stands out to you as exemplifying your surrender to know the Sacred more wholly, lovingly, and wonderfully? Share that.
4.Ravenhill writes: “God's world is a spiritual world and we begin to understand the spiritual pathway that leads there when we come to places where all our theories don't fit. Only as we reach the place where "only God is left" can we start to find that higher realm where He quickens and where He teaches.” Reflect on this excerpt. Ask questions of the Holy Spirit, and stop to listen for any inner response – questions like, “What is meant by spiritual world?,” “What is meant by spiritual pathway?,” “What is it like to be at the end of all theories religiously and spiritually?,” “What is meant by 'only God is left'?,” “How does God quicken and teach me?,” …
5.How might God view success in a spiritual leader and faith communion differently than how our society shapes us to see success?
6.I make the following assessment of the present condition of the churches in my society – though, certainly, there are many exceptions: “I see churches stuck in trying to save themselves by claiming a past that is dead and gone, rather than seeing the quenching of the Spirit is their refusal to seek the Divine at a level of knowing and loving they have not known and cannot know without a transformation that means, to some extent, the death of the church they have revered and, indeed, the death of the experience and perception of God they once rightly enjoyed.” Do you agree, or not, with this assessment? Explain.
7.Who has most inspired you to know there is always more of God for you to claim in faith? What about this person so inspired you?
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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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