|
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
We cannot speak unless we have listened, unless we have made our connection with God.
From the fullness of the heart, the mouth will speak, the mind will think.
*Mother Teresa. Everything Starts from Prayer. Ed. Anthony Stern.
Scripture
9 Then Jesus told this story to some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else: 10 “Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. 11The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: ‘I thank you, God, that I am not a sinner like everyone else. For I don’t cheat, I don’t sin, and I don’t commit adultery. I’m certainly not like that tax collector! 12 I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’ 14 I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
*Luke 18, NLT
Spiritual Teaching
Julia Cameron, in her Some People Say … God is No Laughing Matter, tells of meeting a woman who fits her type “Spiritual Expert.” Here is Cameron's anecdote:
She was wearing her ex-nun outfit – a boxy little suit and short hair – and I looked like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. … Well, we were both supposed to be lecturing on spirituality and she kind of looked me up and down and hissed – I mean hissed - “Why can't you dress like the rest of us?”
“Because I don't want to,” I told her. She did not want to hear that. It seemed to make her even madder and nastier than usual. She whipped out there and scolded that audience just the way Sister Very Nasty used to when I was little. According to her, they were really botching their lessons. And she knew … Lou Gosset's fanatical drill sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman had nothing on her.
She whipped right into the Sister Nasty Version, which uses a lot of sarcasm and cruelty “for your own good.” This version is all about lessons, and how you are doing them wrong. In this version, God is really not very fond of us. It's like He thinks we are social climbers trying to get to Him and He can see right through us and so can Sister Very Nasty.
* * *
How do you discern what Cameron refers to as “the Spiritual experts” club? Well, one is its exclusive nature: “First of all, it's hard to get in, and once you do, the main fun they seem to have there is keeping everybody else out. Let's say you think so-and-so is interesting, 'No, no, not a real expert!'”
* * *
Certainly, this pridefulness plagues much of religion. Yet, now we have a counter-expert group. This group includes persons who demean religion and praise what they call spirituality. Then, they have their tribes of those in the know, and all others are, pitifully and sadly, the uninitiated and unenlightened. See, the problem has never been essentially religion, the problem has been essentially the human insecurity that leads us to want to be superior to others, and our group and way the only right one. One can be a Sister Very Nasty either as a Catholic nun or a Tarot reader, a Mormon or a Hindu, a Christian or a Pagan, … Why? Because any group is made up of humans.
* * *
A counter to spiritual elitism - a defensive mechanism of personal attack- I experienced from a person who had attended my meditation classes and praised my teachings on spirituality. The person made a sudden turn after many months of agreement, so much so as to encourage me to share more with others. I became a man, according to this person, who esteemed myself as more spiritual than she and she herself as praying in an inferior way. The person never again expressed empathy toward my teachings or sought to discuss such matters with me from my perspective.
Yet, implicitly the person may have picked up on something that, at first, attracted her - that I do teach some teachings and practices that are not equal to lower-level ones. This is not a condemnation of other ways, only an affirmation of what is true as much in playing an instrument as meditating - there are levels, or waves, of depth. And when one teaches such, he or she opens up to be accused of being elitist.
* * *
Attitude, not concept, is the issue here. Clearly, there are levels, or waves, of development in all areas of life. No one would say that Tiger Woods is at the same level of golfing that a recreational golfer is at your local Country Club. And no one can logically call Tiger Woods arrogant simply because he knows he is the expert golfer he is, and better than possibly anyone else on earth. Do you think my little Chevy truck shares the same expertise as a Porsche? I like my Chevy, but I would enjoy more driving that Porsche - the Porsche is a better make of vehicle. So, we have differing degrees of expertise, or lack of it, in faith matters, also.
Likewise, not all faith movements are of equal maturity, or value to us and the cosmos. This is to say, not all faith movements share an equal degree of reflection of the universal principles we need to embody as fully as possible. Indeed, likely, our world would be better off if some faiths ceased to grow and died out.
Therefore, we need to move beyond some of the vapid political correctness about faith that comes over as nice, but is so nice to be nauseating. Not every person reflects the same degree of maturity in faith, and no, despite the airy claims otherwise, not all religions are equal anymore than all peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are equal.
Personal difference aside, if Truth can mean equally anything, the word Truth has no meaning. Without some degree of expertise, which creates its opposite of non-expertise, then, the whole structure of Reality would collapse into mush - and all equal mush is still mush.
I am an interspiritual Christian. I seek to see the value in other faiths. That to me is honorable and loving, in the sense Jesus speaks of loving my neighbor. Yet, this does not mean I think Jainism is on an equal par with my faith. Persons in Jainism are often, likely, more mature in faith than I am, yet, as a Christian I cannot be a Christian and agree that all other faiths, or even all other major world faiths, or just as right and revelatory as the faith I adhere to. I would not respect a Buddhist saying his Path and my Path are changeable with the other. Part of what makes the rainbow of faiths so wonderful is the extent to which differing persons can affirm convictions on the revelatory value of them, in light of other faiths.
Certainly, in some measure, we could claim that all faiths are seeking a like Reality. Yet, again, that being equal among all would not entail all are equal in the way they manifests that common longing for the Sacred.
* * *
So, that being clarified, the problem with the mentality of Sister – Brother – Very Nasty is not a person's innate right of conviction, but his or her attitude of arrogant superiority. This is, and has always been, a prime trait of socially-tribal faith – all of these are fundamentalist in nature. Such is to affirm that essentially fundamentalism, in whatever garb it is dressed up, is at core arrogant, exclusive, and based on an ignorance of the common likeness of each and all of us in our essence and longing – and God's equal embracing of us each and all, too.
In Christianity such turns the all-embracing, compassionate Christ among the least of these into the Judge who is ready, without a tear in his eyes, to condemn all but persons of one faith to eternal damnation. This “Christ” will admit into an eternal heaven a gluttonous “first world” materialist and kick into an eternal hell a poor and compassionate and godly Hindu simply because the latter did not become “a believer.” Yet, this is exactly the mythical-tribal, and often magical, nonsense that parades as Truth even in much of mainline Christianity – translated, partly, “Those who claim to be more enlightened than their ignorant fundamentalist brothers and sisters.” Yet, this is exactly my frustration with much mainline Christian faith: The continued refusal to face head-on the subtle fundamentalist tribalism lurking in its own sanctuaries, among it leaders, and in its liturgy. In other words, such arrogant expertize condemns its fundamentalist friends, while dressing its own like fundamentalism in a more modernistic, rationalistic garb – a more socially-accepted form of – To Hell with all you others. This means, such nicer fundamentalism seeks to appear more open, while its use of liturgy and scripture and theology still screams out the message of Sister – Brother – Real Nasty, only mainline Christianity is not as apparently nasty.
* * *
Still, while we can speak of these issues on a larger scale, we need to bring them home – to ourselves as persons. That is, we each can likely discover, if we are honest, a tendency, even a drive and felt-need, to feel so special as to act somewhat like Cameron found Sister Real Nasty to be. That is, we each have that Nasty within us - some have more than others, but all of us have some of the Sister Real Nasty.
One challenge is how to take our faith Path seriously, while not taking it or ourselves too seriously. This is not always easy, and that is one reason we find so much Nasty in religion and spirituality.
But we can begin daily with ourselves. We can explore our own attitudes and feelings both toward our faith and those who disagree with us. We can, like the tax collector in our Scripture for today, see ourselves as having nothing to offer from ourselves. That is, we can see that any good within us, and any love of Truth, is a gift. We can see that we, no less than persons of any faith or spirituality, or reliant beings, one in our common dependence on our Source. We can see that we all aspire to the same thing, and that is what we are to share with others amidst our sincere differences: Love. Indeed, we can see our differences as opportunities to grow in Love and expand our own degree of gracefulness.
Love has the face of compassion. This allows us to see from the perspective of the other. How can a Christian judge a Buddhist, if he or she feels and sees from the perspective of the Buddhist, and vice versa? The Buddhist may be more Christian than I am, and I may be more Buddist than I realized - or more Buddhist than many adherents of Buddhism. I have learned much from Buddhism, and I find some things about Buddhism to be superior to some things within my own faith tradition. And, possibly, a compassionate Buddhist could say the same thing when compassionately relating with me. To me, that would be Loving. And what we most need within and among ourselves is more Loving. We are, when all is said, one.
* * *
Now, how does this connect to Prayer? Prayer is getting close to God. As we draw closer to the Sacred, we become more like the Sacred. We become more sacralized, or consecrated, and this entails more loving, more able to see and appreciate as God does. Those who have a Nasty God see what they themselves are. Those whose God is able to embrace and appreciate the Truth in many earthy garbs is not the Nice God, but the Loving God – indeed, the One called Love.
Responding
1.Are there ways you may appear an Expert in your religion or spirituality and, thus, alienate persons or present an image you do not want to present?
2.How can we work with the tension between degrees of religious and spiritual maturity, while, at the same time, seeing persons as equal and deserving of equal respect?
3.What are aspects of faith as you have witnessed it personally that now strike you as pertaining to Expert groups, rather than compassionate and insightful?
4.What are steps you can take to present a religious or spiritual image that reflects an image of conviction in your personal or group ways, yet, is curious and accepting of other ways of expressing faith and the Sacred?
5.Reflect on the following and its meaning for your life and the faith group you join in: Prayer is getting close to God. As we draw closer to the Sacred, we become more like the Sacred. We become more sacralized, or consecrated, and this entails more loving, more able to see and appreciate as God does.
6. Consider making a commitment of zero tolerance for religious, or spiritual, nastiness. I do not mean being nasty toward the nasty. I mean, at minimum, deciding not to participate in or support in any way such nastiness. Such a decision might entail things like simply walking away when such nastiness is being voiced, or a calm notification that you do not agree and why.
* * *
*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.
|
