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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.
Scripture
16I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, 17and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. 18I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
*Ephesians 3, NRSV
Spiritual Teaching
As many of my readers know, I began a major life-transition several months ago. Part of that has been a transformation in my network of friends. While I have seen Spirit connect me with many new friends, and a new church, too, I have seen other friends – some that were once close -, recede into the background. This is not intentional, but a process potential in any major life transition. We cannot go through a major inward change without some shift in relationships.
Sometimes, a person just fades away, and we let the person go. During a major life transition, a once best friend wrote me to keep her informed about how things were going with me. She had not been contacting me in any way to ask of how I was doing – though I was in a major, difficult loss in life. After that e-mail, no other communication arose. My response was if I am not more important than that, when this person was aware of what had happened and was happening, then, that was not the type of close friend I needed in my life. So, I left room for the person to contact me, or not. I never heard a word. Just a few years before, the person was one I thought would be there when the bottom fell out of my life – the bottom did fall out, and I was surprised at the lack of expressed concern – indeed, silence.
Also, in contrast, was a person I met many months before the major transition began, and I met her only once. This person chose to emerge and be a strong encourager and support - practically insisting I let her befriend me. Alike the above, but unlike too, this person was one I would not have thought would initiate such care and invitation to help.
So, friendship has become a major theme in my writings, for I am learning much about it at present. I am, also, learning more about the difference between relationships and spiritual relationships. What I am seeking more, now, is persons who focus on their spiritual unfolding, and our sharing together can be an enjoying of that in each other. I am allowing Spirit to network together others and me, to enjoy spiritual companionship and mutual edification.
So, I share these words, and others, not just to tell of my experience. I use my experience to invite you to consider your own. Hopefully, this writing will help you explore with me the nature and process of spiritual relationships.
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Tonight, I met with a friend. I was home enjoying a beer and already settling in to get ready to rest. She called. I said that maybe it was too late – was about 9:20PM. She affirmed “No” and “Come on over.” I got in my truck and drove over.
What began as my sharing some matters of concern to me, and needing her guidance and encouragement, emerged into a reciprocating. The energy of the sharing deepened and intensified. What, to me, felt like an initial heavy energy-field, or not flowing well, became a flowing, light, and luminous field of energy.
Mutual themes in our separate experience informed each other. What was felt was a mutuality of sharing - felt for this form of sharing is an embodied, sensual experience. That is, felt means there is a feeling quality and, thus, more than intellectual or passing back and forth words and ideas.
Possibly, in a spiritual sense that is what friendship is: A mutuality of sharing. This sharing is the New Testament koinonia. Such, again, is not merely a sharing of ideas, or what we often mean by “conversation,” but a sharing of essence with essence, presence with presence. In such spiritual intimacy, the Christ in one is conversing with the Christ in the other.
The Abbot Aelred (b. 1109) writes eloquently of this intercourse of thought and feeling, this mutual sharing, this koinonia of essence:
We have a clear duty to love all persons, and especially those who live closest to us. For the monk, this means especially the members of his community. But it is also clear that no one, not even the best monk, can find all the members of the community enjoyable; there will be some whom he must love as an act of will and intellect, without the consolation of being able to enjoy their company. Toward others, however, all things will work together to produce a kind of love which is a foretaste of heaven: the attraction, intention, and enjoyment will satisfy not only his discernment of what is right, but also his feelings of what is enjoyable.
*St. (Abbot) Aelred of Rievaulx. Spiritual Friendship. Trans. Sr. Mary Eugenia Laker. Quoted in Rhonda Chervin. Spiritual Friendship. Adapted by writer.
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We might think persons so devoted to the Spiritual Life would easily get along. No. Monks and nuns enclosed are no different than persons outside such enclosures. Anytime you get more than one person together, you get more than one personality together. The True Self of persons entails no conflict or dissonance. From the True Self there is only harmony, for disharmony is alien to God. Therefore, some things emerge from these matters:
1)The personality is that collection of attributes that are individual to us each; the True Self, our essence, is the same in each one of us, for the True Self, or essence, is our participation in God as beings formed from God – as a son or daughter of God.
2)If persons would share always from their True Self, or essence, there would be no disharmony between or among them.
3)No one always shares self from the True Self to the True Self of the other, or others; therefore, some measure of disharmony exists in even healthy relationships – how much more in unhealthy ones.
4)The more two persons mutually share from the True Self, the more they enjoy spiritual harmony, or resonance.
5)The quality of True Self only arises from essence, never from personality – though through personality. Thus, we cannot enjoy the essence of another in mutual sharing by our choice alone; the other person, or persons, must share with us from the same essence.
6)No relationship problem arises from the True Self. Every relationship disharmony is a personality based matter.
7)The key is not to deny the role of personality, but surrender to the influence of the Holy Spirit so as to clear personality more to be more a means of the operations of essence.
Abbot Aelred rightly speaks of our not being able to enjoy the friendship of some persons. You may have all the good intent to maintain an enjoyable relationship with someone, yet, that can still be a practical impossibility.
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How do we nurture a spiritual friendship, or other relationshp of spiritual likeness? If we answer this, we have some signification to the query, “What is a spiritual relationship?” Ronda Chervin writes:
What makes a relationship spiritual is that its very center of gravity is mutual or shared participation in the following of Christ. There are many forms of sharing: praying together, talking about insights into the ways of God, reading the same books, working side by side in ministries as varied as social justice, mercy, teaching, healing, helping.
Chervin proceeds to quote from the classic The Imitation of Christ. This classic reads: “Devout conversation on spiritual matters … is a great aid to spiritual progress, especially when persons of the same mind and spirit associate together in God.”
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Chervin and the Imitation show the essential process of having and growing a spiritual relationship. The process is sharing content that reflects the nature of the relationship. For example, if you say you want to have a spiritual intimacy with someone, yet your activities exclude a priority being given to matters of spiritual content, then, you will not – will not – have a spiritual relationship. Possibly, then, you just say that is what you want, but you really do not want that kind of energy, that form of intensity, and by your choices in relationships you are deciding what form of relationship you will have – you are creating that, as a consequence of your priorities of will – for actions evidence in perfect concert priorities of will.
We go to an analogy. Suppose every person you meet has a vibration, a resonance-capacity, an energy intensity degree, … Let us use resonance – saying there is a spectrum of resonance-capacity from zero to one-hundred. We assume, then, you are resonating at seventy-five. You have an area of potential spiritual relationships with persons, say, from resonating at sixty-five to eighty-five. If this were the case, no matter how much you tried, you could not enjoy a spiritual resonance in ongoing relationship with a person outside your capacity-connection. Now, you might pick up the essence, or True Self, with your True Self, of the persons outside that resonance-capacity, yet, this connection does not move his or her center of gravity to a degree of capacity to sustain a spiritual relationship with you.
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What is the purpose of intentionally seeking to discover, nurture, and enjoy spiritual relationships? One response is found in Ephesians 3.16-19. The scripture ends: “To know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” To know this Christ-Love is not merely a doctrine, a theology, a theory, an idea – to know is to experience, to embody, to share. When we know-experience-share a Love that no doctrine, no theology, no theory, no idea – nothing – can grasp, we can be sure we are knowing this Sacred-Love.
Then, the scripture offers: “So that you may be filled with all the fulness of God.” The Fullness of God is the ultimate blessing of knowing Love. What we need is some relationships in which we are ushered into the experience of the divine Fullness.
I could say, “But I learn this Love by loving everyone, not just those at a higher resonating-capacity.” Yes, I agree. Yet, our knowing the Fullness is enhanced and intensified through the blessing from gathering the mutual-sharing-energy of persons on a higher resonating-capacity. Here, the potency of Fullness is more vibrant and nurturing, while the positive loving of others tends to be less nurturing and often draining. So, again, while we love everyone, we need the nurturing stimulus and potency of the resonating-capacity of persons who more encourage us to grow into the Fullness.
This leads to a caution. The more intent, the more focused you are in being a spiritual, Christlike being, a person participating in a focused growth toward ever-encompassing degrees of the Fullness of God, the more discerning you will need to be in whom you seek spiritual relationship from and, then, the content of the relationship. Remember, if there is not a consistent focus on thoughts, actions, and conversation of a Christlike nature, you will not have a spiritual relationship.
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So, I urge two matters. First, consider the potential impact of television on all your relationships. Very little spiritual is on television – even much religious broadcasting is not spiritually nurturing except to persons who are at a low resonating-capacity. And much of present television is simply shallow glib, nonsense, and often sexually suggestive, to offer entertainment unworthy of persons seeking to live as spiritual beings and help edify others in that Journey. Then, we do not have to go into detail about the fascination with violence and silly reality shows. I am not saying always be serious, I am saying a consistent influx of low-resonating entertainment is not befitting a person seeking to have relationships spiritually, and debilitating to that intent. If you spend a lot of time around the television with friends or family, you can watch the spiritual intimacy of the relationships decline.
Second, pray together and share about your spiritual experience. Why are professing Christians so comfortable talking about matters like politics, the economy, and sports, but not about their relationship with God? If this is so with you, you will not maintain a healthy spiritual relationship with anyone, not even yourself.
Responding
1.Look over your relationships you presently have. Which ones would you call spiritual? What qualities led you to call these spiritual.
2.Look over your relationships you presently have. Which ones do you conclude are not able to be spiritual, or to provide the spiritual resonance similar to your resonating-capacity? Explain your response.
3.What are activities you could engage in with others to nurture the spiritual relationship you share? What are activities that would need to be limited in such relationships?
4.Look over your relationships. Ask yourself the question: Who among these would I like to focus more on to nurture a deeper spiritual connection? Then inquire: How might I proceed to join with this person in an intentional movement toward an intentionally evolving spiritual sharing, to provide for us each a container to speed up our spiritual growth?
5.Look over your relationships. Ask yourself: Who am I trying to resonate with spiritually and this effort is not and cannot work? Then inquire: How might I change the relationship for my discontinuance of trying to get from it what it cannot provide spiritually?
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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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