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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.
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is called OneLife Ministries – An Interspiritual Contemplative Fellowship. Hope to see you there. Blessings.
Scripture
7Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
8If I ascend to heaven [the sky] , you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol [world of the dead], you are there.
*Psalm 139, NRSV (Anglicized)
Quote
The first thing I want to tell you is this: the very fact that you want to know God's presence means you're already sensing something. Think about it. How many people never give God a second thought? How many sleep in on Sunday morning, and never open a Bible or send up a prayer? But you're not like that: you really want to be closer to the Lord. My hunch is you are already sensing something of God's presence, or you wouldn't care.
*Frederica Matthewes-Green. The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God.
Spiritual Teaching
The assurance of Frederica Matthewes-Green gives to each of us, including those who think experiencing the presence of God is foreign to them, is encouraging. I agree with her. So, if you are reading this and you think you have not been blessed to experience the presence of God, but you long to, the longing itself is stimulated by the Presence. You cannot long to sense the Nearness of God, except by the inspiration of the Nearness of God.
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I will share an analogy to help with this thought of the Presence stimulating the desire for the Presence. This is offered by Matthewes-Green:
Picture yourself walking around a shopping mall, looking at the people and the window displays. Suddenly, you get a whiff of cinnamon. You weren't even hungry, but now you really crave a cinnamon roll. This craving isn't something you made up. There you were, minding your own business, when some drifting molecules of sugar, butter, and spice collided with a susceptible patch inside your nose. You had a real encounter with cinnamon – not a mental delusion, not an emotional projection, but the real thing.
One purpose of ritual of all forms is the inspiration of this sense of Presence. Traditional rites gather us around God, not around ourselves. Ritual inspires, we could say stimulates, a sense of Divine Presence.
I offer an example of ritual from the Orthodox Church. Ritual kissing can be a powerful expression of devotion. When worshipers enter the church, they kiss icons – often Jesus on the feet, saints on the hands. Some persons kiss the chalice. Some kiss the edge of the vestment of the priest as he walks by. Acolytes kiss his hand when giving him the censer. All attendees line up to kiss the cross at the conclusion of the service. By “venerating” something, usually the Orthodox' mean doing the sign of the cross and kissing it. Finally, before communion, attendees kiss each other – the number of times based on the culture, but from one to three kisses.
Prayer is a form of ritual. Prayer disposes the person, mind and heart, and body, to sense and enjoy the presence of God. Prayer is doing our part, is our showing up again and again, and again. Over time we are marinated by the unseen Presence, and we grow into a more palpable and consistent living with a sense of Divine Nearness.
Note, I referred to our showing up, again and again, and again. To grow in the sense of divine Nearness, we have to work at it. Like any relationship, this requires time, patience, and diligence.
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Matthewes-Green's book The Jesus Prayer arises out of a commitment to prayer. Many years ago, she began the practice of praying the Jesus Prayer in the mid-night hours. She started this when she had her first baby. She continued the practice through other children, and now grandchildren. She has a ritual she follows. She stands before an icon of Christ, seeing the face of Jesus illumined by candlelight. She makes the sign of the cross. She speaks prayers, including the Lord's Prayer and affirms the Nicene Creed. Following, she repeats, in an unhurried way, the Jesus Prayer a set number of times – her movement of fingers over a prayer rope – a rite of the Eastern Church – allows her to know when she has finished her set number of repetitions inwardly of the Prayer.
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We live in a culture that often feels ancient ritual is out-dated, that we no longer need that. I, however, and many others, are blessed with a worship service saturated with symbolic ritual that helps inspire a Sense of the Holy, that Awesome Presence, and connects to centuries of tradition.
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In our de-mystified, pragmatic, and materialistic culture, if you want to live with a sense of the Presence, you can. But you will only by intentionally engaging practices that help in this. Likewise, your living space will need to have reminders of the Sacred – as in, objects, books, pictures, … that evoke a sense of God.
Responding
1)What are some changes to your living space that you could make to engender more a sense of the Sacred in your daily life?
2)What are some ancient rites you could explore more, possibly to discover their power to inspire the sense of the Holy within you?
3)Are there traditional practices you have abandoned due to a disconnection with your previous faith sect? If so, I encourage you to be open to exploring the spiritual riches of these practices. Often persons leave a faith group, and they do so before they really lived into the meaning of the rituals.
4)You may like to explore some rituals of a faith group other than your own. Some persons, like I do, find practices of other groups than my own to have helped me immensely. While an interspiritual Christian, I find some of the practices of the Catholic Church meaningful to me – among them the sign of the cross. And, like the Orthodox Church, I find ritual kissing a good practice.
5)I encourage you to study the means to practice the Jesus Prayer. There are different ways of praying it. The most common is: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” A longer version is: "Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." Some persons are not comfortable with the word “mercy”; if that is you, you can choose another word, like “grace.” Shorter ways of praying the Prayer include: “Blessed Lord, Jesus Christ,” “Blessed Jesus Christ,” and "Jesus Christ."
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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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