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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.
Affirmation
I am grateful God is working for my good and through me for others' good in ways mysterious and beneficial. Amen.
Quote
The onset of the love of reason somehow shaped humanity's relationship to God and the soul, and it obviously had a profound effect on the connection that was once possible between humans and heaven. For all the blessings that come with sharpening our intellect and our capacity to be discerning, it is obvious that we compromise our profound interior connection to the sacred when we replace our capacity for mystical perception with a need to have what in fact cannot be had at all – a reasonable and logical universe.
*Caroline Myss. Defy Gravity: Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason.
Spiritual Teaching
A dervish was sitting peacefully by a river
when a passerby saw the bare back of his
neck and yielded to the temptation to
give it a resounding whack. He was full
of wonder at the sound his hand had made on
the fleshy neck, but the dervish,
smarting with pain,
got up to hit him back.
“Wait a minute,” said the aggressor.
“You can hit me if you wish.
But first answer this question:
Was the sound of
the whack produced by my hand or by the
back or your neck?”
Said the dervish, “Answer that yourself.
My pain won't allow me to theorize. You
can afford to do so, because you don't feel
what I feel.”
When the divine is experienced, one's propensity to theologize is considerably reduced.
*Anthony de Mello. The Song of the Bird.
* * *
We are living in a time of much collective suffering - mental toxins fill the environment. What we need is a more intimate and embracing experience of the Divine. By intimate, I mean closeness with the Holy; by embracing, I mean more open to diversity, differences, inclusion, and unforeseen ways Spirit will work in us individually and collectively.
The church of the past, and of today, will not meet the needs of the future. On one side, we see liberals offering us things like the historical Jesus – their conjectures, regardless of validity, are at the level of mind – of reason, mentality. Speculations such as this do not meet the needs of the soul. On the fundamentalist side, we see the letter of the law – the Bible literally interpreted – being offered - another mentalism. In between, we have an array of offerings - mostly mental. Persons are still seeking Something More. Where is this to be found?
* * *
What we are seeing is the exhaustion of reason. No, we cannot return to mythic-tribal faith prior to Enlightenment Europe. Yet, we are entering a post-Rational era. This does not mean the denial of reason; this means reason, as well as the riches of faith from before the Enlightenment, will be taken up into a post-conventional, post-reasonable experience of the Sacred realms yet unexplored by most of us.
And, not again, any time soon, will we see any group claiming to have the sole or official means to that Experience to wield power over the masses, and getting the masses respect through reason. Such groups may bemoan the unfaith of many, but the "unfaith" may be part of a transformation necessary both for the survival of the church and our species, too.
* * *
We cannot think our way to the solution of the challenges now facing us. We cannot reason our way to a return to lost days, or a golden era of faith. We cannot return (re-gression), we must follow the Spirit (pro-gression) into post-conventional, post-personal realities and see where God leads us. We do not know where God is leading, and not-knowing requires faith to say “Yes.”
Neither Myss nor de Mello is saying we are to be unreasonable. Rather, they are saying spirituality is post-reasonable. Spirit leads us to an experience that includes reason at a level beyond logicical thought.
* * *
So, in contemplation we practice this post-reasonable Way. We bring, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing teaches, our naked awareness, or bare openness, to the Divine. We forget all, we know nothing. This “know nothing” is an openness to and affirmation of a faith not illogical but beyond logical - mystical. Many of the great saints and mystics of the Christian tradition integrated reason in a wider embrace of mysticism - they can give us guidance for our future.
We have so identified faith with theologizing and moralizing that we fear the Unknowing. This is an un-knowing of ordinary thought, and an initiation to a higher order Knowing - let us welcome this blessing of Grace.
Responding
Share an experience you had that you can say was post-reasonable. What made this a post-reasonable experience?
* * *
*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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