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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
Before form was, was the formless Logos,
and the Logos was with the Eternal One,
and the Logos was the Eternal One.
*Gospel of John 1.1
Spiritual Teaching
May God be pleased to continue with his divine work until you reach total possession of him, the supreme good.
*Blessed Padre Pio. Padre Pio's Words of Hope. Edited by Eileen Dunn Bertanzetti.
In John's thought, then, the Logos seems to be in the last resort the very principle of all that is and all that lives, being at once interior to and distinct from everything, the 'That' of which the [ancient Hindu] rishis had an intuition and into whose mystery they entered by contemplation, naming it … the self [Atman] and the absolute [Brahman].
*Abhishiktānanda [Dom Henri LeSaux]. Hindu-Christian Meeting Point.
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“Praying is no easy matter,” writes Henri Nouwen in his With Open Hands. Why? He shares a story to demonstrate the “Why?” for us:
An elderly woman brought to a psychiatric center … was wild, swinging at everything in sight, and scaring everyone so much that the doctor had to take everything away from her. But there was one small coin which she gripped in her fist and would not give up. In fact, if took two people to pry open that squeezed hand. It was as though she would lose her very self along with the coin. If they deprived her of that last possession, she would have nothing more, and be nothing more. That was her fear.
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When I go to certain meetings, I get a name tag. This says to everyone, “I am Brian K. Wilcox.” This is to identify me. So, there you have it, who I am. Or, not? That is, does that identify me? If so, which identity.
Let us break this “I am ...” down linguistically, for often linguistics give us the import of spiritual truths. “I am” speaks of being, essence. This is that which does not change among the changes within and around me.
“I” speaks of the essence, the “self” before all identities. Indeed, “I” has no identity other than “I.” In Christian contemplative parlance this is the True Self. In Hinduism this Self is the Atman. Part of the spiritual journey is to return to the awareness of this True Self; the disidentification with the “selves” is from what is called in Christian mysticism the False Self.
“Am,” well, that speaks of a changeless state of being, before all change. Your Am-ness is your always state of being. This never alters.
Let us see our life experience as an accumulation of many name tags. The problem is we become to see ourselves, our identity, as all these tags. We have these name tags all over us. We get pulled into these roles as essential to who we are. This leads to our defensiveness, to conflict, to inner anxieties.
Let us take one identify: religious. We can see ourselves as a Christian. Yet, that can become a mental idolatry that separates us from others. The world becomes Christian – other like me and I – and the rest of the world – all the non-Christians. This is an act of unlove. Here, we often move from our faith as being a means to transcend all temporal identities and lead us to the sense of oneness with others. This is a tribal consciousness – but most persons in religion are kept within this identity idolatry – this will always lead to I'm-right-you're-wrong thinking.
As an interspiritual Christian, one of my goals is to experience the Christ Path as integrative, as respectful of other Paths in which the Divine might offer Grace. Yet, I find persons who do not identify as Christian, who feel the Christians have been exclusive and judgmental, to be that way themselves. There is a lot of hostility against Christianity in our society.
See, the problem of mental idolatry is not essentially a religious issue, this is a human issue, a societal issue, a world issue. And when one counters with an against-them identity, the person has just assumed a reactive identity, one not his or her True Self and not the True Self of the group he or she is against.
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Now, with this understanding of how easily we merge out essence and roles in identity, and how it creates divisions inwardly and outwardly, I relate this to prayer. Recall, Nouwen wrote, “Praying is no easy matter.” Now, why not an easy matter?
[Praying] demands a relationship in which you allow someone other than yourself to enter into the very center of your being, to see there what you would rather leave in darkness, and to touch there what you would rather leave untouched. Why would you really want to do that? Perhaps you would let the other cross your inner threshold to see something or to touch something, but to allow the other into the place where your most intimate life is shaped – that is dangerous and calls for defense.
Nouwen relates the defense to our clinging to the False Self – facile identities. Prayer is opening the door of our inner sanctum to Another, to allow that One to challenge who we cling to as a possession that we feel must be defended against all intruders.
If we wish to pray truly, we will soon have to face that part of us that transcends even the tradition that shapes our prayer. Our many false identities, or temporal labels, resists letting go into our True Self. Yet, why do we long to let ourselves allow the Spirit to “invade” the inner sanctum? Our True Self longs to express itself, our soul longs for freedom from the weight of all our false selves: which together make up a collective called our False Self. Then, we become more free as we have less to defend, and there is nothing in the True Self that needs to attack or defend. And there is no sense of separation from God or the other in the True Self: indeed, we could call the True Self – the I am – the union of shared identity in God of all of us, together.
As a Christian, I am awakened to this True Self in Christ. Yet, this Christ, the Word from before time-space, does not belong to Christianity. Christ is not a religious possession, and no faith can keep Christ within itself alone. The Word was before, with, and beyond all religion. Christianity is faithful to the Christ to the extent it understands and practices this nonreligious, even nonspiritual, Word.
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Bede Griffiths, the late Christian mystic who lived in India for decades and integrated Hindu and Christian thought, refers to the Upanishads affirmation “I am brahman [God]” and “Thou [True Self, Atman] art That [God, Brahman].”
Each created thing and each individual soul is an image or reflection as in a mirror of this one reality. The image has it own relative reality. It is not unreal, but neither is it wholly real, since its whole being is from another. In our present mode of consciousness we see this one reality reflected in the mirror of this created world. But when we wake to the … supreme knowledge, then we see that one reality alone, in which all images are contained. … Then the person knows himself not as reflected through his senses or his mental consciousness but in his original state, in the ground of his eternal being and consciousness, and in this knowledge he experiences absolute bliss.
*The One Light. Edited by Bruno Barnhart.
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Griffiths continues by relating this to the reference to God, or Supreme Being, as the Satchidananda, or Satchitananda.
This is the supreme knowledge; the soul comes to know its self in its original being (sat), and this knowledge (chit) brings absolute bliss (ananda). … [In Hinduism] the Jnani (knower) is one who has experienced this state of being and is able to communicate his knowledge to another, when he is ready to receive it. In other words this is a mystical experience in which the soul knows itself in its original ground of being, beyond sense and reason, where all differences as conceived by the mind disappear and the one reality is experienced without duality in a unitive vision, which communicates absolute bliss.
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But how does this pertain to the Christian faith? Griffiths places this experience as one in which no Christian is excluded. The Christian can know this unitive experience of identity within the Christ Mystery:
Translating it into Christian terms we can say that the Spirit illumines the mind by its own free action and the soul comes to know itself as the image of God made in the likeness of Christ, in whom the Father, the original source of being, reveals himself.
Responding
Enter into quiet meditation. Let arise the identities that label you to others and yourself. With each one, interiorily reply, “I am not that.” Place the stress on “I am.” After a while, you will be in a state of pure awareness. Rest there, in the I am, the True Self, where you and God are mingling eternally in Love, in the Word, with the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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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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