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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
Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat,
and he had compassion on them and healed their sick.
*Matthew 14.14, NLT
Spiritual Teaching
The writer Léon Bloy (1846-1917) aspired to be saintly. He said, “There is only one sorrow – not to be a saint.” His aspiration to be saintly manifested in his ardent compassion for social justice and identification with the poor.
Bloy had little formal education. His youth was lived mainly drifting without direction from job to job. He flirted with piety and, then, would go into a state of rebellion.
The turning point for Bloy happened with his attraction to a destitute prostitute. Her name was Veronique. Bloy saw in her a treasure of greatness. He committed himself to her rescue. Veronique, soon, had a profound religious conversion, and so great that Bloy followed in its wake. Unfortunately, Bloy saw Veronique descend from religious exaltation into mental madness. Veronique spent her remaining days in an asylum.
Bloy was near despair. Yet, he never lost his religious faith. And from this experience his calling to be a writer received confirmation. Bloy published many books, but few of them sold more than a thousand copies. So poor was Bloy that his family spent many winters close to starvation, with his spouse burning books and furniture to provide heat. And two of his children died in infancy from the effects of the deprivation.
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While we can wonder at the deprivations brought on by the vocational stubbornness of Bloy, we can admire his insight that saw within Veronique the divine spark, her part in the Image of God. We, too, with spiritual Understanding, can see beyond the masks of destitution and see the Divine spark, a likeness to the Love within us each, regardless of social status. Another way of saying this is we can see in the other, including those who are social outcasts, the Christ-Within.
* * *
This compassion is a “seeing,” a spiritual insight of that behind the veil of appearances. If we do not so “see,” we will not practice compassion. With compassion comes this in-sight; with this in-sight comes compassion.
* * *
Is anything – or anyone - in our lives by accident? Caroline Myss, in Defy Gravity, reflecting the affirmation of many Teachers, writes: “Nothing is in your life by accident, but you need the grace of Understanding to see this clearly?” Possibly, we can say by Divine Providence, Veronique was intentionally in the life of Bloy. Through his ministering to her, he discovered the Divine Design for his life, his vocation to give to the world. As well, he ministered Christlike love to a woman - that was of eternal significance, regardless of her decline into madness.
Responding
1)Whom have you met and helped, and through that meeting, you discovered something life-changing the Divine meant you to learn? What did you learn?
2)What does it mean to have spiritual Understanding – the grace of Understanding? How might you open to receive that more in your daily work and interactions? What difference might that make in your life?
3)If there someone whom you need the grace of Understanding to see with compassion and act toward with kindness? Pray about that now.
4)Pray the following prayer from Caroline Myss's Defy Gravity:
I seek the grace of Understanding in all matters of my life so that I may clearly see beyond the obvious and the personal. I ask to see the wisdom path and to understand the deeper truths about my own nature. May I always use the graces of Understanding and common sense in service of others, and may I always be able to act on the guiding instincts that flow, even without my needing to ask, from the grace of common sense.
* * *
*Information on Bloy is from Robert Ellsberg, Editor. All Saints.
*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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