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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.
I dedicate this to all learning to love and trust again. Amen.
Scripture
Set your mind-hearts on realities heavenly, not on things earthly; for you have already died, and your life is hid with [in] Christ in God.
*Colossians 3.2-3
Spiritual Teaching
A single point [of awareness-simplicity] thus leads us into infinite expansion. It is through Jesus that we pass over from everything that is dead, from everything that is restricted, mortal and finite, into the infinite expansion of God which is infinite expansion of love.
*John Main. Moment of Christ: The Path of Meditation.
A tear fell
into the ground, finding
a place to rest itself.
In quiet regard,
held in death's arms,
a compassionate embrace
those living to avoid pain never know;
a seed, alone, received the tear.
Through its decay, the seed opened
and a flower appeared in this bright world.
That is how Love is born, once more.
*Brian Kenneth Wilcox, August 30, 2004
The Colossians scripture poses a profound mystical reality. The true spiritual being, in Christ, is paradoxically dead and alive. He or she has died to an old manner of being, an old center of locus. This spiritualized person now is hidden with, or in, Christ, in God. In terms of energy, the person has received a means of access to the Source, through the expression of the Source. Yet, words cannot convey the meaning of the text, and the temporal-spatial bounds of human language fail at these depths of Truth.
* * *
Some persons focus, then, on the earthly. This leads to a dying from true Life. And this same contrast is more clearly referred to in the following scripture:
18 For I have told you often, and I say it again with tears in my eyes, that there are many whose actions show they are foes of the cross of Christ. 19 They are headed for destruction. Their god is their appetite, they brag about shameful things, and they think only about earthy things. 20 But we are citizens of the heavenly, where the Master Jesus Christ lives. And we are eagerly waiting for him to return as our Savior. 21 He will take our weak mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like his own, using the same power by which he will bring everything under his influence.
*Philippians 3.18-21
Again, language fails us. That of earth and that of heaven are more than local realities. These refer to qualities. Each desire, thought, and act is either heavenly or earthly.
* * *
Then, we can pose the question: “What differentiates heavenly from earthly?” Well, there are different ways of differentiating this, but I will use the word Love, or love. That of Love is heavenly, while the opposite applies.
We are in the season of Advent within the Christian Year. Just beginning this time leading to Christmas Season, I think of the losses of love. That is, within our relationships we find the joy of entering varied forms of love; likewise, we have each suffered the loss of love, too. Many of us have been touched by a friendship that we lose. Also, more and more persons are experiencing one divorce, or multiple ones. Other persons lose a relationship through death.
This past year, I underwent divorce. I could not just walk away and count it another loss, and look to the future. I was working through the pain of the loss even before my ex-wife initiated the divorce; I was in counseling during separation and refused to initiate divorce. I wanted help with any weaknesses within my actions that would hamper being in a healthy relationship or marriage. My story is the story of some of you.
Yet, we are created with the capacity to love in varied ways. We, also, are created with the capacity to heal and love again. This is partly because Love is greater than our weakness, and Love has the innate influence to heal us, to mend brokenness, and prepare a heart that feels betrayed, denied, and crushed to live again in love with another one.
* * *
The word and concept love is much over-used in our culture. We often fail to see how true Love seeks to dismantle us, our selfishness, and willfulness. I, like many of you, are familiar with my own resistance to True Love, as well as my attraction to Such. Innately, we know, if we are mature enough to see, that to love means to lose the self we have been identified with, the self that revolves around the personality and its wishes. We get so bound to the “earthly,” even reducing religion or spirituality to that level, that we may refuse the inspiration of Love to lift us to heavenly things – all pertaining to True Love.
* * *
Jesus was sitting down with his disciples, and he spoke to them of the only way to freedom in Love. Here is what the Jesus of Mark says, in Mark 9.35, to his first disciples, and to you and me: Jesus sat with the Twelve. He said to them, “If any person wants to be first, that person must make himself or herself last of all, and bond-servant of all.”
The spirituality of Jesus, for it is cosmic Truth, is filled with conceptual paradoxes. What appears to be untrue is true, what appears to be true is untrue. He says, essentially, “If you truly want to love another person, you cannot seek to make that person fit into your wishes. First, you must ask, 'How may I serve this person?'” Another way of saying this is, “How may I bless this person?”
* * *
With the rising of advanced technologies of communication, more and more we will find ourselves in relationship with persons we have not met. This is part of our changing world, and its means of communication. This is seen most, presently, in networking on-line. Therefore, this form of relationship, with its drawbacks and advantages, will be an area of exploring the same question we would with someone face-to-face. Certainly, Love is present to two or more persons in loving relationship, even at distance. Yet, the complexities and challenges may take new forms in such distance relationships. They do, however, allow us to explore the potentials of bridging distance and time by seeking to serve and bless another person absent physically, and to receive the same from him or her.
* * *
I am finding more and more that I must remain very close to God to love well other persons, and serve them. God is Love. Unless I stay close to Christ, I cannot love well. From that rootedness in the Tree of Life, I can bear the Fruit of Love for family, friends, strangers, and those who choose to be my enemy.
Therefore, to be hid with Christ in the Divine, for me, is about being in communion with Love and Grace. This is a mystical dimension of the Christian message, not merely a psychological one. The oneness of union with Christ in God opens to infinite expansion. As John Main writes: The Way is the way of daily fidelity, a daily aligning and realigning of our lives on the mystery that is simplicity, that is love, that is unity.
* * *
Ironically, many months after the divorce, I found myself free to have a strong spiritual Love for the person. This occurred after several weeks of Love pouring through me stronger than ever before. I had walked in Love for weeks, like a heavenly, blissful daze, or ecstasy.
I came to discern the Holy Spirit was finalizing healing from some marked hurts in the last years, and that cleansing allowed Love to arise, even for those I had felt so hurt by. In this Love, these very persons – including some who had helped sabotage my pastoral efforts at a church – could now approach me and need my loving service, and I could give them such freely. Yet, these rebirthings of the potential to love and serve is only possible for the Spirit of Christ did work healing, for me to be able to do what I could not do within my self alone. I thank God for them each, and all, in Kindness.
* * *
We find light in a statement attributed to St. Paul, in II Timothy 4.6. Here we read of him announcing that he is already being given to death as a spiritual offering - drink offerings were poured over sacrifical gifts: For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. A spiritual meaning of this pertains to a willing process in this life, again and again – a choice we make in Love. We choose to find life, to discover Love, by offering ourselves to be poured out as a spiritual gift to others. Our departure is the out-going of ourselves in goodwill and kindness, grace and action for others.
We depart our old manner of being, or self-focus, to find ourselves in the other and Other. We do not cease to care for ourselves, we care in a different way – in union with others and the Other. We find a union between caring for others and caring for ourselves. We both lose ourselves and find ourselves, as one Act, one Communion, one Ecstasy, one Passion: the paradox of Loving.
In what ways do you have opportunity to “pour out” your life in blessing to others? Do you know someone who is “pouring out” his or her life for you? What does it mean that you find yourself when you are giving yourself? Have you lost a love, and need to be healed to love again? How may you engage such healing as a spiritual process? Read again the opening poem – How does it relate to your life?
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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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