That our hearts may burn with fire

Exoteric, Esoteric, Mystic

2011-08-17T09:06:00.001+10:00

I have a simple, little model that helps me clarify what we do in spiritual practice and as a church and why we do what we do. This didn't originate with me, I've seen Jason Miller use the same model, Traleg Kyagbon Rinpoche uses it too in "Mind at Ease". I think Richard Smoley uses it in "Inner Christianity".

It's a three-part model that can act as a way to categorise spiritual practises, but it can also describe three different kinds of emphasis that a whole system or an entire church might make overall.

Exoteric, Esoteric and Mystic – these three terms get used in a few different ways. I try to only use them in one way:

Exoteric work involves visible, outward things – rules for moral behaviour, physical gatherings for church services, verbal prayer and song, rules and norms for prayer forms, dress, concerns for the historicity of an account in scripture, social work and charity, stuff like that. This is "core business" for most churches.

Esoteric work involves inward, intangible things – sensations of energy, perceptions of the Divine Presence, visualisations, astral temples, visions, working with angels or other spirits, inward voices, dream work. Anything that involves concerns with the content of the inner world - any content. One could make a reasonable argument that most modern psychology is, by this definition, esoteric work. This is "core business" for most magickal orders, many churches avoid this stuff like the plague.

Mystic work involves what's going on when one lets go of things altogether – Bythos, The Dark Night of the Soul, the dazzling dark, formless emptiness, "God's first language is silence", Ain Soph Aur. This is "core business" for contemplatives and mystics, many churches also (oddly enough) avoid this stuff like the plague too.

Most spiritual organisations include a focus on all three emphases, but usually one is emphasised a great deal more than the other two. If the organisation is recognisable, it must have an exoteric component. If there's any acknowledgement of inward phenomena with any content, it has an esoteric component. If it's considered possible that there are ways of being empty of inward or outward content, it has a mystic component.

I think all three emphases are integral to a natural, healthy spirituality. I'll use each of these terms from time to time.

Do you see the distinctions I'm making in your own experience? Do you think your practice has a balanced blend of all three emphases?

The Eucharist Never Ends

2011-04-24T17:52:00.000+10:00

The AJC is a pretty ~~geeky~~ technology-friendly organisation. Most of the clergy and many of the lay folk are on Facebook, use Twitter and have blogs. I often joke that without Google Docs we wouldn't get anything done. In fact, it's fair to say that it would have been hard for our church to spread and grow as it has without the web. How on earth did people find each other in the 1970s?

Anyway, amongst some of the clergy, there has arisen a custom of using Twitter to let each other know when somewhere in the Johannite world, someone just celebrated a Eucharist. It's really simple: you just tweet, "The Eucharist never ends!" (one of the closing lines of the liturgy). If you see such a tweet, it's conventional to respond, "Alleluia!" Very simple and it helps to extend our sense of being a church out through space. We don't always do it, I certainly often forget, but it's a sweet custom.

So, a few minutes ago I finished offering a Eucharist here at my home in Sydney on Easter Sunday and I wandered out to my computer and tweeted. At almost the same moment, my bishop and patriarch in Calgary tweeted. I suspect that he smiled roughly when I did, realising that without any planning or coordination we'd just said Mass simultaneously on opposite sides of the globe.

Whenever we say that formula in the liturgy, I tend to understand it as indicating that the outpouring of God's love and our thanksgiving extends infinitely through time. Just because I'm extinguishing the candles and we're all going home, doesn't mean anything's finished – we commit to carrying this new mind into our daily lives each time. I still think that's a perfectly sensible interpretation.

But today, my attention was drawn to our globe and that concept we affirm in the Statement of Principles (and many mainstream Christians affirm in the Nicene Creed), of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church – that great Ecclesia, all those people, churches and organisations – gnostic, orthodox, Roman, Byzantine, Oriental, protestant, which locate themselves in the Christian tradition. None of whom agree with each other on who's in and who's not, all of whom pretty much disagree on everything important about belief, practice and sometimes even the nature of reality itself.

But still, most of us offer the Eucharist in our own way, and you can be pretty certain that whenever you're participating in the liturgy of communion, there are thousands of other people in other places doing the same thing in their own way. There were thousands finishing as you started, and thousands more will start as you finish. Different languages, different prayers, different scriptures, but still, voices raised in praise and thanksgiving for the fact of the Divine Presence here, in our midst, in our very hearts. A fact enabled, note, by the "brokenness" of the Church, by its lack of unity, by its inability to agree.

And so the Eucharist never ends. It is unbounded by space, by time, by organisational boundaries, by doctrine, by rules – one great Ecclesia endlessly offering itself and the world to be transformed and healed.

Thanks, Twitter. That's pretty neat.

2011-04-22T07:52:00.006+10:00

A quote from a lecture Father Chris Dierkes gave about the Christian mysticism of Bernadette Roberts in a course I took with him:

Traditional Christian mysticism, as stated, sees the mystical path as a three‐fold journey, from purification toillumination to union. The harrowing chasm separating illumination from union is the Dark Night of the Soul. God has entered so closely to the mystic, as if right behind her heart and mind and eyes, that she can no longer “see” God or sense the Divine Presence, particularly under the form of illuminations, locutions, ecstasies and the like as perhaps were common during the illuminative, subtle phase. God has not abandoned the soul, but has in fact grown closer. The soul, however, does not know this and experiences this change as a loss of the divine. The spiritual energy and presence of God are so utterly transcendent as to be undetected by any human faculties, even the subtle faculties. The three‐fold mysticism historically and experientially grounds itself in The Paschal Mystery — The Death and Resurrection of Christ. The Dark Night of the Soul represents the mystic’s participation in the Crucifixion of Christ; The Resurrection then is the movement into the unitive stage.

While this interpretation is not incorrect, Roberts forces us to question whether it is indeed the most accurate or at least the only valid one. According to Roberts we cannot take the human Christ’s mystical experience to be eternal. Christ’s human nature is indeed created. Jesus was born at a certain point in timeand space and died in another point of time and space. Jesus was not always manifest in the physical and has ceased to be so since Resurrection and Ascension. Jesus, the tradition maintains, as an Incarnation [...] was born in union with God. Jesus did not have to go through Dark Nights, purifications and the like to attain union—“He was like us in all things except sin [i.e.separation] (Letter to the Hebrews).” While a non‐Christian may not accept the belief that Jesus was born into union with God, the reader can certainly believe that he had attained such a stage by the time of his public ministry. For our purposes the point is this: assuming Jesus was in a permanent state of union with God (i.e. union of spirits, mystical marriage, theosis, union of separate, created self with God), and the Dark Night of the Soul is in fact the complete participation in the death of Jesus, then the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus did not in fact engender a transformation of consciousness. Every transformation of a stage of consciousness requires death to identification with that particular stage, to clear the way for a “rebirth” to a higher stage of consciousness. In this sense, paralleling the Dark Night‐Rebirth as Unitive Mystic with the Death‐Resurrection is perfectly valid.

Roberts, however, provokes the reader to question whether the Crucifixion is more adequately interpreted, for the mystic, as the death of the self, the unitive self itself? Here is what she says, “To return to this original oneness [the eternal oneness of the Divine Christ as Person of the Godhead] Christ had to die and, in dying, go beyond the human unitive experience of oneness with the Father. Surrendering this human oneness for the infinitely greater oneness of the Godhead is the true nature of Christ’s death...” This is an extremely important point. Christian mysticism, in simplest terms, is the participation in the Paschal Mystery. Now The Paschal Mystery is usually taken to mean the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ. All of these are certainly part of the Paschal Mystery. The completion of the Paschal Mystery, however, is the Ascension, the return of the Resurrected Christ into heaven. If the three‐fold mysticism of union and theosis grounds itself in the historical experience of Christ, AND, as Roberts states, the crucifixion is the experience of Jesus losing his self‐united‐to‐God in order to experience the Absolute Nature of Godhead, then may the Christian experience heaven (The Absolute Trinitarian Christ) in this life? Medieval Theology, and even most forms of Medieval Mystical Theology (e.g. St. Bernard) answered no. Roberts however from her own experience, answers yes.

Welcome to Easter

2011-04-21T07:50:00.001+10:00

… is it all about bunnies and chocolate eggs or is it about the redemptive sacrifice of Christ?

This Easter I thought I'd give you something to consider that might give a different flavour to Holy Week. In the Gospel of John, the journey of Jesus and his beloved friends together displays an increasing flavour of intimacy from when he first meets them and they begin travelling and learning together. You get the sense, I think, that one by one, as the relationships between them get more intimate, they begin to know, to recognise who it is that has come amongst them. Jesus himself admits his own identity, he tells us he is the Son of his Divine Father.

But in the week they enter Jerusalem, this week, he does a series of remarkable things – he suggests to his disciples that they could enter into the very same intimate, familial relationship with the Divine that he has. In fact, at their final meal together on Thursday before his arrest that evening, he welcomes each of them into his Father's household by washing their feet – acting not as the master of the house, but as a servant. At the foot of the cross, on Good Friday he gives his most Beloved Disciple (who is the exemplar for the community of what discipleship truly is) to Mary as her son and Mary to him as his mother.

Finally, having promised the coming of a spirit of great comfort who will dwell among them (and within them), just as the Shekhinah – the Presence of the Divine – dwelt in the Temple, he bows his head and gives over his spirit. This great work draws his beloved friends into this divine loving relationship. Some traditions have the Gospel of John ending right there, with no mystery of the resurrection, no post-resurrection teaching and no ascension story. I think when you see the scope of what Jesus accomplishes at the moment of his death, you could easily see why the rest of the Gospel could be just a kind of tidying up.

From this perspective (and this is not, I stress, a mainstream perspective) the great Mystery of Easter, is not about death and resurrection (as beautiful as those themes are) and not about a sacrifice of the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world. The Mystery of Easter is the formation of a great, rambling, loving household of brothers and sisters who dwell in God as God dwells in them. That household continues to this day, you are a part of it and Easter is a sacred call to recognise – just as the disciples recognised – who it is that has come amongst you.

Please accept my humble blessings on this most holy season. Holy week has a very strong, sacred energy wound into it, so no matter what you're doing, please make some time each day for quiet and let your soul unwind into the transformative potential of Easter.

How to define the undefinable? Use untranslatable words!

2011-01-21T19:59:00.000+11:00

In some kind of elite, genius, Gnostic aikido move, Father Scott, who blogs at Eighth Sermon to the Dead opens with the difficulty of defining or describing gnosis or Gnosticism and then takes a sharp left-turn off the paved road by giving definitions of three unrelated terms from other languages: dépaysement (French), saudade (Portuguese) and duende (Spanish).
Apart from the delight that he's chosen words from three major Templar countries, this elliptical turn somehow works better than any other attempt I've made, read or heard to get close to the heart of Gnosticism.
It reminds me of an old post by Jason Miller about the twisting language of spirits (the blog seems to have disappeared, but here's a backup copy). He gives a quote from a shaman about how one must talk to spirits:

"With my koshuiti I want to see - singing, I carefully examine things - twisted language brings me close but not too close - with normal words I would crash into things - with twisted ones I circle around them - I can see them clearly. "

With normal words we often crash into things, with twisted ones, sometimes, we can see them clearly.

An interview on same-sex marriage

2010-12-08T17:30:00.001+11:00

A friend recently asked me to do an email interview about same-sex marriage for a publication he's writing for. I thought I'd post my answers here.

Does the Christian Bible say that it is a sin for homosexuals to marry?

No. Bible-focused Christians deduce scriptural support for their opposition to marriage between same-gendered partners from two aspects of the Bible. First, they make a careful reading (I'd say mis-reading) of some ritual purity passages as forbidding homosexual sex. Second, they read the omission of same-sex marriages as meaning that they aren't allowed.

I don't want to walk through every passage that conservatives use as a warrant for their homophobia, but there aren't any that are unambiguous, unless you use a pre-existing prejudice as a lens through which to read them. If you approach them with a liberal/progressive view, they all seem to talk about something else.

Argument from omission is particularly silly - it's the same argument many churches use against the ordination of women. However, Jesus and the Apostles also never used a telephone or a photocopier and where would modern churches be without them? At least the Amish are consistent!

Do any of the denominations follow every teaching and rule of the Bible?

Well, no. Of course not. Just dealing with the big lists: Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible – people ignore most of the laws. You don't see people going thirty paces outside camp to dig a latrine (Deuteronomy 23:12-13) - why? Because we have sewerage. Living spirituality adapts to modern circumstances.

If not, does that mean every denomination picks and chooses which teachings are the only ‘right’ ones and bases itself on them?

Obviously. Liberal churches ignore some parts, conservative churches ignore other parts. Everyone has a different view on how to choose the parts you respect and the parts you ignore. That's to be expected: it's a big, complex, multi-layered book written by hundreds of authors over a thousand or so years.

A live religion also has to cater to people in very different living conditions at different stages of personal maturity - it's normal to make different interpretations of the same core texts. Some of those interpretations will state that there's only one valid interpretation, because some people need certainty.

I feel strongly that the reason scriptures work is because they admit multiple interpretations, hold paradox, inspire allegory and generally resist being pinned down to a single meaning. The Bible caters to many different communities with many different needs.

How are the Parish of St Uriel and the Apostolic Johannite Church different from other denominations?

Our church notes the ancient Christian doctrine that God "indwells" us - every human contains the Divine Spark which, if we open ourselves to it, provides guidance toward our eventual union with God. This isn't some New Age theology, it's ancient Church teaching (Google "theosis" and see what you get).

We regard the Bible as a useful source of poetry, metaphor and focus in that journey of Reunion. It's not a rule book, it's a companion on the path.

The focus of Johannite communities is on practising the love of God through meditation and prayer and equally practising the love of others in work, family and community. Doctrine doesn't figure much at all in what we do.

The political parties are rather divided into for (Greens) and against (the rest), how do you think both sides can be supported?

Progressives like me have no problem extending "marriage" to include gay or lesbian unions. Conservatives like Cardinal Pell have a huge problem with it. None of that ought to have any bearing on a State attempting to equitably respect the current cohabitation customs of its citizens.

The solution to the gay marriage debate is old: continue to separate Church and State. Simply remove the word "marriage" from the legal code and agree that the State approves civil unions regardless of the genders in the couple. Cultural and religious organisations can then be free to police their own ideas of what can legitimately termed marriage without state interference.

Thanks for the opportunity to contribute to your article.

Prayer for the repose of the soul of an ancestor

2010-11-04T11:54:00.000+11:00

A prayer which can be used for All Souls day, the birthday or death anniversary of a recently departed ancestor. On All Souls, the thanksgiving in the middle could be repeated for each of the departed in living memory and then a general thanksgiving said for all ancestors.

In most ancestor traditions, it's usual to make an offering to the spirits of the ancestors. European Christians typically just offer memory, prayer and light in the form of a votive candle. For the recently departed, offerings of colour and fragrance in the form of flowers or incense are often made. In other traditions (this is common in Chinese families), food (especially foods favoured by the departed) can be offered.

The offerings are typically set out on or in front of the grave before you begin.

Opening

In the Name of the Most High: +Progenitor, Logos and Pneuma Hagion

Raphael, healer, bear witness!

Michael, protector, bear witness!

Gabriel, herald, bear witness!

Uriel, companion, bear witness!

Thanksgiving

Call to mind your memory of the departed.

I give thanks for the life of [Full Name], [list of relationships and roles]

For example, in praying for my mum, we said:
I give thanks for the life of Kathleen May Mansfield. Wife, mother, grandmother, friend, teacher, healer, writer and poet.

I give thanks for...

...whatever you want give thanks for about the person's life.

Light a candle.
I light this candle in her/his memory and in thanks for her/his life and the life s/he has given me.

If visiting a grave or memorial garden, you can take this time to simply sit and remember the life of the departed, or talk with others present about shared memories. Sometimes it's useful to talk about your current relationship to your memories of the departed person.

Closing

I pray for the repose of his/her soul. Rest eternal grant him/her, O Lord and let light perpetual shine upon him/her. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the love and mercy of God and the prayers of Our Lady and all the saints, rest in peace eternal. Amen.

Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, I thank thee.

If it's not safe to leave the candle burning when you leave, simply blow it out after the closing.

What does Salvation mean to you? Does the concept of salvation have a place in Gnostic Christianity?

2010-09-23T17:11:00.001+10:00

I think so. The Hebrew name "Yeshua" (which when you mangle it through Greek into Latin and then into English becomes "Jesus") after all means "salvation", so I think it's a bit core.

Firstly, I'm drawn to ask what salvation might mean to a first century Jew. By the Second Temple period the People of Israel had been enslaved in Egypt and then exiled to and kept captive in Babylon, so I think that salvation always has a resonance of being saved from captivity or slavery. In Greek "soter" has the same resonance, but I think it also carries a sense of healing or making whole or well.

To stick with the paleo- & proto-Gnostic period, how about looking at the "Hymn of the Pearl" in which our hero is kept captive in "Egypt" by being lulled into unconsciousness and living as one of the sleepy Egyptians. He is saved by a letter from his parents and a visit from his brother, which wakes him up and begins his journey of return.

In the "Exegesis on the Soul", the soul leaves her father's house and falls among bad men in the marketplace and becomes the lover of many of them before crying out for salvation. She is assured that her bridegroom is coming and so she withdraws to her bridal chamber, draws in on herself and waits with gathered anticipation for His arrival.

Both (and I'm indebted to Andrew Philip Smith in his "Gnostic Writings on the Soul" for this interpretation) stories are often taken to refer to the salvation of the soul by its joining with the Spirit in the journey of return.

So. What are we saved from? From ignorance of our spiritual nature, from moment-by-moment forgetfulness of that same knowledge, from endlessly allowing our soul to be drawn out into mindless distraction rather than drawing it inward in the journey of return to unitive consciousness.

That, for me, is the place of Salvation in Gnostic Christianity.

Ask me anything about Christian mysticism, Gnosticism, social software, integral theory

Blessings

2010-08-16T10:59:00.000+10:00

A friend asked me recently how blessings "work"; what happens when I give a blessing? Rather than answer with just theory, I felt it was more authentic to give a more phenomenological perspective. She suggested that it might be useful to blog my response. The question came up in a discussion of whether an acolyte or deacon asking to be blessed before she performs one of her altar duties was just asking for the priest's permission.

I said that, from my experience of giving blessings, they have something of the sense of "the Divine in me acknowledges the Divine in you", so they're kind of an invitation or a gate.

I'd imagine that if it were a "highly realised person" (as they might say in the Indic traditions) or a Saint (as we might say) giving the blessing then that invitation might itself be quite a strong experience of awakening for the person receiving the blessing. Sadly, that's not our situation :)

I want to acknowledge the not-Self energy present in apostolic succession though, the not-earned channel of Divine presence that (theologically) is the reality of priesthood and (phenomenologically) seems to be present in sacramental actions of various sorts. So if the priest and the person receiving the blessing are open to it, that same energy is present even in a blessing coming from a not-Saint, like me.

In the same way that when someone makes a confession, it's not me who listens, it's God (that's the theological reason why the seal of confession is what it is) – when I bless, I am a gate through which the Divine blesses us (me too, it seems).

So, why bless an acolyte as she is about to begin her work at the altar? Not as a giving of permission, it seems to me, as a mutual welcoming into the Presence, as a reminder of the reality of the Presence as we create the space between people. To me its the use of sacerdotal energy to remind both the priest and the acolyte of why they're both there.

In writing this blog entry, I also don't want to restrict this to what priests can do. To me that would be to deny the sacramental character of manifestation – which in the octave of the Assumption of the Most Holy Sophia seems like an imprudent thing to do.

Once, we commonly blessed each other – when we met, when we parted, when we began a new enterprise, at weddings, at births. Somehow we've dropped the practice. I think that's a pity. I love it when someone asks me to bless them, I feel privileged to be asked to participate in both someone's life and flow of Divine energy.

Please ask for a blessing if you think of it and don't hesitate to explicitly bless those around you. If you need a little help, here's an old Celtic blessing I used recently. Use joyfully and often!

May the blessing of light be on you –
light without and light within.
May the blessed sunlight shine on you
and warm your heart
till it glows like a great fire.

Exoteric, Esoteric, Mystic

2010-07-29T15:37:00.000+10:00

As I've foreshadowed a bit, the first few things I'll be writing are more or less framework for what comes later. This is my way of getting some of this out of my head to somewhere where other people can look at it, give me feedback, tell me how they see it and so on.

I have a simple, little model that helps me clarify what we do in spiritual practice and as a church and why we do what we do. This didn't originate with me, I've seen Jason Miller use the same model, Traleg Kyagbon Rinpoche uses it too in "Mind at Ease". I think Richard Smoley uses it in "Inner Christianity".

It's a three-part model that can act as a way to categorise spiritual practises, but it can also describe three different kinds of emphasis that a whole system or an entire church might make overall.

Exoteric, Esoteric and Mystic – these three terms get used in a few different ways. I try to only use them in one way:

Exoteric work involves visible, outward things – rules for moral behaviour, physical gatherings for church services, verbal prayer and song, rules and norms for prayer forms, dress, concerns for the historicity of an account in scripture, social work and charity, stuff like that. This is "core business" for most churches.

Esoteric work involves inward, intangible things – sensations of energy, perceptions of the Divine Presence, visualisations, astral temples, visions, working with angels or other spirits, inward voices, dream work. Anything that involves concerns with the content of the inner world - any content. One could make a reasonable argument that most modern psychology is, by this definition, esoteric work. This is "core business" for most magickal orders, many churches avoid this stuff like the plague.

Mystic work involves what's going on when one lets go of things altogether – Bythos, The Dark Night of the Soul, the dazzling dark, formless emptiness, "God's first language is silence", Ain Soph Aur. This is "core business" for contemplatives and mystics, many churches also (oddly enough) avoid this stuff like the plague too.

Most spiritual organisations include a focus on all three emphases, but usually one is emphasised a great deal more than the other two. If the organisation is recognisable, it must have an exoteric component. If there's any acknowledgement of inward phenomena with any content, it has an esoteric component. If it's considered possible that there are ways of being empty of inward or outward content, it has a mystic component.

I think all three emphases are integral to a natural, healthy spirituality. I'll use each of these terms from time to time.

Do you see the distinctions I'm making in your own experience? Do you think your practice has a balanced blend of all three emphases?

How is it I can love You?

2010-06-29T18:08:00.000+10:00

How is it I can love You
     within me,
     yet see You from afar?

How is it I embrace You
     within myself,
     yet see you spread across the heavens?

You know. You alone.
     You, who made this mystery,
     You who shine
like the sun in my breast,
     You who shine
     in my material heart,
          immaterially.

– St Symeon the New Theologian

Unexpected spots for Centering Prayer

2010-06-18T20:01:00.000+10:00

I was delighted to find references to Centering Prayer in two unexpected places this week.

The first was from the always-interesting Jason Miller – a really interesting esoteric writer I read regularly. Jason's perspective keeps my attention because of his interesting spiritual background (I gather he started in Hermetic magick, got trained in Rootwork, got initiated in Bön and Dozgchen and somewhere in there was ordained an Independent Catholic priest), but also because I find his views pretty mature, integrative and balanced.

Jason's been answering questions from regular readers recently (via Formspring, a practice I'm shamelessly imitating) and one reader asked whether Jason thought that Centering Prayer was valuable to sorcerers. Jason's response really interested me – not only did he strongly affirm CP's value, he added that he finds it "is very nearly the Christian equivalent to Dzogchen".

I've found a long-time affinity with Dzogchen teaching and I love Centering Prayer, so to hear that the two things have significant similarity from the perspective of a practitioner delights me.

The second place I've noticed Centering Prayer show up is on The Baptist's Head. Various people I respect have been telling me to follow Alan and Duncan's writing for a couple of years and I listened to an impressive interview with Alan a few months ago. On something of a whim (if such a thing exists) I found myself at TBH a few days ago and started reading through some of the basic tutorial material.

Like most folks in the Western Mystery Tradition, Alan and Duncan insist that getting intimate communion with the transpersonal entity usually known as your Holy Guardian Angel is a non-negotiable part of the path. Unlike most folks, they don't send you off to Crowley's Liber Samekh or one of the translations of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. They recommend something they call the Core Practice.

As those initials suggest, if you read Alan closely you notice that he's recommending Centering Prayer as the "direct path" to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. They note that in order to be useful you need to add the other practices of divination and dream work so that the Angel has a few modes in which to communicate with you, but the jewel in the crown is Centering Prayer.

The best demonstration of the effectiveness of Centering Prayer is your experience of the practice itself over the long term, but it's been interesting and encouraging to me to see people from slightly different traditions give the practice some respect.

Taking Formspring questions

2010-06-17T11:17:00.000+10:00

Following Mr Miller's lead, I've signed up at Formspring to make it easy to ask me questions. Pete Smith has obliged on those last two posts. If you've got anything you'd like me to address, fire away.

I'd prefer it if you were polite, but don't feel you have to be nice or gentle.

Ask me anything http://www.formspring.me/timbomb.

integral theory? ok, i'll bite: what the heck is it? and what's up with no photo???? put up something with your nice, clean-shaven face.

2010-06-16T21:41:00.003+10:00

When I say integral theory, I'm referring to the theory frameworks of American spiritual writer Ken Wilber.

Wilber has been piecing together a range of ways of integrating science and spirituality, religion and psychology, sexuality, ecology for over twenty years.

In the realm of spirituality, Wilber argues firstly that a fully-rounded path needs to account for individual and collective dimensions, for the reality of both subjective-interior perceptions (for example, visionary experiences) and for objective-exterior information (for example, brain scans of monks having visionary experience).

Secondly, he feels that a system of praxis and its supporting theory needs to include training in different states of consciousness in addition to our normal, waking state, especially visionary, subtle states and the deep, formless darkness of the causal states.

Third, spiritual teaching, in Wilber's view, needs to be able to accommodate people at different stages of maturity (James Fowler's "Stages of Faith" delves into this territory quite nicely) and not to restrict itself to just preaching a traditionalist form of belief.

There's a bunch of other aspects to Wilber's theory, but one of the other key parts in my view is a notion that he adapts from gestalt psychology's adaptation of Jung: The Shadow – the denied aspects of the self. Only a spiritual path that acknowledges the Shadow and has practices to work with it can avoid "making a religion of our better moments", allowing us the possibility of acknowledging, surfacing and integrating our shame and darkness.

There's lots more. If you're interested, pick up Wilber's "Integral Spirituality" or "Integral Psychology".

I'll probably delve more into some of this in later blog entries.

Ask me anything

Pete asks: let's get down to ESSENTIAL Gnosticism: MUST we buy into any cosmology at all???? like, why is the AJC "trainitarian"---how does that affect my Gnostic praxis: aren't we about doing not "believing". i'm rather board with belief right now. . . .

2010-06-16T20:49:00.004+10:00

The AJC doesn't regulate anybody's belief, so nothing requires that you (or even I) affirm a trinitarian position - but the church does affirm the three hypostases of the Divine.

I don't see that as a cosmological position – I think it's misleading to equate the Trinity with one of the emanation cosmologies from the NHL.

From my perspective, the point of the Trinity is exactly about praxis. The Trinity is a way of organising the experiences of praxis. The mystics of the Christian traditions describe quite eloquently that the direct experience of the Divine has taken, for various people over the last two thousand years, these three forms-in-relationship. I don't think the Trinity is an intellectual exercise in cosmology, it's the simplest way of organising the experiences of Christian praxis.

It may well be that the Gnostic cosmologies of the second century texts preserved in the NHL are also ways of organising experience, in which case why prefer the Trinity? I think in terms of theological minimalism – the simplest theology that can preserve essential distinctions.

Is the Trinity essential? Maybe not. I'd encourage you to experiment. Practice, practice, practice. Perhaps experience will begin to enliven the Trinity and bring it from a concept to a reality for you... perhaps it won't.

Ask me anything

Personal, theological opinion

2010-06-06T15:17:00.000+10:00

So the little box at the side says this blog contains my "personal theological opinion" rather than an official position of the AJC. As a priest in the church, I have complete freedom of thought and opinion, just as any other member of the church does. At the same time, I'm never speaking on behalf of the church (only bishops get to do that).

You shouldn't infer from that that the AJC has some very complex theological position that is hard for its clergy to represent accurately, in fact it's the opposite: the AJC has a very simple theological position that it's hard for its clergy to represent accurately. The people who founded our church worked hard to keep the positions of the church very minimal – the essentials are what is in the Statement of Principles. The brevity of those positions make it very tempting to expand, define, clarify... but I think that's exactly what we shouldn't do.

Like other gnostic churches, we assert that the point of all this is the direct, unmediated, experiential knowledge of the Divine – that's what makes us free, that's what Christ taught, that's the always already present goal of what we do. Theology acts as a set of guidelines (bollards on the path, if you will) and that's all. Because we've all come from religious and cultural background that are propositionally-obsessed we tend to get all wrapped up in the idea of clear statements that we can understand and adopt intellectually. We confuse the bollards for the path, the episteme for the gnosis.

So because I get asked a lot of questions, because I read too much and because I think it's relevant to people in my parish to have some idea of what my opinions are, I'm going to lay some of it out on this blog. But these aren't AJC positions, you don't have to agree with me to join the church or come along to Saint Uriel's and none of this is necessary to the spiritual journey. Some of it may help, but your mileage may vary.

Welcome

2010-06-06T13:06:00.002+10:00

This new blog of mine is a place to write down some of my research, theological thinking, pastoral notes and praxis ideas.

Thanks for visiting. Please subscribe, I hope to get something out a couple of times a week.

You can read some of my older posts on my general blog "He's Just Had Coffee" in the spirituality category.

Father Tim+