• in a check-up with Gerard, my nutritionist, two months ago my bodyfat had crept back up to nearly 19%
• I’ve been travelling a bit in the last few weeks, including a trip to the USA, but I worked on my diet and went back to eating Ful for breakfast instead of porridge, tried to keep starches out of most meals, upped my vegetable intake
• I haven’t been exercising much over that time
• I had a check-up last week and my bodyfat was a bit over 18%
• Gerard let me know he’s leaving the practice to become a schoolteacher – apparently that’s fun!
• this morning I got my own Tanita bodyfat scale so I can monitor my bodyfat daily or weekly if I want to
• Niche and I are kicking up our workout consistency this week and I’m planning to fit in more high intensity cardio.

So, on balance, things are good

I’ve called it That Our Hearts May Burn With Fire.

I’d be honoured if you’d join me. This blog here will continue for software, integral theory, organisational rants and miscellaneous stuff.

Fortunately, the group was very welcoming and gentle with me. Several people who felt their needs weren’t being met very kindly asserted their needs without being critical, and I was able to adjust my course a little. I had an absolutely lovely time and some delightful conversation before, during and after.

Some folks made a recording of the talk, which I gather will appear on the web in due course, so I’ll update this entry with a link to that. In the meantime, I’m posting my Prezi, a gallery of the images I used and a brief bibliography for anyone who’d like to read further.

Images from "Religion Without Belief"

Bibliography

Wilber, K. “Integral Spirituality”, Integral Books, Boston, MA, 2006 – A lot of the ideas in the talk come from this book. If the idea of post-metaphysical spirituality appeals to you. Go look here.

Macarius the Egyptian, Spiritual Homilies – the vision of Ezekiel I read out came from the opening of this. Macarius goes on to discuss the symbolism of the vision.

Wallace, B. A. “The Attention Revolution”, Wisdom Publications, 2006 – Wallace is the neuro-scientist and Buddhist I mentioned briefly who is studying the effects of Buddhist meditation. Here is his web page, the page for his research institute and a description of the research project. He comes to Sydney once or twice a year to offer retreats.

Fowler, W. J. “Stages of faith: the psychology of human development and the quest for meaning”, Harper, 1995 – I mentioned Fowler’s developmental model of spirituality in passing. This is the book where he lays out his research. There are summaries on Wikipedia and here.

Bourgeault, C. “Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening”, Cowley, 2004 – The style of meditation in the Christian tradition that I’m most fond of is called Centering Prayer. This book is an excellent introduction to it.

Finally, I promised a few people a reference to my own church and what we’re up to. The main church website for the Apostolic Johannite Church is here, our local parish in Sydney is here and you can sign up to the regular newsletter via the form on the front page. I’m running a Centering Prayer workshop later this month, so if you’re interested in exploring the Christian tradition in terms of what you can do, rather than what you need to believe, come along!

Practice.

The news programs tell us of the scale of the earthquake in Haiti. They talk about how much suffering there is. One important part of that is how rickety civil society in Haiti was prior to the disaster. Haiti was the target of a lot of international relief in any case so they’re in an awful situation to cope with what’s just happened.

The results of a desperately exploitative colonial past, economic boycotts and successive dictatorships have left the island barely able to sustain itself in the best of times. And now this. So there’s a desperate, practical, humanitarian need for immediate, large-scale help.

The spiritual context for taking action is, to me, founded in the understanding that we are one human people, not separate. My devotion must be to my neighbour, as dear to me as my own soul. This isn’t a logical argument about why you should act, it is simply the spiritual fact of the matter – one we work hard to remain blind to because it is so terribly inconvenient, unwelcome and expensive.

I believe that choosing to act on behalf of another, especially another I do not know and will never meet, is a way of asserting to myself, to my logical mind, this eternal truth of non-separateness. A decision to give in a situation like this, or even to give to someone on the street who asks, made consciously, resonates through my being beyond my rational capacities and tells all of Me the truth. I am not helping “them” I am helping “us“.

So, with that as context, please consider doing something to help those who are already on the ground in Haiti. If you already support a charity which has a Haiti appeal, consider giving a little more. If you don’t here’s some suggestions.

• Save The Children
• UNICEF
• Australian Red Cross
• AVAAZ – Haiti Appeal

But don’t just send money, pray too. Pray for those of us in Haiti. Pray for those of us who have lost our parents. Pray for us who have lost our children, our sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. Pray for us in our need. Pray for our comfort and care and health and courage and will.

May the Unknown Father rain down loving-kindness and strength upon the people of Haiti and may the souls of all the faithful departed forever rest in peace.

Dad, me and Mum around 1968 or 1969

Ten years ago today, John Arthur Mansfield, my Dad, died.

He was at home. Jenny, Tess and I had seen him that day and Mum was with him at the moment he breathed out for the last time.

Here’s something I wrote about him and me. Here’s the eulogy I said at his funeral.

He loved Stravinsky and Jazz music, Peter Sellers and Stan Freberg. He used to shout at the television when the football was on.

I still miss his bald head and his kind hands. I miss his constant support. I miss his sense of humour. I miss both his courage and his weakness.

We miss you, Dad.

Rest eternal grant to him, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon him.

That's the way we like it.

I have nothing against Adobe’s Flash as a technology. We wouldn’t have YouTube without it and look how much good that’s done for civilization!

The thing is, I’m in a slightly annoying computing situation – entirely of my own making, I stress. I work on a MacBook Air that I insisted my job buy for me (Noo, I don’t want a MacBook Pro! It’s far too heavy!).

Indeed the Air is light and thin and gives me a lot of gadget kudos at airport security. It also has a common, completely disastrous bug. When the machine gets hot, as the processor temperature passes some critical threshold and for reasons I don’t understand, the kernel task goes nutso and starts eating the twin CPUs, using 150% all on its own (more typically it sits at around 1.5%) and all work grinds to a halt.

Not every Air does this, only the lucky ones. In hot weather, mine does it several times a day and all I can really do it put it to sleep and go catch up on reading while it cools down.

I tried using a very geeky application called CoolBook which helps you undervolt the CPU to manage the CPU temperature, but I’ll confess I don’t understand what I’m doing well enough to make that work.

Then I read a tip about installing a Safari plugin called ClickToFlash (there are similar programs for Firefox) which doesn’t load Flash programs embedded in web pages until you click on them. In the meantime they get replaced with a handsome gray rectangle. I was pretty skeptical this would make any difference to my CPU problems.

But three days later, and my processor load is so low the load graph on Activity Monitor barely shows a blip (see illustration above). Turns out most web pages have some Flash on them, often just to make small animated ads, but I guess a lot of it is fairly inefficient code and eats up a lot of processor. Many pages are littered with Flash ads, all running at the same time.

So, my advice? Seriously, get a Flash blocker for your browser. Also I guess I should recommend that you seriously consider if you really need a MacBook Air.

The visible progress has all been good. Gerard (my naturopath-nutritionist) has been watching my bodyfat measure on his scale drop from my original 22% three months ago down to 15% and my waistline shows the difference, so he and Nick (my psychotherapist-GP) agreed that it was time to get a second round of tests.

Last week, Nick and I sat down to review the results. The liver numbers on the blood report were all in the middle of the normal range, way down from their elevated levels that sparked this whole project off. The golden moment, though, was the ultrasound report. Nick had request that the sonographer compare this exam with the film from the previous exam. Here’s the conclusion:

The findings previously of fatty infiltration of the liver have resolved.

So, in a very technical sense, I’m well.

Gerard and I spoke last week about adapting my diet out of “crisis mode”. We all understand that if I go back to the way I was living for the last few years I will wind up in the same spot or worse in a few years, so we talked about how to keep the current plan sustainable: another serve of wholegrains a day, lots of variety , sticking with regular exercise and finding fun ways to get it. The usual.

I think one of the many things I’ve got out of this is that to frame my former way of eating and exercising (or not) as “abuse”, now that I’ve adopted a new set of behaviours I’ve got all the indicators to show that I’m “normal”, but my aim is to weave them into a sustainable lifestyle that is recognisably “healthy”.

Wish me luck!

Opening

Stand or kneel. Say the Name slowly.

In the name of the +Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

With devotion.

Open my lips O Lord : and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.

O God make speed to save me : O Lord make haste to help me.

Psalmody

Chant the psalm for this office. If you don’t use a psalter, just start at Psalm 1 and read the next one at each subsequent prayertime. Just chant in a monotone, if you are worried about your singing, but chant.

Do your best to keep your mind harnessed to the words of the chant, returning your attention to the chant when it drifts.

Once you’ve chanted the psalm, you may move into Lectio Divina based on the text or simply move on to the reading.

Reading

Using either the lectionary reading for the day or a reading you choose – perhaps by simply working your way through a Gospel or other book of your choice – read the text aloud.

Optionally, move through the phases of Lectio Divina – lectio, ruminatio, oratio and contemplatio.

Contemplation

The preceding phases help to quiet the mind and settle the subtle body, which makes this an ideal moment for:

• Shamatha meditation
• Hesychastic prayer
• Centering prayer

Prayer

From your heart, pray as you will. You may choose to:

• intercede for those in need of prayer;
• offer gratitude for blessings you have experienced;
• offer praise to the Divine for the ongoing sacrament of life
• reflect on the ways you have not lived up to your aspirations and pray for release from the debts you’ve incurred.

If there are several prayer times in the day – consider focusing on a particular kind of prayer every day at that time.

Closing

Slowly, treasuring the meaning of each phrase, with devotion.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy Name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory Forever, Amen.

Lord, bless me and bring me to wholeness, compassion and understanding. Amen

Leaving aside whether it’s useful or sensible to give up coffee, I thought it might be interesting to post some thoughts about how to give up. Perhaps these thoughts might apply to other kinds of habit-forming substances. Your mileage may vary.

I’ve given up coffee several times, for several reasons. I’m not suggesting you do and if you do, I’m not suggesting you do it forever. You may have some short term reason for doing so, or you might want to do it for the long-term. My suggestions about getting off, because I’ve gone on and off, I don’t have much to offer about long-term strategies other than – if you end up with a habit again, just do all this again.

The main thing I want to point out is that most coffee habits actually have three distinct aspects woven together: addiction, psychological habit and social habit.

Addiction is a physical dependency. Your brain builds a dependency on having caffeine fed to it regularly, when you stop it goes into caffeine withdrawal causing headaches (and possibly other side-effects). I once went from about 7-8 espressos a day to none overnight – I’ve described the effect as “wearing the iron crown” for three days. Imagine a big crown cast from pig iron with spikes that dig into your head. As I recall it was also three days in which everyone hated me and I hated everyone: I really don’t recommend it.

Because addiction is a physical dependency based on chemical needs, I’d recommend treating it chemically – just make sure that you wean yourself off caffeine over a few days. You can do this by cutting down cups, slowly substituting decaf for caffeinated coffee or using caffeine pills (much like you’d use nicotine gum or lozenges when quitting smoking).

But, you’re also likely to have a psychological habit of drinking coffee – maybe you associate coffee as a reward drink, a drink marking a mid-point in the afternoon, a drink you have when you wake up. You have an individual pattern of associations between various times and actions and drinking coffee.

An approach to giving up that deals purely with the chemical addiction, but not with the habitual behaviour patterns is less likely to work. I’d recommend finding substitute behaviours – maybe other drinks to fill the gap: tea, decaf, herbal drinks – or in the case of rewards things like dark chocolate. However in the world of rewards you tend to drift to booze, candy and cigarettes and really, coffee’s the lesser of many evils, but if you can find a healthy substitute reward that works for you, go for it.

The final aspect is the social habit. You probably “go for coffee” with friends. I have always had a cup of coffee with my beloved as a way to start the day, coffee often comes after a shared meal and so on. In many cases, we hang out with other coffee drinkers whose social persona includes “coffee drinker” as a self-identifier, as does one’s own. This aspect is not about your personal habit, or your chemical dependency, it’s about social pressure.

Depending on how big a part coffee drinking plays in the group’s culture, this part can be easy or very, very hard. If it’s just a basic social habit to have a cup of coffee with friends, it’s fairly easy to substitute green tea or a herbal tea for your usual cup of coffee without much problem.

But if you hang out with people whose usual drink is a single shot of espresso, who know what a ristretto is and who laugh out loud when a friend orders a “decaf skim latte”, you may have some issues.

You’ve really got three options in my view:

1. show up a little late and order a decaf so that no-one can hear
2. order whatever you want and soldier through the derision
3. find new friends and stop hanging out with the coffee pushers

My approach this time through has been aimed at minimising pain and taking it easy.

• I bought a really nice-tasting, organic, Fair Trade decaf coffee for our espresso machine
• I started substituting decaf espressos in place of my usual, without changing frequency
• after a couple of days, I tried only drinking decaf until I started to feel a headache or some withdrawal symptoms and then add a “medicinal dose” of caffeinated espresso
• over a week or so, those incidents naturally started to space out
• I started to substitute green tea and herbals in place of some of the decafs

… and that’s pretty much it. Now once or twice a week I have a cup of caffeinated coffee if I feel like it, and I rarely do. I start the day with a decaf with Anthony because we like to make coffee for each other. If my friends raise their eyebrows when I order decaf (and they mostly don’t) I laugh.

That’s my thoughts. Your mileage may, of course, vary. I hope some of that’s been of some value.

The fatty liver issue has meant that I need to restrict my intake of caffeinated coffee (green tea is OK). So, while I have still “just had coffee”, it’s now the decaf stuff. Nice, fair-trade, organic decaf, but decaf nevertheless.

In any case, the bodyfat percentage is down. In a couple of months, we’ll test my blood again and see if my liver’s recovering.

In May this year I turned 42. I figured a prudent step might be to go see a physician and get a medical check-up just to see if anything was amiss. I’ve spent so much time in the last ten years trying to cajole my late mother into seeing a doctor, it seemed a bit hypocritical not to.

I found the kind of General Practitioner I’ve always fantasised about: Dr Nick Bassal. Nick started the Wholistic Medical Centre a couple of decades ago to provide integrated health management. There’s four medical doctors and a whole crew of naturopaths, osteos, nutritionists, masseurs, acupuncturists and so on. I like using alternative therapies, but I’ve always wanted a GP who could refer me to what was the right one to use. Now I’ve got one.

The check-up involved mostly blood tests, which showed skewed liver numbers. We followed up with an ultrasound which showed I have a “fatty liver“: my spreading girth (or “central adiposity” as the medicos like to euphemistically phrase it) is accompanied by visceral fat around my organs and fatty pockets inside my liver. Early signs of Metabolic Syndrome, says Dr Nick. The liver condition will get worse if I don’t change my lifestyle – pockets of fat in my liver gradually squeeze healthy liver cells rendering my liver less functional. Diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, cancer.

Well. That’s why you get a check-up I guess.

So, off to see Gerard the naturopathically-qualified nutritionist to talk about my diet. I saunter in holding a food log from the previous month anticipating a relaxed chat about ways I could improve my diet. Gerard has other ideas.

He hands me a booklet called “Whole Life Vitality” which firmly lays down the law on (previously loved) foods which are forbidden and (previously ignored) foods which are now mandatory. And 60 mins of exercise per day. Every day.

No potatoes of any kind. No white rice. No sweets or chocolate. I count my blessings that he crosses out the “no coffee” part, but seriously, is life worth living without potatoes?

I take a deep breath. It’s not that bad. I’ve done crazier diets and this one’s for serious (as my beloved sister likes to say). I need to work out how to keep this up basically forever or at least until my live gets less fatty.

This is my fourth day. It takes a lot more forethought and planning about my diet than I’m used to. My usual approach is to just do what ever I’m doing until roused by hunger pangs, survey the immediate environment and scavenge food. This approach will no longer work.

I’m kind of in shock about it all. It all seems a bit big. I’ll try to check back in when I’m the swing of things, if that ever happens.

Wish me luck!

Edit: all posts about my fatty liver lifestyle are here: Fatty liver

I twittered this fact and asked for feedback from people and got some interesting responses (mostly cheers) via Twitter and Facebook. In order to calm people down a little: I still have a Visa debit card, so I can still shop online. My friend Lochy asked me to blog a little about how the whole experiment goes and I think that’s an interesting idea, so here’s some first thoughts:

First, it’s exhilarating. Every personal finance book I’ve ever read starts with the advice: “first, pay off your credit cards” and I have to say it feels very good, both doing it and knowing I have enough money in reserve to cover some basic emergencies. Even while using credit cards constantly, I have irrationally resented the banks for giving them to me and for constantly raising both the interest rate and my credit limit. Really though, I should read the product disclosure statement, have some self-control, turn down credit limit increases.

So second, I want to come out in public and say: I’m not good with credit. I’m the ideal credit card customer who fills the card, stays just under the limit, pays pretty regularly and never quite pays it off. Banks love me. The clever credit users pay the card down to zero regularly, never spend more than they can repay within the interest-free period and never get charged late fees. Banks hate those guys – they’re a drain on a perfectly good profit-making system. I aspired to be one of those people. But I’m not.

I’m a person who lends money and then forgets the debt within a few weeks. I can rarely answer how much things I bought cost. I don’t bargain. I mentally use the same anticipated income to pay more than one debt. I’m not what you’d call “deft” with my finances.

I’ve come to acknowledge that I have a mental deficiency… let’s call it, Idunno… Profound Financial Aphasia or something. I’m a little retarded about money. Some people need books with big print and small words. I need to only spend what I have.

Third, having something saved makes me feel like saving. There’s a few things I want, nothing urgent. I could just buy them, or I could save some money over the next few months, make a little extra interest and buy them later. Here’s the weird thing: for the first time, I feel like waiting. So not me.

I’ve waited to buy a few things recently: some computer gear, some books, a cassock. I’ve had no credit to spend, no cash in reserve, I’ve just had to wait. You know what? Just like Grandma used to say, having to wait makes it genuinely more delightful when I finally get the thing. I’m sure it’s something I really want, not just a passing whim. Waiting makes me feel like I deserved it.

So, why not wait, save up and buy it when I have some more money saved? My friends who don’t have PFA are ROFLing right now, but pause, reflect on how insane a lot of my behaviour has seemed over the years and share a moment of happiness with me that perhaps I finally get it.

… and check back with me in six months to see how I’m doing.

Most people probably assume that this is all nonsense and none of it’s had any effect, but while the frequency of me talking about my back hasn’t diminished much over the years, the actual pain definitely has. The various therapies have helped me get a better sense of the emotional repressions I habitually do, which result in constantly winding more tension into my back. They’ve also helped me end many of those habits. Simple, practical stuff like a good working chair and a better arranged workspace helps me not re-offend, as does some exercise, chiefly: walking.

I’ve been reading stuff about walking and running barefoot for a couple of years and recently I’ve started trying to go for long-ish walks barefoot. A few things seem to be happening as a consequence:

• I’m learning to engage with the ground in a different way, more involving my big toe and the ball of my foot, this seems to be gradually making the painful bit of connective tissue behind the ball of my foot calm down. Win!
• The whole way my legs and pelvis work together as I walk is balancing in a different way, this seems to be shifting my spine to a more balanced position, and I’ll be darned if my shoulders aren’t shifting naturally backwards, my neck getting more erect and the shoulder pain lessening one more quantum. Win!
• This is a big one: it’s really, really joyful to walk barefoot. I feel like breaking into a run spontaneously. I feel connected to the ground in a more intimate way. A surge of energy seems to rush out of the ground and up the front of my body from time to time. I feel like a kid, I want to hope up on walls and jump over things. This isn’t exercise, this is hilarious. Win!!!

Summary: Win! I like going barefoot.

But… it’s winter in Sydney and in the mornings (my favourite walking time) it’s just too cold to comfortably walk, the pavements have broken glass, all the palm trees are dropping little hard seeds, every little rock and bump hurts more when your feet are cold. It’s a low-joy event.

Enter the compassionate hand of My Beloved who decided to buy me for my birthday a pair of FiveFingers Classics. We went to pick them up today and I walked home in them. As advertised, just like going barefoot, with a tiny bit of cushioning, so that hard things don’t hurt, I don’t fear broken glass, but I still get that direct perceptual link to the ground.

It’s very hard to convey how happy I’ve been from the simple act of walking home “barefoot”. I may never wear a normal shoe again.

This sequence of meditations:

• the wealth of spirit
• divine grace
• divine protection
• divine aid toward liberation
• recognition of the human potential for liberation

… is intended to bring mind and heart into a space in which are able to recognise the level of assistance which we are provided. Liberation is not only possible, it is feasible and we have help, but we need to accept it.

You may find that contemplating and meditating on that sequence of five themes at any time in your life opens your heart into the possibility of freedom. What had seemed just too hard, can afterward seem effortless, pleasurable and essential. Try it!

We don’t refer to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as the ‘Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook.’

I’d like to just jot down a few notes about the aspect of the Divine which, in the Christian tradition, we call the Holy Spirit. The main things I’m interested in doing though is getting behind those particular English words and their implications.

In the Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic), the word which gets translated “Holy” is “ha-Qodesh” (or HaKodesh), which literally means “separated” or “set to one side”, but which comes to refer to those things set aside for sacred use: the Hebrew language, the ark of the covenant, the Temple. It acquires this sense of being reserved for the particular uses related to the Divine.

Spirit in English comes directly from Latin (“spiritus” and means both a non-corporeal entity (as in “the spirit was angry and threw the medium’s crystal ball at her head” and a certain tendency or drive (as in “the spirit of ’76″ or “school spirit” or “high spirited”. Because the Holy Spirit is one of the three Persons in the Trinity, I think the name tends to inherit mostly that first meaning. Perhaps because “spiritus” is a male-gendered noun in Latin, we also take the Holy Spirit to be masculine. The aggregate is kind of like Casper, the friendly ghost. A benign, helpful ghost sent by God.

The correlate word in Greek is “pneuma” and hence “Pneuma Hagion”. Pneuma means spirit and also air – it’s the root word of “pneumatic”. It doesn’t seem to usually refer to non-corporeal entities, at least in the Greek of the early Christian Period, I think one would usually use the word “daimon” to refer to what we’d call a spirit. “Demon” in English is reserved for malign spirits, but “daimon” is a value-neutral word in Greek. “Pneuma” is grammatically neuter in Greek.

In Hebrew, the correlate is “Ruach” (hence “Ruach ha-Qodesh”, the Aramaic is very similar, “Rukha d’koodsha” which means air, atmosphere and breath. “Ruach” is grammatically feminine. It’s not completely clear that the modern distinction we make between the metaphysical idea of our “spirit” and the physical notion of our breath was made by Middle Eastern folk in that time, they may have simply seen that breath is the animating, driving force of life.

What is almost certain is that the modern distinction between atmosphere and vacuum was not present in the thought-world of people in the first centuries of the common era. When we think of air or atmosphere, we have the dual notion of “vacuum” which co-defines the meaning. They had not concept of vacuum or of outer space, just air which stretches from the space between you and me all the way up past the celestial bodies, past the angels, to YHVH itself.

The other things to notice about “ruach” is that is invisible and only noticeable in movement. We can sense wind, voice and breath but when it doesn’t move, air doesn’t seem to be there at all. The breath is a process of inhalation and exhalation, and for the early Jewish Christians, the Holy Spirit would have been a process as well: a process which connects you and me via voice and breath, connects all of humanity to each other, to the Holy Beings and, ultimately to God. Neither wholly outside me, nor wholly inside me, but passing from the one to the other with each breath.

Ah, and female. The Holy Spirit (like the “shekinah”, the Presence of YHVH in the Temple) is a She.

This short sequence of linguistic digressions leads us from the benign Casper of Sunday School: anthropomorphic, kindly, somewhat useless, male to the more radical and immanent Ruach ha-Qodesh of antiquity: feminine, always moving, present in action, the voice and breath set aside as sacred, connecting us to the Father and to each other.

And there She is. Closer than my very breath. In She rushes, whispering encouragement, drawing my attention as She rushes out, out and up. Present in every word, the winds of change, blowing where She wills.

The other evening a fellow cleric asked me what I thought was the essence of a Gnostic reading of Easter. Leaving aside the canonical response (since one of the crucial aspects of a Gnostic theological position is the individual discernment of the person, we’re prone to asking “What do you think?”, I came up with a couple of thoughts which I thought might be useful to share.

Easter is pretty much the crux (pun intended) of the liturgical year for exoteric, orthodox Christianity. It’s the remembrance of the moment in history when a human being named Jesus (or if you want to be slightly fussy and pedantic, Yeshua) who was simultaneously also God, was betrayed by one of his followers, persecuted by his own people, executed, died and, in the quintessential miracle of the Christian Gospel, after a couple of days rose back to physical, embodied life.

As Gnostics, we tend to make non-literal readings of all scripture. These readings might be poetic or symbolic or they might be inner, esoteric or mystical readings. In any case, since the orthodox views of Easter are so very well documented, let’s take them as read and look at some other ways to understand the festival.

One way to approach the story of Easter is in the context of the cycle of the liturgical year. This is the annual cycle of festivals that make up the church calendar starting at Advent (the solemn season before Christmas), then Christmas, the new year, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost and through the “ordinary” time to Advent again, peppered with Saint’s days throughout. There are many ways to understand the liturgical year, but a popular way for Gnostics to grasp it is as a symbolic analogue of the journey of the individual seeker: from puzzlement or roadlessness (aporia) to the initial flash of insight (epiphany) to the dark night of the soul to theosis.

In this mystical reading, Good Friday is the culmination of the dark night and Easter Sunday is the inbreaking of God – the beginning of theosis which culminates in the Ascension.

Another way to understand Easter that I particularly like involves dwelling on what we can learn from the Person of Christ. There’s a longer post in there on ways to understand the doctrine of the Trinity, but for the moment I want to dwell on the way I understand the Person of Christ.

Much of the controversy among different traditions in fourth century Christianity arose from arguments about the nature of Jesus Christ. Was he Divine? Was he human? Did he have a material body or was he pure spirit? Did he have two natures or one nature? Was he of one being with the Father or not?

While communities of substantial size (notably, the Arians and the Nestorians) made their own decisions on these questions, the central communities that dominated in Constantinople and Rome felt that these questions were important enough to warrant the kind of painstakingly clear, doctrinal statement found in the Creed of St Athanasius. Jesus Christ was fully human and fully Divine, of one Being with the Father.

For those of us taking a Gnostic view, this means that all human beings are of one being with the Father, though we may be lost and not realise it. By setting foot upon the Path and putting on the mind of Christ, we come to see that which has always been true. Crucially, in this view, the Person of Christ is not just manifest within, as me, it’s also manifest to me as you… and that guy over there in the annoying sports car and that lady over the back with the stupid hat and the hated person at work who took my promotion. All Divine, no separation.

That’s all fine and while radical to put into practice is not a terribly radical idea. All of us are Divine is a very popular idea these days. The Gospel takes an extra step.

In the Gospel story Jesus dies. Gives up the ghost and dies, is taken down and buried. Now here’s a trick. Fully human, fully Divine, of One Being with the Father, does that stop, do you suppose, at death? When a person ceases to be a living being and becomes matter?

I feel that the Gospel story is telling us that just as the Life of Christ indicates to us the Divine nature of humanity, the Death of Christ is telling us that even matter itself is not separate from God. This is one way to begin to grasp the sanctification of the material world, to acknowledge the radiance of the Divine in the places where it is so evident: in the sea, the sky, galaxies seen through telescopes, crystals seen through microscopes, in snowflakes, in cliffs and mountains, lakes and streams.

One way to understand Easter is in the kind of paradoxical way that Jesus loved so much in his teaching. Perhaps we look in vain for sacred places, especially holy times of the year, especially saintly people in our attempt to “find God”. Perhaps the story of Easter emphasises to us that the divine is everpresent: everywhere, eternally, in every person and that our journey of seeking is not looking endlessly for the place that God is, but acknowledging the truth the Hermetic literature speaks so elegantly: There is nothing which is not God.

How do we come to notice that truth? Perhaps that’s the challenge of Holy Week.

Happy Easter! Stay off the roads and go easy on the chocolate.

A soup stone problem is one is which a community has everything it really needs to take an agreed action, but it needs a little injection of faith to galvanise collective action. I love soup stone problems.

I invited the people who had spoken to me to a meeting and proposed to them that they work together to form a “narthex” or lay community of the AJC. They agreed to undertake the necessary work and to support Prenna in applying to to the church lead the narthex. The AJC requires that anyone taking on a public role on behalf of the church undergo background checks as well as writing essays intended to clarify their intentions in the work they are proposing to undertake. This all took some time to manage and a certain amount of money and effort on behalf of all the people involved.

This week all this effort has borne fruit. The Apostolic Council of the church approved the group’s application and announced the formation of the Saint Teresa of Àvila Narthex, the church’s second community in Australia and tenth globally.

On Sunday, I had the enormous privilege of not only announcing that to the group in Brisbane, but also of baptising and confirming some of them and formally receiving a few more into the community of the AJC. We held a Eucharist in a park next to the Brisbane river and baptised Prenna through full immersion as people fished nearby and played soccer in the park. A very public coming-out for a new church!

It has been an enormous privilege to shepherd this community into formation and to initiate several of them into our beautiful tradition. I am deeply grateful to the people of St Teresa’s for their commitment, faith, hard work, perseverance, intelligence and love. They are a remarkable group of people and I foresee great things in their work together.

I offer my continuing blessings for their work and my ongoing practical support.

There will be photos soon I hope. I’ll post again when I’ve collected some of them. There may even be a video of the baptismal moment!

OK, so first up, I am not on a diet.

People who’ve known me for a while have seen me do all kinds of crazy diets to either put on muscle or lose fat. I’m not dissing the craziness — most of those diets worked and the speed with which they did was pretty motivating.

But the stuff dieticians tell you has been true for me, when I make an extreme change to my regular way of eating, it might work, but a few months later I’m back more or less where I started.

So now I’m focussing on gradual, bearable, sustainable changes to how I choose, prepare and consume food. I want to change my personal “food culture” to improve my body composition and (directly and indirectly) my health.

One thing I’m messing with is a kind of “slow carb” eating (which is to say you aim for low GI foods) which incorporates beans. I found it on Tim Ferriss’s blog and something about the idea appealed to me. The key idea is that each meal contains some kind of straight-up protein: meat, eggs, tofu (I guess); some kind of legume or bean and some kind of vegetables. Close to the Paleolithic Diet in some ways, similar to a Low Carb diet in others — but beans as well as being low GI also bring along a whole lot of health benefits.

Subjectively, when I eat just meat and vegies, I get all the odd jittery effects I’ve come to expect on a low carb diet (at least in the first week) when I add beans I get this nice, steady thrum of energy that lasts from meal to meal. I crave sugar and fat less, my energy levels are more stable. It’s nice.

When I started, I was pretty bean clueless so I used canned baked beans and canned chickpeas… which is fine, but a little dull. In the last few weeks, I’ve been keeping my eyes out for good bean recipes. My favourite so far is a dish called Ful Medames. “Ful” is the Egyptian word for Fava (or broad) beans and this dish has been filling the bellies of the hard-working Egyptian people since the place was called Kemet (or so Meave O’Meara assured us on the episode of Food Safari I found the dish on).

It’s a slow-cooked mix of red lentils and fava beans with cumin, salt, pepper and a dash of olive oil added. You eat it with flat bread and a boiled egg or salad. It’s like the ultimate breakfast of champions.

I have another mediterranean-style thing I do with chicken, but I’ll save that for another time. One day perhaps I’ll be able to brag about making feijoada… but not yet.