A slightly fuller newsletter this week. As well as some thoughts for the week and a service announcement, I’m also including an events calendar for September and October. I will be out of town a few times over the next two months, so there are some Sundays with no services.
Contents
This week is the start of the Sophianic season, which extends around the year overlapping with the festivals of Christ’s life and culminating in the Assumption of Sophia (which we celebrated a couple of weeks ago).
You can find several accounts of Sophia’s descent into the manifest world from the divine realm of the One in the Nag Hammadi texts: in the Secret Book of John and in the Pistis Sophia, for instance. I don’t believe that these accounts tell us what gnostics believed I think they tell us what they noticed as they delved deeper into intense spiritual practice.
From that point of view, it’s not necessary to fret about how Sophia comes to be in the world, but simply to note that she very much is in the world. This is the perspective exemplified in this week’s reading from the Wisdom of Solomon (one of the books in the Apocrypha – books written in the last couple of centuries before the birth of Jesus and accepted by Roman Catholics, though not by Protestants).
The word for Wisdom in both Hebrew (chokhmah) and Greek (sophia) is feminine in gender and in this book is a personified aspect of God. God is present in the world in this view as Wisdom, present in the phenomena and experiences of the world and constantly inviting us into communion with the deep things of God.
The implication, I think, is that one path toward the Divine is found, not in withdrawing from the world and from the senses and from experience, but in simply coming to notice the presence of Wisdom in the moments of everyday life. This still takes practice and work and attention, but it stands in distinction to the more ascetic paths for which the Christian tradition is famous.
This week is a time to celebrate love, the everyday and the willingness of the Divine to throw herself directly into our lives just as they are.
May your journey be joyful.
Father Tim+
Readings for the week
Service – 6pm
The service this Sunday will be a “Sophianic Eucharist”. The service praises Sophia or Holy Wisdom as the immanent, feminine face of the Divine and celebrates the sacred marriage between the immanent and transcendent aspects of Spirit. The service features prayer and chant and the sharing of the Body and the Blood in the form of bread and wine.
Sophia Café – 7pm
Sophia Café follows the service – stay around for tea, snacks and conversation.
A couple of notes. I’ll be away from Sydney a few times in the next few weeks, so there will be no services on:
- 20 Sep
- 4 Oct
- 11 Oct
The other thing to note is that we’ve launched a new contemplative prayer group which is meeting twice a month – on a Tuesday evening and a Thursday evening.
All this is summarised on the calendar below.
The congregation at St Uriel’s meets every Sunday at 6pm at:
The Unitarian Centre
15 Francis St
Darlinghurst, NSW
Map
Rector: Father Tim Mansfield
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Apostolic Johannite Church
