Author: Bishop Tim

History of the Community

Our community was founded as “Saint Uriel’s Gnostic Community” on St Uriel’s day (21 June) in 2007. The initial community – Luke Fullagar, Trish Nowland, Stephen Leppard and Tim Mansfield – met weekly on a Sunday at Tim’s house for a lay service and discussion, which usually wound up around the kitchen table for a couple of hours talking about life and spirituality over tea and snacks.

In 2008, the community began meeting at the Unitarian Centre in Darlinghurst (our current home) and in May 2008, Tim was ordained a priest and became the rector of the Sydney parish. St Uriel’s took the more formal title of The Parish of Saint Uriel the Archangel.

Trish Nowland took a strong role in the community, joining the Order of Saint Esclarmonde, she organised a weekend retreat at a monastery at Stroud in 2009. Eventually entering Minor Orders, she began serving at the altar during the eucharist, as well as organising several learning groups and discussion circles, both in-person and online. In 2013, she served on a project about the Divine Feminine for the AJC’s seminary program.

Saint Uriel’s has hosted a weekly Centering Prayer group and a monthly “Wisdom Jesus” meetup as well as occasional workshops on Centering Prayer. Tomek Wyczesany was a key contributor to this contemplative ministry over the years. Orion Mitchell, Alicia Boyd, Emma Thembani and Ben Burke have also been regular attendees and co-hosts of various events.

In 2010, Emma, Ben, Lynette Watters-Idehen and Angus Fotheringham stepped forward as members of the parish council to help guide the future of the parish. Lynette has been a steady presence at St Uriel’s since our earliest days, providing welcome and hospitality to every visitor, along with some really excellent contributions to the shared dinner table! Angus has mentored us on aspects of incorporation and other legal and financial matters.

Many other warm-hearted, open-minded people have contributed to dinners and conversation, participated in workshops and community life and shared in communion at Saint Uriel’s since 2007. We are a diverse, inclusive community which has always stayed focused on intimacy, hospitality and open inquiry of our human life’s greatest mysteries.

 

 

A History of Blessing

This week is celebrated as Gay and Lesbian Pride Week in many countries around the world. The genesis of that young tradition was the riots that arose in the wake of a police raid on the Stonewall Bar in New York City on the 28th of June in 1969. These riots marked one of the first times homosexual and transgendered people stood up to persecution and began demanding rights. This week also marks the overturning, also in the United States, of the federal Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) – a crucial step toward the legalisation of same-sex marriage in that country. Here in Australia, our federal parliament recently voted to extend anti-discrimination protection to intersex people (making us the first country to do so) and in the same week an internal political brawl in the ruling party gave us a new Prime Minister, the first who publicly supports same-sex marriage and who, in his first week in office, foreshadowed significant movement toward federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

It’s fascinating to see what amazing shifts have occurred in many countries over the last fifty years since those riots spilled out of an underground gay bar, onto the streets of New York City and across the world, spawning the global gay liberation movement. The dramatic difference it makes to my life, being able to love and live with my partner, be open with neighbours, friends and colleagues gives me huge cause to celebrate this anniversary.

It’s sobering on the other hand to witness political attitudes to the very existence of homosexual people in less wealthy countries, particularly in central Africa where homosexuality remains illegal and where GLBTI people live under constant threat of violence. It emphasises to me the necessity to maintain a global view on matters of justice and human thriving, to understand that while one of is oppressed or suffering, we are all the lesser for it.

The other recent anniversary, of more significance to me perhaps than to any other person, is the first anniversary of my consecration as a bishop and the fifth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood.

Part of the reason I chose to pursue my vocation to the priesthood with the Apostolic Johannite Church is the seriousness with which this church pursues a policy of non-discrimination. The final principle in the Statement of Principles forbids discrimination on the “basis of gender, race, social status or sexual orientation”. It’s a nice phrase, which I appreciated when I first encountered the church, but lots of organisations have similar statements of intent, which fail to be borne out in practice. One of the open questions I approached my first year or two of seminary with was, “how seriously do these people take this stuff?” I gradually discovered that we take it very seriously. This principle is a constant touchstone for discussions of inclusion in every part of church life. The church has chosen to lose clergy who disagreed with marrying people of the same gender rather than change the principle.

One of the key moments for me, was the tremendous enthusiasm the church as a whole and our Patriarch, Shaun McCann, in particular approached my ordination as a priest. Every ordination is a special moment, every new deacon or priest a tremendous blessing to their local community and to the church as a whole. But I had the honour of being the very first homosexual person ordained in the AJC. That non-discrimination principle had been core to the church’s view of itself since its founding moment, but ordaining a gay man respresented a milestone in the church’s ability to proclaim that it lived what it taught.

One simple moment that made it beautifully clear that the depth of this commitment goes beyond tolerance and acceptance was when His Eminence invited my partner, Min, to come to the altar an assist him with vesting me in my priestly vestments. As a visual moment, it emphasised to those present and anyone who saw the photographs afterward, that we don’t mean we accept homosexual persons in some abstract sense – we accept homosexual persons in the full relationality of our love for each other.

Obviously, this is also emphasised in our church’s delight every time we have an opportunity to marry two people in love no matter what their gender or whenever we can welcome GLBTI people to full inclusion in the sacramental life of a parish. We are not the only church on the planet which welcomes, marries and ordains GLBTI people. More and more churches are moving in the direction of love and seeing trans-gendered and intersex people as precisely as included and loved and welcomed as cis-gendered people, seeing gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and their partners and families as members of the household of God sitting at the very same table as heterosexual people and their partners and families.

But one thing which I think makes the AJC a singular community is that we are a church founded on this principle. Just about every other church has endured an internal struggle to accept the equality of GLBTI people (and many are still in the midst of it). Members of those churches carry a memory of fights, arguments and sometimes violence in the long battle to gain tolerance, acceptance and ultimately welcome. The AJC has never had to face these sometimes bitter struggles, we have no institutional memory of war and no embedded history of argument, this simply is as it is and only people who agree with this principle join us.

You might say that where many churches have a history of struggle for GLBTI rights, the AJC has a history of blessing.

I yearn for a future in which all of us all over the world can take our rights for granted. To me, my equality in society seem certain and solid, but that equality has been fought for and won in my lifetime and it is still a distant dream for my fellow human beings in other countries. I know rationally that these freedoms are fragile things, that they must be protected and preserved, that there is still much to work for and many places to work in.

I am so grateful for the rights my elders in the GLBTI community have won on my behalf, the struggles other have fought for me so that I have the life I have. I give thanks for the church I now call home and its welcoming embrace of all of us. I pray, and I hope you pray with me, this Pride Week that we may come to see, in the words of a wise person I read recently, that diversity, not uniformity is what unites us as a people and the love is a universal bond which demands that we see that Original Light in the eyes of the other, no matter how strange they may initially seem.

Why bother with the Trinity?

Today, I want to write down some ideas about the Trinity which I’m very alive to recently. This letter may leave a lot of threads hanging which I will pick up in future writing.

We affirm that the Godhead is composed of three Persons, which are one in substance – God, the Father Almighty; the Son, the Logos or Xristos Sother and the Holy Spirit or Pneuma Hagion.

– AJC Statement of Principles

Quite a lot of people experience some puzzlement over the presence of an affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity in our core theological document. After four or five centuries of the dominance of rationalism, even many mainstream Christians think the Trinity an unnecessary, pre-modern, muddled, superstitious encumberance which we should ditch. Among the more staunchly monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam, it’s an impediment to dialogue as it is to any spiritual-but-not-religious person with a modern mind. Pagans are often bewildered by what can seem a “three but only three” approach to polytheism which seems unnecessarily restrictive. Buddhists often approach any kind of theism with a benign sort of puzzlement, but can experience a kind of symbolic affinity through the concept of the Trikaya.

Pastorally, this puzzlement is a gift for me. It lets me discuss the difference between the Church’s affirmation of a spiritual reality and any kind of mandatory statement of belief for an individual member. Since “freedom of thought” is another of our principles, that’s a very important conversation. The Church as a body agrees the Trinity is important, you personally are free to ignore it, should you wish. Many people do.

Most Gnostics adopt a kind of henotheistic Monism – many gods, one platonic Monad who reigns over all and unto which all things ultimately dissolve in their time. This is perfectly serviceable as a theological view – by which I mean I don’t regard that view as containing intrinsic errors which impede spiritual transformation.

Many Christians default to a sort of monotheism in which the Father is God, Jesus is a kind of Big Saint and the Holy Spirit is a sort of ambiguous spiritual gas (pun intended). Others to a sort of Jesus worship – really common in Evangelical communities and, increasingly in Catholic and even in some Orthodox communities. That last one seems a lot more problematic to me as a view, but I’ll forestall going further into that.

But really, all this is fine. These are all just views, none of this is Reality. All things dissolve in God in whom we live and move and have our being, so no harm done. Notice how minimal the Principle is, it makes no attempt to pin down “Person” or “substance” or the character of the Three, it just states a minimal version of the doctrine and says, “we think this is important”. Each of the views I’ve summarised above are perfectly fine responses to that, there are many other views, some orthodox, some heretical – I commend all of them to you.

That is one of the purposes of the Trinity – it’s a para-conceptual reality. None of these conceptualisations exhausts God’s reality as we are able to behold it or even as we are able to experience it. The Trinity is a paradox whose function is to wriggle in the mind’s grasp and, ultimately, to evade it.

To my personal way of understanding, the Trinity offers several things beyond that para-conceptuality. Its intrinsic relationality offers us a dynamism to the Divine living that breaks out of any static conception of God – a dynamism that is essential to a theology which puts human transformation at its core as our Johannite tradition does. Nothing is fixed in God, everything is in motion in Love.

Love in the sense offered by the Trinity is not characterised by lack, by yearning or desire for something missing, for something unfulfilled. The Trinity describes a love characterised by fullness, but overflowing, by abundance – it tells us something crucial about Eternal Life (as John called it).

OK. That’s all good, but it’s all just nice ideas. What effect does this have on you and me personally, in our lives? My experience is that the more you take Trinity seriously as a way to encounter God in Godself – not as a confusing philosophical abstraction, but as a living reality – the more you find it connecting with your life, and in particular your practice life.

Let me offer you one way I see it. Here’s a kind of narrative of the spiritual journey in terms of an encounter with the Trinitarian God.

One way to notice the Holy Spirit is as the Presence available in everyday life. She is as close my very breath. At my baptism, She became my companion, my comforter. At my confirmation, She and I became One Breath. As Her name implies, Her presence is subtle, like a breeze on the skin or the breath of a lover embracing you. Long before I began any kind of serious spiritual practice, even during the period I was an atheist this subtle Presence was about me, nudging me to take a certain path, putting people in my way, offering me books, ideas, even TV shows. She is Pronoia – the Divine Forethought – laying a trail before me back to never-distant place and a never-lost relationship.

As I began practice and even more as I entered seriously into our Johannite tradition, I began to move into an awareness of Christ, the Son, a radiant, loving Presence who faces me with total, human, openness and calls me to His arms. He appears to me in the face of the other – the stranger on the street, the friend with a kind word. He appears to me in the Eucharist – His royal Presence filling the temple as his throneroom, taking His seat among us His cherubim on the altar, His throne. There are moments when I lose myself in Him and my prayer becomes His eternal prayer – the only Prayer Which Is – the prayer of the Son to His Father. Perhaps this self I think I am is just a dream and I may wake up in the reality of His Being.

The saints tell us that the end of our journey is union with the Father – union with God as God is to Godself. The Ground of all Being. This end is not an experience, it is the Ground from which experience arises. It is union with what Christ Himself beholds.

… which is one of those things about which almost nothing sensible can be said, and yet almost an endless torrent of words have been expended. So I’ll leave that there.

The Trinity, I hope I have demonstrated, is not a pointless logical absurdity or a theological irrelevance. Among the reasons we insist on affirming it is that from the point of view of practice and spiritual transformation, this key paradox bridges the gap between what can be grasped conceptually and the encounter with God which can only be beheld. Gnosis, one might argue, consists in crossing this very bridge of noetic apprehension.

Stations of Faith

This is a recording of a workshop from AJC Conclave in 2012 exploring James Fowler’s developmental model of faith. I use Ken Wilber’s notion that any stage in the faith journey can become a station, at which a person stays for the remainder of their life.

James Fowler’s popular book “Stages of Faith” outlined for a general audience the results of a long-term study of how one’s faith – one’s holistic orientation to and relationship with the universe – develops through life. Fowler’s model of faith development provides a framework for guiding and companioning each other as our faith shifts and changes. This session outlines and explores Fowler’s model through a sequence of experiential exercises, drawing participants recalling and reflecting on their own journey of faith and that of the people around them.

Dwelling in the Household of God

A talk in Sydney about two books by Dr Mary Coloe which explore the deep patterns of symbolism in the Gospel of John.

The Gospel of John, according to Australian scholar Dr Mary Coloe, pivots on two key symbols: the Temple and the Household. The symbol of the Temple lays out a narrative through the Gospel explaining that God dwells amongst the members of the community. The symbol of the Household details the forming of the community as a kind of divine household. This session gives an overview of Dr Coloe’s theology of the Johannine community and reflects on its relevance for a Johannite church in the 21st century.