… is it all about bunnies and chocolate eggs or is it about the redemptive sacrifice of Christ?
Author: Bishop Tim
An invitation to Holy Week
Welcome to Easter
… 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.
St Mary of Egypt
Venerated as Passion Sunday in the Old Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the fifth Sunday in Lent is set aside in those traditions for the presentation of Mary of Egypt (344 – 421), prostitute and saint.
Born in Alexandria, Mary leaves home very young, and finds a life fulfilled in insatiable passion, exchanging sexual favours and spinning flax, to keep herself. One day, entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, she hears a voice that instructs her to cross the river Jordan, and receive peace. Thus she goes to the monastery of St John the Baptist, and is received into the river.
Upon baptism, she renounces her earlier life of great passion, and becomes a wild-woman hermit, entering the vast desert wilderness. Meeting Zosimas of Palestine in the desert, many years later, naked and unkempt, she manifests great clairvoyance as she recounts her life story to him. He returns a year later to the exact spot, at her instruction, to find that she had died, and the power of the story of her baptism, and the transformation that baptism symbolises, is preserved by him through the oral tradition, and is passed down to us, to this very day.
Contemplative Eucharist
As we prepare ourselves to enter the season of Lent, please consider yourself thoroughly invited to join with us this Sunday evening at 6:30pm, to take part in the liturgy of the Contemplative Eucharist at 15 Francis St, Darlinghurst.
The intent of the readings across these weeks that lead into Lent circle around the characteristics of the Holy Spirit, as encountered in both orthodox and heterodox scriptures, and indeed, in our own still moments, where we might attune closely to our senses, and realise more deeply the treasures of quiet contemplation.
Wisdom, sanctification and the purifying fire of love are the qualities which we are graced to witness in every encounter, in every breathing moment where we presence the divine energy of the Trinity, described in orthodoxy as the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, recognised perhaps as the hypostasis (unified essence) of the Invisible One, Christ and Barbelo in apocryphal sources, particularly in the Apocryphon of John.
As the readings call us to partake in the intermingling of Sophia, wisdom, with Barbelo, the first thought, so too are you deeply welcomed to come and share with us in the Contemplative Liturgy, led by Reverend Tim Mansfield, to renew and invigorate the subtle, still presences of each of these qualities that are indeed with us in every moment, every hour, every encounter, with each other.
Readings:
The Holy Spirit As Sanctifier
http://www.gnosis.org/ecclesia/lect023.htm
The Apocryphon of John
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html
Contemplative Eucharist – 6:30pm
The service this Sunday will be the Contemplative Liturgy, written by our very own Reverend Tim Mansfield. The service alternates engagement and stillness, provoking a meditative attitude and the cultivation of deeper perceptions. The service features prayer and contemplative practice, including a period of silent meditation, as well as sharing of the Body and the Blood, in the form of bread and wine.
We follow the service with some conversation, hot drinks and snacks. Please come along and join the discussions, sharing in fellowship and hospitality.
Trish Nowland
The congregation at St Uriel’s meets on the fourth Sunday of the month at 6:30pm at:
The Unitarian Centre
15 Francis St
Darlinghurst, NSW
Rector: Father Tim Mansfield
Ritual of the Bridal Chamber
‘If someone experiences Trust and Consciousness in the heart of the embrace,
they become a child of light.
If Someone does not receive these,
it is because they remain attached to what they know;
when they cease to be attached, they will be able to receive them.
Whoever receives this light in nakedness will no longer be recognizable;
none will be able to grasp them, none will be able to make them sad or miserable,
whether they are in this world, or have left it.
They already know the truth in images.
For them, this world has become another world,
and this Temple space [Aeon] is fullness [pleroma],
They are who they are. They are one.
Neither shadow nor night can hide them.’
~The Gospel of Philip
The above quote comes from the website for the Church of Gnosis, the spiritual home for the beloved episcopi vagantes (wandering bishop) of the post-modern global Gnostic communion, +Bishop Rosamonde Ikshvaku Miller. On January 19th, our greater ecclesia celebrates the consecration of +Tau Rosamonde, the first woman to be publicly ordained in the apostolic succession of the Ecclesia Gnostica, on this day in 1974.
Already consecrated as the seventh and last Marashin in the Holy Order of Miriam of Magdala in 1962, +Tau Rosamonde thus carries multiple lineages into the Church of Gnosis, which she sees as ‘not an end, but a field of action’.
Certainly, the Ritual of the Bridal Chamber, a ritual composed by +Tau Rosamonde, reads as a deeply inspired, incredibly liberating liturgy, incorporating Lurianic Kabbalah, Hermetic invocation, and Christian tradition to become a beautiful blessing by which the Eucharist is celebrated as the mystery of the sacred marriage, of Word and Wisdom.
This Sunday 16th January at 6:30pm, in rememberance of the anniversary of the consecration of +Tau Rosamonde, Fr Tim Mansfield+ will lead us for the first time in the celebration of The Ritual of The Bridal Chamber at the Parish of St Uriels in Darlinghurst. Please come along and celebrate with us, as we unite together in prayer, liturgy and chant to realise the divine nature of the One, uniquely revealed through and within each and every sacred moment, each and every person.
References:
http://www.gnosticsanctuary.org/
http://www.hometemple.org/WanBishWeb%20Complete.pdf
The Ritual of The Bridal Chamber – 6:30pm
The Ritual of The Bridal Chamber is a service that will call your physical, subtle and spiritual self to presence the sacred marriage of word and wisdom in the form of eucharistic communion, enlivened with the rich beauty of prayer, chant and song written and composed by +Tau Rosamonde Ikshvaku Miller.
Please come and join us and stay for a cup of tea and snacks afterwards, and relax into Sunday evening discussion and company.
Trish Nowland
The congregation at St Uriel’s meets on the fourth Sunday of the month at 6:30pm at:
The Unitarian Centre
15 Francis St
Darlinghurst, NSW
Rector: Father Tim Mansfield