Author: Bishop Tim

Eucharist – the practice of union

Whether you understand Eucharist as a commemoration of Jesus final supper with his closest followers

… or as a survival of an ancient ritual to reweave the covenant between the Divine and the human, between heaven and earth

… or as a communal space of contemplation

… or as the service of praise in which we stand as angels around the Throne of God singing hosannas…

… it doesn’t matter. Yet it matters crucially. Eucharist is a mystery, endlessly generative of sacred meaning.

Each time we gather, we offer ourselves, our words, our love for each other, we listen, we pray out loud and in silence and we welcome the Presence as deeply as we’re able.

Each person makes their own sense of it. But we stand together in our practice of it.

Come. Give thanks and praise!

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Practice for All Souls Day

A collaboration between Ramon Szeitszam and Bishop Tim Mansfield.

As we come to the end of October, most people’s attention is on the candy and costume festival known as Halloween.

Like most popular, modern holidays, Halloween is a blend of an ancient pagan festival (in this case Celtic Samhain), a medieval church holy day and a liberal dash of 20th-century commercialism. Quite how much of each and where one begins and the others end is a matter of debate.

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Temple Talk

Over the last few months, stimulated by a talk I gave in Boston, an intrepid group of explorers have gathered in an online video chat to explore the details and implications of Margaret Barker’s Temple Hypothesis.

Over a series of conversations, we ranged over a pretty vast range of topics, from the details of Dr Barker’s theory, connections between the NHL material and the First Temple, implications for liturgical practice, connections to the Desert traditions and monasticism, connections between the First Temple and Egyptian ascent ritual and further back to prehistory and the mythology of ancient peoples (which Gordon White explores deeply in “Star.Ships”).

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