New book on Mary Magdalene; also, how you can help support the AGCA April 26, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Divine Feminine, Mary Magdalene, Sophia.add a comment
Hi everyone, this is Matthew writing again. I just wanted to post a quick message to say that I have gotten some information about a new book coming out about Mary Magdalene, called Invoking Mary Magdalene: Accessing the Wisdom of the Divine Feminine. It sounds very interesting and I will share more about it with you after it comes out. We have put the book on our list of recommended books on the AGCA website, and that reminds me that this is a wonderful way for you to support our Internet activities. If you purchase books or music from Amazon using our links, you pay the same price and we get a small percentage in referral fees, which is basically a good deal for everyone, and allows us to keep our website and other activities going without constantly having to ask for donations. Just go to our center for Recommended Books and Music to find links directly to new books and CDs you might be interested in purchasing, or use this link to the regular Amazon website to participate in the referral program and help our work in spreading the message of Gnostic liberation.
The book details are: Siobhan Houston, “Invoking Mary Magdalene” (ISBN: 1591794226)
The Gnostic Rosary April 18, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Gnostic Theology, Prayers and Devotions, Sophia.add a comment
Dear brothers and sisters: The use of prayer beads has been an important part of many different religious traditions, and borrowing from the practices of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists, Gnostics have developed a number of different “Gnostic rosaries.” We in the AGCA are just one of the groups to have done so, and we just wanted to take an opportunity to introduce you to our version of the Gnostic rosary. Like the Christian rosary, it is constructed around fifteen mysteries, in this case reflecting different aspects of the relationship between Christ and Sophia; meditation on each mystery is accompanied by a series of prayers that employ rhythmic repetition to help sharpen the focus on the paradoxical mysteries at the heart of the Gnostic mythos. Often people pray five of the mysteries (a single large circuit of the rosary) each day, thus allowing for a complete cycle to be recited every three days as part of a regular devotional schedule, or less frequently as circumstances permit.
You can read more about our AGCA Gnostic Rosary at http://www.gnostic-church.org/rosary.htm. We are ialso nterested in assistance from anyone who would be interested in developing a series of readings from the Nag Hammadi texts and other sources to provide along with the mysteries, illustrating different parts of Gnostic mythic story-telling. If you would like to participate in this project or have any suggestions for particular readings relating to certain segments of the rosary, please feel free to leave a comment here or get in touch with us by email.
Yours in Christ and Sophia,
Matthew and James
Vicar Matthew’s Easter Message 2006 April 16, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Gnostic Theology, Mary Magdalene, The Gnostic Christ.add a comment
This is our annual Easter message for 2006. If you would like to hear an audio file of Matthew reading this message, you can follow these links (they require Windows Media Player to operate correctly): Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Our theme for this year’s Easter message of 2006 is “Miriam of Magdala, queen of the apostles and gateway of the resurrection.” We know that in both Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Mary and in Christian narratives, Mary or Miriam becomes the first to testify to the reality of the resurrection and then takes it upon herself to convince often unbelieving male apostles that she herself is a messenger of the truth.
Texts indicate that Miriam was Jesus’ great partner throughout his life and his teaching. Much interest in the past few years has focused on the potential nature of their personal relationship, although the truth is that we will probably never know exactly what that was, but what is certainly clear is that she was the one who stood by him, who followed his teachings and then later, particularly after his death, carried the message of those teachings toward others around her (as the Gospel of Mary shows her stating, “What is hidden from you I will proclaim!”).
In the Gospel of Philip, she is described as being “the one who was called Jesus’ companion.” This is what we mean by describing Miriam as the Queen of the Apostles or Apostola Apostolorum – the Apostle to the Apostles. To understand the relationship between Mary and the resurrection it is important to revisit once again the question of the Gnostic vision and understanding of the resurrection. The resurrection has never, to Gnostics in ancient times or today, been looked at as some kind of resuscitation of a dead corpse. Jesus is not “brought back to life,” but rather brought forward to a new form of life in the spirit. And, moreover, the resurrection event is something that flows, for Gnosticism, not out of his death, but rather out of the fulfillment of his life.
The resurrection, according to the challengingly beautiful words of the Gospel of Philip, “Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. The world will not receive truth in any other way. There is a rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is certainly necessary to be born again through the image. Which one? Resurrection. The image must rise again through the image. The bridal chamber and the image must enter through the image into the truth: this is the restoration. Not only must those who produce the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, do so, but have produced them for you.”
This has deep implications, of course, not merely for Christology but also for our own understanding of the human person and the participation of the human being in one’s own form of the resurrection. There was a famous theologian of the early Christian era named Origen, who worked to try to reconcile some teachings from Gnosticism with more traditional ideas of orthodox Christianity. Eventually his teachings too would come under attack by the orthodox establishment, but I really wanted to just bring up one of the most fascinating things Origen said. He taught that, and I am paraphrasing a bit here, every human being is formed in the image of God – and it is the purpose of our lives to transform ourselves into God’s likeness as well, to take on the pattern of God and liberate the imago dei that lies deep within us. It is here that we can participate alongside Christ in the resurrection and the journey toward a new kind of life in the spirit.
What many Gnostics did was to go even farther than Origen in stressing the affinity between Christ’s life and our own lives. Jesus, said Carpocrates, was the son of Joseph and a human being like any of us, except that – again to paraphrase – he was able to attain the resurrection before death, the transformation of gnosis and theosis. As we have said in the past, Jesus’ first steps along this path took him into the desert wilderness of Judea, where he was tempted by the powers of the demiurge and asked, in turn, to simultaneously put his physical needs first and ironically also to deny his own humanity (by using magic to transform stones into bread), to put his faith in an intellectual belief disconnected from any relational knowledge or gnosis (by throwing himself off the temple), and ultimately to deny the one true God in favor of the demiurge who claimed dominion over the princes and kingdoms of this world. Each of us goes through the Judean desert in our lives as well – at some point or another, no matter how healthy or wealthy or happy we may seem to be, we face circumstances, endemic to a world inexorably including suffering, that bring us into the desert of experience. Here we face the easy answers of the archonic forces – greed, addiction, violence; and the even more deceptive answers, like the cheap salvation that promises us that all we need to do is have “faith” and it doesn’t matter what we do to others or how we shape our lives as long as we “believe.” We have to have the strength to move past these false oases, as Jesus did in the story of the temptation in the wilderness.
The journey did not stop there though – and this is important, because it stresses the humanity of Jesus. He grew and he developed; he learned more about his spiritual nature and grew in a dynamic way as a human person. Ultimately he came to understand that true spiritual awakening lay in giving to others – and this is just what we spoke about on Holy Thursday in talking about his gifts to his friends and disciples. And thus we see the sense in which it was so appropriate for Mary Magdalene, his close friend and associate, who surely must have both challenged him and developed with him, to ultimately become the great apostolic witness to his resurrection.
One of the ways we see Jesus developing in the Gnostic scriptures is in his understanding of the role of women. Particularly in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus makes increasingly clear his vision of an egalitarian spiritual universe in which men and women will be reunited in the spiritual wholeness with which they began. Sometimes this is expressed a little strangely, as in the very end of the Gospel of Thomas, where it is stated in a way that coincides to a certain degree with the chauvinistic attitudes of the times, while still trying to reverse them. In other places, however, the expressions are almost incredibly powerful, as in saying 22: Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.” They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.”
The challenge for us this Easter, and every day of the year, is whether we too can heed the call of Jesus and Miriam to join in this journey toward resurrection. Will we be able to have the courage to receive, in the words of the Gospel of Thomas, “what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind?” What is a church, and what should it be? The ekklesia, the beloved community, should be above all the place for the rebirth of the resurrection that takes place every day in our lives, as we struggle to bring forth the imago dei that lies deep within us, to manifest Christ to ourselves and to those around us.
We find the roots of our fundamental human dignity – and more importantly of our fundamental mission toward theosis and gnosis – in Jesus’ promise, recorded in the Gospel of Thomas, “Anyone who drinks from my mouth will become like me. I myself will become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that one.”
In Memoriam April 15, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Peace and Justice.add a comment
As part of our Good Friday broadcast, we read a list of all the names of the soldiers who have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of 2006. I thought you all might want to have this list as well. We have posted it as a Word file on the website, and you an download it directly at http://www.gnostic-church.org/memorial reading.doc
A Poem for Easter April 13, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Gnostic Theology.add a comment
I wanted to share with you all a new poem that I wrote for Easter in honor of Christ and of Mary Magdalene — I call it “Magdala”
Once I too could have been called Levi
for I was a person of earth, and cherished earthly things
yet, now I do call myself Matthew
and why? why do I have the audacity to accept the meaning of this name?
A man called me;
years ago, I heard his voice,
“Matthew, Matthew, get up and follow me.”
I heard his voice through the gateway of another,
a woman named Miriam from Magdala.
She spoke and said,
“Matthew, Matthew, the master is calling, get up and follow him.”
I heard their voices and I got up
I left everything that I once had been
everthing that I once had owned
everything that I once had believed
and I followed them
And on my journey
I have beheld the risen Christ
seen him embracing the Magdalene
seen them surrounded by the infusion of the spirit of Sophia
and I have found peace.
Brother Matthew
The Neo-Classical Gnostics Arrive on Codex Gnosticus April 13, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Gnostic Theology.add a comment
Matthew again writing here. I just wanted to let you all know that, with the help of a number of people, I have posted an article on the GnosticWiki (Codex Gnosticus) about Neo-Classical Gnosticism. I thought some of you might find this interesting. I am about to leave for work, and I will look forward to seeing some of you this evening at our Divine Service audio broadcast on Yahoo Messenger.
I Prepare the Bread and My Mind Within April 12, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Gnostic Theology.add a comment
This is Brother Matthew writing here – I was just working on my message for tomorrow evening’s Divine Service broadcast for Maundy Thursday. I thought I would share a few of the thoughts I have been working on for the homily, which will focus on attempting a Gnostic exegesis of the eucharist or holy communion, in honor of Holy Thursday and the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper. Here is part of the draft of my comments.
In the stories we have of the Lord’s Supper, we always read or hear of Jesus offering his friends and his disciples bread and wine, proclaiming that they (the bread and wine) are his body and his blood, and asking his followers to repeat these offerings as a memorial to him. One of the saddest postludes to the story of the Lord’s Supper, of course, is that the precise meanings of these words, of these actions have been fought over by Christians for centuries, especially since the rise of the Reformation, sometimes causing vicious disagreements. I don’t want us to go into the history of all those disagreements now, but simply to consider for a few moments a uniquely Gnostic perspective on the meaning of the eucharist or holy communion, terms we use more or less interchangeably.
First, I would suggest that we can see here a message that strongly resonates with our claims about Jesus’ humanity. Jesus offers bread and wine, what must have been the very staples of existence in first-century Palestine, the stuff (and staff) of life as it were. And he speaks of his “body” and “blood.” He doesn’t say, “Here, this bread is my Godhood” or “Take some of this wine, it is my divinity.” No, not at all. He speaks plainly and powerfully – this is my body; this is my blood – using what would have been in all events the key parts of any human being’s physical life, food for sustenance and wine to drink.
This is important, and I would say deeply important, for it draws our attention back to something that I have often spoken about in my writing and homilies in the past – so please forgive me for repeating myself once more if you have heard it all before. For nearly two millennia, there have been two very different views of Jesus competing with each other among those who see themselves as his followers (whether mainstream Christian, Gnostic, or other). On the one hand, we have the human, earthy Jesus, the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas and many of the Nag Hammadi texts or the Gospel of Judas – this is the Jesus who is completely human, who laughs and cries, gets angry at times though he is ultimately motivated by a deep and abiding human love, who develops and evolves as he learns more about his mission, who ultimately points not to himself as the final answer but to the world of the divine that lies buried deep within the heart’s core of each individual human being. Competing over against this version of Jesus, however, is a very different one – one that treats Jesus Christ as if he were some kind of divine avatar that sort of looks human and acts like a human, but is not really human at all – that suggests Jesus was born in a different way from us, that he didn’t really experience the things we experience. The avatar-Jesus or Jesus-as-superman doesn’t laugh much, or cry much; he doesn’t kiss Mary Magdalene or the twelve; he seems to understand everything without even needing to develop at all as a human being – indeed, he seems hardly like a human being at all, but rather like a pseudo-human image more akin to the theophanies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses than a genuine human teacher and human being.
Avatar-Jesus has, I am afraid we must say, overtaken the real human Jesus as the character that has dominated much of mainstream Christianity for the past, and indeed has all too often even displaced the human Jesus from his central role even in Gnostic versions of the message. The Eucharist actually represents a wonderful, if challenging, place to work to recover the true humanity of Jesus. Jesus tells his followers that they can consume his very body and blood, which is ultimately a way of illustrating in the beautiful metaphors of which he was so fond the fact that his substance, his essence – fully human but infused with the divine spirit – was just the same as the substance or essence of every human being, filled with the infusion and the potential of the divine spirit. Truly, as Carpocrates wrote, Jesus was a man like anyone else, the son of Joseph, but different from other men and women in that his spirit, strong and pure, remained united with what it had witnessed in the realm of the ungenerated God.
And it is in this recognition of the absolute humanity of Jesus, this Carpocratian insistence on the brotherhood of Jesus with every single man and woman in the human race – and not a false brotherhood, not a pretend theophany that forms a mere poseur like the avatar-superman version of Jesus, but the real earthly human teacher – it is the recognition of this true brotherhood that gives us the courage, the strength, the audacity to take the blessing cup and share it as one family, to take the one loaf and break it, scattering the bread upon the waters of the pleroma. It is this radically human vision of Jesus that is so eloquently and beautifully sung about in the Odes of Solomon:
My joy is the Lord and my course is towards him, and this path of mine is beautiful. For there is a helper for me, the Lord. He has generously shown himself to me in his simplicity, because his kindness has drowned out anything that might have been frightening about him. Indeed, he became like me, that I might become him. He took my form, that I might be open to him. And so I trembled not when I saw him, because he was loving to me. He took on my nature, so that I might understand him; he took my face, that when I saw him I would not turn away from him.
Jesus could symbolize his body and blood as bread and wine precisely because of the genuineness of his human existence. Yet, he had also come to realize over the course of his own journey toward gnosis that human beings do not live by bread alone – a realization that had come after, in narrative imagery, his struggles, fasting, prayer, and wandering in the desert, metaphorical representations of experiences that we all share to some degree or another in the desert of cosmic suffering at some point or another. The Lord’s Supper, then, represents as it were the last step on that road that began in the fasting of the desert time in Jesus’ life. He has realized that human beings do not live by bread alone, and he has realized that humans have the capacity of transcending those things that limit their liberation and their divine potential – but how? Through giving – through giving of the self to the other in the agape-feast. “Take, eat, this is my body; drink, this is my blood.” The exchange of true mutual agape in the love-feast that constitutes the Eucharist represents the moment of transcendence, which unites the earthly and the heavenly, the human and the divine, in the patterns of gift and exchange. It is at this moment that Jesus’ spirit can most truly proclaim, as it later did through the preaching of Miriam as recorded in the Gospel of Mary:
The soul answered and said, What binds me has been slain, and what turns me about has been overcome, and my desire has been ended, and ignorance has died. In an aeon I was released from a world, and in a type from a type [i.e. the symbol of the Eucharist represents the end for a need for symbolization and the beginning of actualized liberation], and from the fetter of oblivion which is transient. From this time on will I attain to the rest of the time, of the season, of the aeon, in silence.
The Lord’s Supper is thus in a very real sense not a “Last Supper” but rather a “First Supper,” a moment of incredible transformation that we seek to recreate in our contemporary worship, as all sorts of followers of Jesus (Christian, Gnostic, and otherwise) have tried to do for almost 2000 years. Yet this Eucharist must be a metaphor for a greater Eucharist, a deeper Eucharist – the Eucharist of love between ourselves and God, ourselves and the divine within, and ourselves and those around us. We have the audacity, the bravery to break the bread, to bless the wine and thus to share in the body and blood of Christ. Do we, though, have the audacity, the bravery, the daring to repeat Jesus’ words and intentions to those around us? Can we turn our own lives into a Lord’s Supper? Can we reach out to others and say, “Here, take my body, and let it support you, take my blood and let it nourish you, take my mind and let it help you, take my hand and let it strengthen you, take my resources and let them aid you, take my love and let it bathe you, take the Christ within me and let it bring forth the Christ within you”? That is the imperative of the Eucharist – that is what Maundy Thursday demands of us every day of the year, every day of our lives. And we will be made known to each other in the breaking of the bread of love.
Brother Matthew
Writing the Ineffable Water April 12, 2006
Posted by Brother Matthew in Our Blog.1 comment so far
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
We want to take this chance to introduce ourselves and this new project, the Vicars’ Corner blog, which we hope will be a new focal point of conversation and community for neo-classical Gnosticism online. We are both honored to be two of the servant-leaders of the Apostolic Gnostic Church in America, a democratic communion of classical Gnostics around the world, more commonly known to most of its members and friends as the AGCA (we’d like to also welcome you all to visit the AGCA website). To be more specific, we are respectively Br. Matthew Ouroboros, Vicar of the AGCA, and Br. James Eugnostos, one of our two Auxiliary Vicars (we hope our second Auxiliary Vicar, Br. Olie, may ocasionally make some appearances here as well).
Why are we creating this new project? We want to have a way to reach out directly to our friends both inside the AGCA, in the larger neo-Gnostic community as a whole, and to those from other religious traditions that are interested in our faith and our life as Gnostics. This is Matthew typing this message at the moment, and both James and I have a lot of interests in our work as Church servants; in addition to administration, we both run local parish or study groups (mine in Richmond, James’ in Tennessee); James is incredibly active in organizing our ministries in the areas of peace and social justice, and I spend a great deal of time working on trying to articulate the theology and spiritual teachings of the Church within the democratic context of our ecclesiastical communion and community.
There seems like there could hardly be a more auspicious moment to begin this project than this Holy Week of 2006. Just this week, the new Gospel of Judas, a beautiful Coptic gospel created by classical Gnostics of the early Christian era, has been released in English translation and widely publicized; soon we will all be gearing up for a major campaign to promote discussion about Gnosticism relating to the film version of the Da Vinci Code; and of course we are preparing, in a matter of days, to celebrate some of the most important mysteries of our faith in Christ and Lady Sophia, the Divine Wisdom.
By the way, we’d like to take this chance to invite all of you to attend our audio broadcasts of Holy Week services. We’ll be having numerous broadcasts over the next few days, all through the Yahoo Messenger voice conferencing system. On Thursday, we will have a celebration of our Church’s liturgy, the Divine Service, beginning at 8 p.m., which will include reading and preaching from the new Gospel of Judas and a focus on the Gnostic understanding of the eucharist. On Friday, I (Matthew) will be teaming up with Sister Artemis of our Church to broadcast a complete rendition of our AGCA Gnostic Rosary (you can find a copy of this on our website at www.gnostic-church.org under the “Prayer” section), starting at 3 p.m. EDT. Finally, Sunday will see our main Easter service broadcast at 5 p.m. EDT. I’ll be preaching the homily on the theme: Miriam of Magdala — Queen of the Apostles and Gateway of the Resurrection.
If you’d like to attend any of these events, please send a message to gnostic79 anytime from about 5-15 minutes before the scheduled time in order to get an invitation to the voice conference room. You need to have speakers installed and you will also need to have the Yahoo Messenger software (you can get it for free at http://messenger.yahoo.com/). But why stop there? Do you have a microphone and would you like to participate in reading prayers or in some other activity of the liturgical broadcast? If so, send us a message (vicarmatthew@gnostic-church.org or brotherjames@gnostic-church.org) and we’ll set things up immediately.
We’d like to close with this quote from the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, from which we have taken our first topic title for this message.
And the perfect Majesty is at rest in the ineffable light, in the truth of the mother of all these, and all of you that attain to me, to me alone who am perfect, because of the Word. For I exist with all the greatness of the Spirit, which is a friend to us and our kindred alike, since I brought forth a word to the glory of our Father, through his goodness, as well as an imperishable thought; that is, the Word within him – it is slavery that we shall die with Christ – and an imperishable and undefiled thought, an incomprehensible marvel, the writing of the ineffable water which is the word from us. It is I who am in you, and you are in me, just as the Father is in you in innocence.
Love in Christ and Sophia from your brothers and your servants,
Matthew and James
