The Vicar’s Corner

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