The Vicar’s Corner

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This is Brother Matthew writing, and as many of you probably already know, I have been out of town for the past two weeks. I just got back home yesterday, and I wanted to come here and post something as soon as possible, since I haven’t been able to get online while I was gone nearly as much as I was expecting.

Of course, the big news since I have been gone has been the release of the Da Vinci Code film adaptation, and while I know you are probably tired of hearing about it incessantly, I just wanted to bring up another dimension of the ongoing controversies that I find somewhat concerning, namely that many of the attempts to “debunk” the underlying ideas of the DVC have taken a stridently anti-Gnostic tone that has revived many of the most traditional misperceptions about our religion, but most particularly the notion that Gnosticism is a form of snobbish intellectual elitism, whose adherents look down their noses at other people. Of course, as we have discussed many times in various forums in the AGCA, nothing could be further from the heart of the Gnostic message. That message is one of profound egalitarianism, indeed a revolutionary egalitarianism, in which the essence of of the spiritual encounter with God is to be sought in the life of every individual, where the keys to the kingdom lie within the unlimited potential within the spiritual nature of each person given by the one true God, and indeed part of God; as the Gospel of Thomas puts it, the call is simple: “Know yourselves, and you will become known!” The essence of gnosis is experiential knowledge or awareness of God, of the true self, of the spiritual realm, realities which can never truly be separated (a recognition that is also a fundamental part of this awareness). How far this is from the caricature of an intellectual elitism that would limit people from participating in spiritual enlightenment. Indeed, the Gospel of Thomas reminds us that it is the metaphorical “scribes and pharisees” that “lock up the kingdom of heaven to human beings,” while Gnosticism is an attempt to fling the doors open wide to the individual, to begin deconstructing the artificial walls and artificial spaces that are constructed between the individual and the kingdom.

I think I will stop here, and maybe Brother James will have something to add on this.

Love always in Christ and Sophia.