The Vicar’s Corner

My dear brothers and sisters,

It is with in turns a heavy and a hopeful heart that I pen the following lines from my office at the university where I do my “secular” work and will type them to send to our discussion group and post to the “Vicar’s Corner” blog later this evening. As most of you know from your involvement in our online discussion groups, it has been a difficult year for us in a lot of ways. In particular, the past few months have seen our group of members and friends divided by any number of conflicts. I don’t know fully the genesis of all of these clashes and problems. Unfortunately ego is a problem in our world – that is part of the situation we face with the material realm of the demiurgic dichotomies that rule our
lives and which we seek to transcend through the pursuit of gnosis, with both a small and a big “g”, so to speak. I have an ego too – I don’t deny that – and I definitely do not put myself beyond blame for any problems that we have had as a group. If anything, I would say that perhaps I have exercised my ego a little too weakly, because I have hoped that a policy of gentility by example might be the best way to help put some of these conflicts behind us. This has not proven to be the case.

I have never wanted this church community to be all about me. However, I am also not willing to sit by and allow something I personally have worked very hard for over the past half a decade of my life to simply slip away into the ether of lost hopes and dissipated
dreams. I have put large amounts of my time, my money – and that isn’t important, but my spiritual life – I have just put everything I have into this church, this community that we are trying to build, and I think we have something of value – a message of value to share. I am not going to simply allow that to be destroyed without a fight.

Drastic problems call for drastic solutions, and I think the solutions I’ve proposed in the past have perhaps simply not been drastic enough. Our donations have dried up, and I’ve funding the church activities online and so forth almost entirely on my own, and so I think, frankly, that the onus is on me to set the direction for what we are going to do in the future. I ask you, please, to read the whole of this message, although I know it is a little long – and I hope that you will agree that I am acting sincerely, even if you disagree with precisely what I am saying or doing.

So, at this moment, we are cleaning the plate, and starting afresh.  All the prior proposals – organizing the synod, developing a more organized structure for the Vicariate – these have apparently been too little too late. So, we are starting again from square one more or
less like we did when I and about 4 other members founded the AGCA several years ago.
What do I mean by this? As of this moment, everything – with the exception of the ongoing mission statement work that is being done by Brother Anthony, which I am imploring him to continue, because it becomes all the more important now – but everything else is essentially placed on hiatus. There are no more committees, no more
councils, no more synods – we will go back to the situation we had when the church first began, and that is a system of basically direct participatory democracy by members and friends but mediated through me as the Vicar of the church. I thank Sister Artemis beyond words for her help as Auxiliary Vicar, and also Brother James as Vicar Emeritus,
but now the time is for me to stand on my own, and do what work I can to steer this organization toward a future we all can be proud of.

Our guiding principles will be no different from what they have always been – but what I am going to do is seek more clarity on making sure we all try to live up to them the best we can. Toleration is not what we are pursuing – because toleration means that you simply “allow” other people to have their own opinions. We are seeking active pluralism as a form of truth – we are engaged, to misquote President Lincoln, on a great challenge to see whether a pluralistic system of truth and authority can long endure, or whether it is doomed, as conservative Christianity would suggest that it must be, to fall apart under its own internal tensions.

At the same time, we are not pursuing pluralism for the sake of pluralism – but rather pluralism as a manifestation of an authentic neo-classical Gnostic spirituality and theology. There is a broad spectrum of what we can mean by neo-classical Gnosticism – but not an infinitely broad spectrum. Part of our challenge as a community will be to discover both the breadth and the limits of that spectrum.

In the immediate future, there are a few things that are going to begin to change, some dramatic, some less so. The first has to do with our name.

I have always maintained that our selection of “apostolic” was a poor decision. I won’t go into all the reasons that lay behind its selection at the outset of our Church’s life, beyond simply saying that we meant it as a synonym for “classical Gnostic,” but it was from
almost the outset badly misconstrued and became the cause for conflicts and confusion that was always unfortunate.

I had been planning at our first synod meeting to move that we jettison the “apostolic” name for something that would maintain our AGCA initials but avoid causing these confusions and misunderstandings. Well, we don’t have time to sit around and wait to
see if the synod might ever get off the ground. We will have a synod, or something like it, before many months are past, that I can assure you – but for now, I am simply taking the reins and dealing with this name issue, because it is just one symbol of the many problems we need to go ahead and deal with, and put behind us, so we can move into the future.

I have spoken with some of you privately about naming choices, and I know that there are many ideas. The idea we will be going with for the moment is: “The AGCA: Alliance of Gnostics in Community and Awareness.” I believe this represents our forward-looking ethos, our sense of community and togetherness (which we need desperately to reconnect with, I might say), and it removes both the rather official-sounding “church” as well as the problematical “apostolic” from our name. We will be transitioning to the new name on the
website and on this group as soon as possible. It shouldn’t change much of what we do or say because we will be keeping our initials the same, and I hope that this name meets with at least the moderate approval of most of you. If you strongly disapprove of it, feel free to say so in any forum you like (here on the blog for example) – this is not about stifling dissent or discussion – but this is the change, for now, and we can certainly
revisit it at some later date, for example after Brother Anthony is able to gather more information about opinions regarding our mission statement (which might help us pick an even better name).

The organizational structure of the Alliance of Gnostics in Community and Awareness is now a clean slate. We will have, basically, a coordinating executive officer, myself, who we will continue to call the Vicar – or, if you prefer something more democratic, just call me
The Brother. That’s all I want to be here in this new endeavor – your brother, sharing with you the ideas I have learned along the way, learning from you the ideas that you can bring to the table, building a community together, with the gifts you bring and the meager
resources I bring as well, laid together on the table of the Lord and the Lady, as we set a feast of gnosis for our fellow human beings.

I have never wanted the AGCA to be about me. However, I realize that I have spent the better part of a decade searching for a Gnostic spiritual path – I have spent the better part of half a decade working with and teaching others about seeking their own spiritual liberation. I am no savior, no saint, no hero, no pope, no dictator, and have no
desire to be any of those things. You might find me a dumbass, an egoistic pompous fool, a pretentious bastard, or maybe something slightly less extreme – if so, that is fine too. This is not about wanting everyone in the world to like me – I know there are lots of
people who don’t like me, and that is okay – they can be good Gnostics and wonderful people without liking me. The doors of the AGCA will always be open to everyone, and that means open for you to leave too if you don’t like the message that we bring. For now, though, this wiping of the slate means that much of what we do will be about sharing my teachings, my messages, my thoughts, my discussions. This is not because I imagine that I have any great secret to the mysteries of life or the universe – this is not because I am trying to set myself up as some kind of guru – its simply that I have spent a lot of
time and resources creating material and this material can serve to spark discussions – our discussion group and blog, for example, will begin going back and reposting some messages from our website and asking directly discussion questions about them – we will be refocusing our threads on this discussion group and revitalizing the way we conduct discussions– we’ll be talking about having live classes, and we will be continuing, if the people involved are willing to do so, with our development of Sophia-Radio.

Some people are, I am sure, going to say that I am transforming the AGCA into a vehicle for my own personal teachings. Again – that is fine, I – you know – I turn the other cheek. You can feel that way if you want. All I ask is that you think about what those teachings are. I have never told anyone anything except this: YOU have the power to
liberate yourself – YOU are the son or the daughter of the living God – YOU are the divine within you – YOU are the temple of the divine spirit that dwells inside you. Gnosticism is about liberating ourselves. I’m not asking anyone to “follow” me. If I am, I am asking you to follow me…by refusing to be a follower anymore. That is the Non Serviam of gnosis – that is the refusal to serve the framework of the demiurgic dualities and dichotomies that are forever forced upon us by this world-system in which we find ourselves.

The future, beyond that, is open wide. And to embrace that open future, we will begin immediately – and I do mean immediately – to have a series of public meetings on yahoo messenger regarding the future of the new AGCA. Our first one will be on Saturday, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time (noon pacific time). We will have an open forum in which I will be on mic and you can type or voice your questions directly to me, and to each other. Everyone is welcome, whoever you are, members or otherwise.

If you are involved in a ministry, please continue with your work on the grassroots level. We will be reconstituting our ministry committees as soon as possible, but in the meantime, we will continue our democratic way of dealing with the creation of spiritual
resources. If you write an article, if you create an artwork, write a poem, and want to see it on the website, you know where to send it (gnosis@gnostic-church.org or, preferably, directly to me at vicarmatthew@gnostic-church.org).

I will need volunteers to help me with the administrative side of things, particularly with the way we are streamlining our organization. If you are willing, for example, to help answer emails to our main office, or to help edit material for the website, or to do
some personal administrative-type work for me as the vicar, please email me and let me know, because it would be a tremendous huge help as we move forward.

I hope that you will receive this message in the love and the charity and the gentility and the incredible pride that it is sent – I am proud of you all, of every one of you, of the work you have done – of the spiritual progress you have made in your own lives. I am proud of
what we have done in the AGCA, despite the problems we have often fallen into. And I close by asking you to forgive me, my dear ones.   Please, forgive me — there have been times when I have not been able to give 100 percent of my time to the church; there have been moments when I have put the personal needs of my family above the church and –
I’m not saying that is right or wrong, but I’m sorry that it has caused perhaps some of the situation we now face. Please, forgive me for my shortcomings. I know there are many, but you know that my whole life is for you, for us, for what we are building here, what we
are trying to achieve together. Please, forgive me, and join me, and work with me and together we can raise the new dawn.

With my love, always,

Brother Matthew
Vicar, Alliance of Gnostics in Community and Awareness