Ecclesia At Homica: How To Make Any Sunday a Sabbath

Ecclesia At Homica: How To Make Any Sunday a Sabbath

by Father Amadeus

Nobody loves going to church more than I do! I'll go to just about any church for just about any reason just about any time you want me to go. I love church!

I especially love "different" churches, by which, of course, I mean different from the church experiences with which I'm most familiar. On some weekends, my wife and I have been known to take in two or three services. On a triple service weekend, we start with Catholic Mass on Saturday evening followed by a Methodist early service and then a Baptist 11 AM service.

I love those weekends!

Sometimes, however, I just want to stay home and chill on Sunday morning. So, today we're skipping services and staying home just as we did last Sunday. Call it spiritual cocooning or maybe Ecclesia At Homica!

The trick to keeping Sunday sacred even if you don't make it out of your PJ's before Noon rests in insuring you stay present to a Sabbath mindset in all that you do. Here's a few Stay Home Sunday Sacraments that can put a little Spirit into you're "day of rest".

A Special Breakfast Dish

At the Maddox Compound, we have a couple of delicious dishes that are not only sure to please, but are also sure signs that it's Sunday -- Nanny's Sausage & Egg Bake and the dish which is my specialty, Kimbley Valley French Toast. The key to these dishes being perfect Sabbath sensations are that they can both be prepared the night before for Sunday morning enjoyment. You make 'em on Saturday night, stick 'em in the fridge overnight and then pop 'em in the oven when you stumble out of bed on Sunday morning. Thirty minutes later everyone's spirits will be transported to a heavenly place with the smells and tastes most certainly of a divine origin!

Sunday Morning Meditation Enhancements

Nothing heals the soul like just the right Sunday morning music playing, candles burning and if it's a spring morning like today, maybe a gentle breeze blowing in from an open window or an open screen door. The wild onions are making their rebirth known here at our tiny country cottage, so there's the unmistakable scent of wild green onions wafting over everything. You might think this doesn't sound pleasant, but you'd be wrong. The effect is to bring about a mindful meditation on the rhythms of our seasons -- of death and rebirth -- of the continuity and timeliness of creation's cycles regardless of our readiness for them. As you can see, almost anything can become a worship experience if we can approach a Sunday morning at home with an intentional mindset!

An Attitude of Gratitude

Like so much of life, converting a lazy Sunday into a Sabbath experience depends mostly on our attitude toward the day. An attitude of gratitude strikes the perfect posture if you want your Sunday sanctuary flooded with heavenly Light. The worries of the week will soon enough be upon us, so resolve to make Sunday a day of thanksgiving.

I'm reminded of the beauty of the Catholic liturgy as the Priest encourages the gathered worshipers, "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God" and the congregation answers, "It is right to give Him thanks and praise."

Goodwill Toward Humankind

One of the oddities that I've experienced as a parent and that I remember from my own youth, is that things can get a little dicey on a Sunday morning when folks are tired and rushed to get out the door to make Sunday morning services on time. God may desire our backsides in our pews on Sunday, but the Universe sometimes seems to work against our best intentions. Tempers can flare and our words can become sharp toward each other with the result being the opposite kind of transformation we hope for from our Sunday efforts.

On these mornings when we decided to attend the Slacker's Sanctuary, we really have no excuse not to practice patience, good will and kindness both with our family members and with ourselves because Stay Home Church has no start time and the preacher never makes you late for Sunday dinner. We can just go with the flow and let the day happen.

Just Being Present

For me, the most rewarding sacrament we can perform on any Sunday is the act of simply BEING PRESENT. Present to life, present to God and present to the people I care about and who care about me. Being present requires that I pay attention, that I not immerse myself into the television or the laptop for extended periods of time and that I take the time to carefully listen to others just to hear them. I promise you that the voice of child, a spouse or a loved one takes on all the qualities of a hymn of worship when you allow their words to ring within your heart without the distraction of just listening to formulate your own response.

Sunday Silence

Perhaps more than any other single element, our Sunday needs some silence. So, figure out a way to steal as many moments as possible in a favorite chair, taking a walk along a favorite route or going to a special place where you can be alone. Just you, your quietness and the small still voice of transcendent God always willing to gently invade us like a butterfly invades the spring flower.

If you have a moment, please share with us what makes your Sunday a spiritual experience even if you don't make it to church!

"In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Gnostic Path of the Bodhisattva

The Battle for God: Where do the Gnostics Stand?

Gnostic Videos: Sex & the Garden of Eden

Gnostic Afterlifestyles of the Rich & Famous

As with so much of so-called "New Age" spiritualism, Scientology draws heavily from Gnostic conceptions of the afterlife.  The recent spat of new coverage resulting from the tragic death of John Travolta's teenage son spawned quite of bit of writing about Scientology's teachings on death and the afterlife.  I've long contended that the typical religious person is just as confused about their own beliefs as the average Baptist would be about the teachings of the Zoroastrians.  In an attempt to clarify Scientology teachings on death and the afterlife, MSNBC reporter Courtney Hazlett shared the following official release from the Church of Scientology:

“In Scientology, we believe that you have lived before and that you will live again. The spirit, which is you, is immortal and you are not your body. You as an individual are an immortal spiritual being and simply put, you have lived before and will live again, lifetime after lifetime. In Scientology, these past existences are simply referred to as past lives.”

This Scientology doctrine might just as well have come from Origen, an early Christian Bishop (185 - 254 CE).  Clear evidence exists to support that reincarnation was a central them of those we now call Gnostic Christians.  Of course, increasingly accepted scholarship indicates that many if not most early "Christians" held such "Gnostic" beliefs about the afterlife and that the idea that folks either went to Heaven or Hell upon their physical death was not a majority belief until the 4th century after the Christianity became the official state religion of Rome.  Before Origen, Plato promoted the concept of reincarnation  as well as developing the philosophical constructs upon which became the fountainhead for numerous Gnostic doctrines.  Even St. Augustine, perhaps the pre-eminent Orthodox Christian theologian of all, seems to hold out for the possibility of reincarnation as a possible alternative afterlifestyle.

My personal brand of neo-gnosticism simply holds that no one knows what happens to a human being's essence at the time of their physical death.  At least I certainly don't know what happens when we die.  Having issued that caveat, I strongly suggest that the metaphor of reincarnation would be a superior belief to the final judgment eschatology of both Orthodox Christianity and Orthodox Islam.

I present the following evidence for Reincarnation being a better afterlifestyle than Final Judgment by pointing again to the official doctrine the Church of Scientology regarding their funeral services:

“The Scientology funeral service celebrates the life of the person who has departed his body. Friends and family have the opportunity to say goodbye, to acknowledge and thank the person for what he or she has done in this lifetime, and to wish them well as they move on to their next lifetime. The service is a reaffirmation of the knowledge that we are immortal spiritual beings.”

Did you catch that last part -- "a reaffirmation of the knowledge that we are immortal spiritual beings"?  Isn't it interesting that when you pull away the imaginative nomenclature of L. Ron Hubbard (or Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy, for that matter), what you are left with are these basic Gnostic concepts that human beings are spiritual beings having a human experience?

Even literary cult figure Philip K. Dick, in the novel VALIS, offers his own version of Gnosticism as Item #29 of his Tractates Cryptica Scriptura:

"We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned.”

Gnosticism itself, as we can clearly see, continues to be reincarnated by new generations of thinkers, writers and self-proclaimed prophets.  As we can also see, there really isn't very much new under the sun other than the creative narratives of Hubbard's thetans, Smith's magic seeing-stones and the brilliant reinterpretations of honest fiction writers like Philip K. Dick.  Whether it's reincarnation or salvation, human beings have an insatiable desire to know the answers to questions we obviously can't answer.

As for this Gneo-Gnostic Christian Universalist, I'll take the literary prose of Dick over the prophetic deceptions of ego-inflated cult leaders for my personal eschatology.  So, here's P.K. Dick's Item #44 of the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura to take us out of this post, even if we are spiritual beings trapped in physical flesh:

"Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought. There is no other road to salvation."

On your own "road to salvation", I pray that this information might help a little!

Also, I shouldn't close this post until I say that my heart goes out to the Travoltas and to all those who were close to Jett Travolta -- may he return again to this world in whatever from is most pleasing to his Spirit!

Evolt

I scribbled this on January 1st of 2007 and then cleaned it up a little later that month. I found it tonight while doing a bit of a year-end review of some things I'd written and I liked it much better after 2 years of aging than I did at the time, so I thought I'd risk the humiliation of sharing it here. The poem more or less was the beginning of an introspective year where I found a new use for the religious software that got installed in me as a kid growing up in the Bible belt. Joseph Campbell says "don't get stuck to the metaphor" & I've been able to re-embrace the metaphors that were first installed into my hard-drive as not only literal truth, but as Ultimate Truth that carried a pretty stiff penalty for non-belief. I spent more than a few years in revolt before I understood Campbell's message of spiritual freedom meant that I actually owned my software and that I was free to do with it whatever my imagination could cook-up.

So, maybe I can't uninstall the software, but I sure as Sunday can influence the output.

Revolution maybe the right flag for some to fly, but martyrdom seems overly dramatic to me. I'd rather work somewhere in-between the grooves where the status quo meets resistance, but the soldiers live to fight another day. Evolution, though, takes away the personal, the immediate and leaves no room for imagination -- which is to say it leaves no room for mankind.

Revolt, too aggressive.

Evolve, too passive.

"Evolt" strikes the right chord for the traveller.

Evolt

by KDM

1/26/2007

There will be no revolt

No Revolution

There will only be this

Forever

There will be Evolution

Yes, evolution

There will only be that

Not Revolution

Things will change

In every direction

Things will not change

No Predestination

You will be you

I will be me

They will be they

And we will be we

The moment is now

Has always been thus

Reason has no reason

To make such a fuss

My hands on the keyboard

Your eyes on the screen

No Communication

Just see what we see

You know what you know

And you don't what you don't

Forget revolution

Believe what you won't

I do not have the answers

Nor even the questions

Placed her by chance

Without destination

So here we are

And so we are too

Blinded by ashes

Still I can see you

What can I tell you

What can you tell me

No Revolution

Just Mystery

Happy Gnew Year

Practicing Gnostic Christians include New Year's Day as one of their Holy Days. Here's an explanation from the good gnostics at Gnosis.org:

New Year's Day occurs in the Christmas cycle as one the twelve days of Christmas, the period between the ending of the lunar calendar and the beginning of the solar year, a time betwixt and between, a time of misrule when the usual rules and authorities of the world are suspended. It is a time of temporary chaos, confusion, celebration, and breaking down of
old established forms to make way for a new light and new resolutions, the eternal new-born child of the year. These twelve days represent an opportunity for a psychological and spiritual renewal as well.

As a good gneo-gnostic, I will inform my own New Year's meditations and celebrations with this wonderful bit of gnostic mythology about the "usual rules" beings "suspended" by allowing my imaginative powers to envision what I might bring forth from within for myself and for my family in 2009.

New Year's Day for gnostics typically includes a Thanksgiving ceremony as well, so I'll also be giving thanks for the incredible blessings of 2008.

"The consummation of Gnostic rebirth gives us a way to transcend the sense of loss and pain, and to make the transitions and passages in our lives occasions for renewal and joy."

Lessons in Gneo-Gnosticism: The Divine Within

Discover the X in Christmas

One of the Advent messages brought by my pastor at the tiny United Methodist Church where I'm a member and have attended frequently for 30 years was a standard Orthodox sermon built around the popular theme of putting "Christ" back into "Christmas". It was a nice message and I enjoyed it, particularly the part where Pastor Peggy, an exceedingly competent and sincere Orthodox minister, took on the practice of substituting "X" for "Christ" in the word Christmas.

As I sat there taking in Peggy's fine Advent sermon, I was looking forward to reminding her after the service that an "X" is one of the symbols early Christians used to represent Christ. Therefore, of course, the word "Xmas" literally represents "Christmas" making it unnecessary to rail against the former as an offense to the Spirit of the season. To Pastor Peggy's credit, however, she explained at a later point in her homily that even though an "X" is, in fact, an ancient symbol for "Christ", that most contemporary users of the term aren't reflecting upon the Christolic Symbology of the letter "X" as a representation of "Christ" when they jot down Xmas in place of Christmas in a likely attempt to further secularize the meaning of Christmas.

OK, fair enough, I thought and I shared a laugh with her after the service that I was gonna get on her about the "X" until she adeptly preempted my protest.

I'm writing this post after Christmas dinner as I sit on the couch in my wife's mother's basement with my wife and two children. We are in the midst of a Christmas Movie Marathon. For whatever reason, I started thinking about the business of how the use of "X" for Christ fits so well for those of us who approach our Christ with a Gnostic Spirit of Gnot-Gnowing. As an interesting alternative to the common Orthodox concerns about substituting an "X" for "Christ" in "Christmas", I'm thinking how the letter "X" in its form of the variable in an equation actually perfectly represents Christ -- especially at Christmas.

The story of the literal Christ of literalistic believers, ironically, can easily be proven to be a more derivative and unoriginal story than that of the "X" of history we intentionally unorthodox seekers find buried in the shallow grave of the Orthodox Christmas. The Orthodox Christ was literally born of a Virgin on December 25th in identical fashion to Mythra, which stole the same story from the ancient Egyptian God, Horace.

So, it is the Orthodox Christ of the traditional Christmas story that is an inappropriate substitution for the "X" of "Xmas" instead of the other way around!

The Orthodox Christ was nothing new, but the Gnostic Christ presents the same "X" variable to human beings today that it presented to the people of ancient Palestine some 2,000 years ago. Like our world today, we sense that we are or could be something more than we are and that maybe there's something missing from human heart which manifests itself in the problems of human history -- some unknown variable that might solve the problem and give us all the answers.

In the Gnostic approach, the metaphorical Logos gives birth to the Transformative Constant -- the Baby X -- in the empty manger of the Unknown Variable. The existing paradigm of "God", which persists even to this day even among a majority of the world's "Christians", was God which men used in various fashion to grant for themselves the throne of political power. A King decides to commit genocide against a neighboring Kingdom for political reason and the story is told as the dictate of a sovereign God who demands that men and women seek His will through Kings, Priests and carefully crafted scriptures which serve more to enslave than to liberate.

Christ does not represent this well-understood and popular notion of God the Father. Christ, the X of Christmas, represents a wholly Alien God -- a complete Unknown Variable.

"I will give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart."

~Attributed to Yeshua in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

Before it had been taught to extract an "eye for an eye" and a "tooth for tooth" but Yeshua, the Son of the Unknown Father, says to "turn the other cheek" and to give a person a coat if that person steals your shirt. Yet, we explain these hard sayings away as we regress back into the known and comforting God of exact rules perfectly fitting for human institutions. We forget about the X altogether and we claim again, as always, that what is known to man -- continuous war, economic exploitation, hunger and poverty -- are the necessary condition of humanity. The call of Christ to embrace an entirely Alien God, but loving God who asks us to practice humility, generosity and forgiveness in the place of arrogance, irrational selfishness and retribution.

The Alien God replaces the illusion of knowing with the truth of not-knowing as represented by the mystery of the Eternal Christ, which is the metaphorical "X" inside both the individual conscience and the collective unconscious. The literal Christ of Christmas happens once in history as a physical date of birth. The metaphorical X of Xmas happens each and every time Light and Love are given the space to birth forgiveness and redemption within the hearts of humankind.

So, as the literals, the fundamentalists and the Orthodox lament the promotion of Xmas while arguing that the literal Christ has been lost to secularization, there are some who passionately embrace the X of Xmas as the perfect symbology of the Eternal Christ who calls us into direct communion with the Alien God, whom we believe is the Father whom Yeshua and others discovered with nothing more complicated than an open heart and a mind which seeks only the Truth.

The Gospel of Truth, part of the collection called "The Gnostic Gospels" lost for 15 centuries until discovered at Nag Hammadi, speaks of this "incomprehensible" Christ -- this X of Xmas in the following verse:

In their heart, the living book of the Living was manifest, the book which was written in the thought and in the mind of the Father and, from before the foundation of the All, is in that incomprehensible part of him."

When we engage that "incomprehensible part of him", we have found the X of Xmas which is always seeking a place to born within us.

Merry Xmas!