In the period of my lifetime, I have witnessed a movement in church and society from reliance on interior to exterior authority. This movement has happened because of changes that have taken place that have increased human anxiety and insecurity at the same time as we have become more scientific, more aware, more person-centred, more able, potentially, to diagnose and heal physical and emotional disturbances to our bodies and psyches. Externalised authority and awareness has become dominant in the Christian Church today over and against our internal intuition and wisdom.
Good Friday 2024 – the erosion of spiritual energy in the CofE
The mood, the environment, the culture of the Church of England in the decade from my teenage years (the nineteen sixties, by when I’d known I was gay for five years) to the nineteen nineties, was a good place in which to be gay. The whole of my being, my intuitive, experiential, feeling, creative, idealistic, introverted self, discovered that I was in a gay friendly environment despite that me also knowing that homosexuality was taboo and disapproved of by God. I now live in a spiritually depleted, hostile environment of endless battles, reports, reboots and ‘process’.
Mired in Love and Faith
If the Church of England is unable to recognise God as manifested in the life of Jesus to be the presence of unconditional, infinite, intimate love in creation and evolution, a presence that all human beings are able to experience through the presence woven into creation of what Christianity identifies as the Holy Spirit, then the Church needs to reflect on what, from the Biblical witness to the life and teaching of Jesus in a twenty-first century understanding of reality, God might look like and where the Church has got God wrong.
"I have come that you may have life, life in all its fulness"
Unless spiritually and mentally and conceptually we are drawn towards and become immersed in an open-minded, open-souled, open-hearted, unconditionally loving presence, the dream of God will not come to be. People will reject Christianity and walk away from the Church. They will find healing and truth wherever men and women recklessly, generously pour ointment on feet, where tears and love flow and the broken hearted are healed.
Thinking about God and the challenge of evolution
How do I, do we, do you, do other people, think about God (and Jesus)? I know I think differently about God from other people. We all have our own conceptual version of God. Churches, bishops, theologians, mystics, men, women, gay activists, homophobes, misogynists, etc., each have their own version of ‘God’. Some claim their version to be the unique, unquestionable, authorised, ‘true God’’. ‘He’ isn’t. It’s their version of a truth. We think we ‘know’ God, but we don’t. We know God in the same way we know ourselves and other people – partially, incompletely, and elusively.
Bringing yourself to life: The Power of Now
Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. It is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. In general, the Christian church doesn’t teach this because its adherents and practitioners don’t know this.
Bringing yourself to life
Bringing yourself to life might be a very good, brief description of what motivates me as a Christian priest. In the course of my life I have discovered that “life in all its fullness” is something to be discovered and ‘worked on’ in our Selves, our bodies, emotions, energy, breathing. In the here and now of our being is where we encounter God and where our spiritual work is to be done, the work that enriches, enhances and energises our experience of God and his Son Jesus Christ, the life-giver and unconditional lover whose way is “life in all its fullness.
The cosmos, planet earth, consciousness, and energy – life’s spiritual adventure
We, homo sapiens, matter. We, us, me, our souls and bodies, feelings and energy, our consciousness and self consciousness, our self-awareness and our breathing, the well-being and health of our body systems equally with our environment, all this matters, and contemporary culture encourages addictions rather than awareness of just how much we matter.
True and untrue images of God in the church
Prayer is a two-way process. We are making something of the Mystery of God in our prayer and prayer is making something of the Mystery of God in us. At least, this is what can happen when it is ‘true’ prayer, remembering Ken Leech’s phrase, prayer that is truly open and radical, taking risks, allowing the Mystery we call God to impact us, our preconceptions and prejudices, our emotions and energies.
What do I believe? Paradigm thoughts of a feral Christian
In the modern West, in Christianity, faith is still primarily about what people believe and how they behave. A person is in a right standing with God when they acknowledge the validity of certain conceptual truths and by living as God wants. The evolution of Christianity from the first to the third centuries and the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century has now become an existential crisis for Christianity. We have endured thirteen centuries of a new kind of religiosity, Nicene orthodoxy. It is at an end, this doctrinaire belief in theological niceties and certainties, the inherited orthodoxy and traditionalism.