Blue Raven – Lecturing with Magic

A further note...

Mark Townsend is very happy to accept invitations from any organisation – be they religious, spiritual, political, educational or charity based - to present a full-length lecture (with magical illustrations) all about his new book The Path of the Blue Raven.

Because of a certain amount of 'negative campaigning' Mark has been getting, he is very keen to have an opportunity to answer any questions that folk may have. With this in mind he has decided to wave his normal lecture fee and offer this on an expenses/ donations only basis.

Lectures are available for afternoons or evenings from Sundays to Thursdays.

For further information please contact Mark via http://www.magicofsoul.com.

That Coming Debate

There is a debate taking place on November 18 in Uganda (when in England a medic will look at my leg without charge as part of the Welfare State) to discuss whether a class of people ought to be imprisoned for life (removed from society for good) or get killed by law (saves on the expense).

This will be at The Makerere University Human Rights and Peace Centre, set up because it analyses continued human rights violations in Uganda that it thinks have led to economic decline and collapsing State and public institutions, with such a falling away of civil society that it leaves people depressed and incapable.

So I thought that the prospect of a good debate over potential mass killings and imprisonment could be looked at in advance. We can all guess what people might say. Here's my toss of a few coins...

Hon. David Bahati, MP Ndorwa East and Sponsor of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill:

Death would be a release for them, should they recruit the disabled and young towards their ways of behaviour. We could be compassionate - we could always set up concentration camps. But we are leaders in the field here, showing the world, bringing attention to Uganda, attracting evangelical Christians from all over the world to this moral crusade.

Assoc. Prof. Sylvia Tamale, Coordinator, Law, Gender & Sexuality Research Project, Faculty of Law:

It's all a bit more complicated than the proposer thinks. International involvement? Well, people are the same, whatever borders are crossed. There is much to learn and this proposal carves people up too easily about those who can live and those who would either die or vanish forever.

Rev. Canon. Aaron Mwesigye, Provincial Secretary of the Anglican Church of Uganda:

No need to actually kill anyone. The Ugandan Church is compassionate. We could put them on an island. Yes, that's a possibility. They could be worked in a camp, earning their own keep while alive, and then we wouldn't actually kill them - if they died they would then have killed themselves, a sort of evangelical Christian self sacrifice through work! Work makes you free! We could put that into law. That would make us feel good, whilst the corruption, the economic chaos, and the rotten government is something we can bother about later, some time. But we are a Church and wish to save people's souls. And the HIV/ AIDS activists can still treat the heterosexuals if there is any of that disease left once we remove the polluted. It's only the homosexual polluted we want to incarcerate or advise to look heterosexual and pure and stay on the narrow path. We don't need Gender Studies when we can read all about sexual activity in the Bible, and every single story in the Bible is about healthy relationships, isn't it, or at least how to get saved through sex. Thank goodness for GAFCON and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, to which the Ugandan Church is completely committed.

Maj. Rubaramira Ruranga, Human Rights and HIV/AIDS Activist:

I would actually like all people to come forward for sexual education and treatment. The Bible is full of the kind of polygamy, rape and incest that helps spread HIV/AIDS. Pass the bill into law and the whole of Uganda becomes a concentration camp.

Another Exam (from 1979)

Another blast from the past - an exam paper and just look how out of date is the Elements of Politics examination. Who'd have thought it - a little over ten years later and the Berlin Wall would be down. Such a paper simply cannot appear now, unless it is historical politics. Also included is my reaction to taking that exam, and considering all of them. I was right in so far as I did least well in the Sociology in that first year, because I never really had a clue what it was about and did not understand its reliance on authors as a literate subject. I was most familiar with Economics, although later it was to fall away on the basis that people are not as rational as mathematical equations.

The Catholic Single Decker

Some people are having problems interpreting the new Roman Catholic document ANGLICANORUM COETI BUS as it is called. This bus image may help.



The document translated reads:

BENNY 16TH, formerly the Joseph Ratz, AKA Fingers the Crusher.

APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTION ANGLICANORUM COETI BUS

PROVIDING FOR PERSONAL URINATIARES FOR ANGLICANS
ENTERING INTO LITTLE ROOMIRUSES
WITH THE CLOCHMERLE CHURCH

In recent times the Drunken Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to pester the Clochmerle communion individually as well as corporately. The Apostolic Pee has responded favourably to stop the nuisance petitioning. Indeed, the successor of Pee the First, mandated by the Lard to guarantee the unity of the e-piss-copate and to preside over and safeguard the universal commotion of all the Meeting Places, could not fail to make available the means necessary to bring this vital desire to realisation.

Until now, all such Coetus Pissus without the Missus meeting places have been static and smelling of urine, and have been places of lurid sexual activity.

So the Holy Pee has decided that there should be one public toilet for every male, moving, on a coeti bus, and no longer divided into public and private, managers and workers, and other categories, but still reflecting sacred male hierarchy. So there should be One Bus from One Lard, run by alternatives to but not excluding the E-piss-copate, but with little places in the One Bus of Roomiruses, called Urinatiares, all gathered around the same plumbing and removing exhaust pipe. Condominium machines will be removed, of course, but Cathololiccy liccy is encouraged.

This should make everything clear for the future.

The Flying Blue Raven

I am honoured to have been sent the text by Mark Townsend of his book (2009), The Path of the Blue Raven: From Religion to Re-enchantment, Ropley, Hants: O Books.

It is the story of a priest tired with Churchianity, whose personal events facilitated ongoing theological tendencies and change. A marriage broke down, and he had an affair with a married woman. This was all unconnected with his second marriage, but he wanted to be honest with his Bishop. As a result, the bishop came back to him and denied him his next full priestly job, so that he and his new wife dropped into poverty while she tried to develop a business and he became a cleaner of toilets among other things. He also developed his skills as an illusionist, a magic he saw as connecting with the greater magic in the natural world. From the beginning of being a priest, he wanted to be open and broad about his theology. It had been Pentecostal in his earliest Christian conversion days, but going to the Holy Land saw him more interested in the magic of the appearances of the Christian religion than the closeness of biblical texts, and thus his later liberality was a joining to what can be labelled the more esoteric. Rites of passage were central to his ministry, and he bent around how he did them to suit the people involved rather than the Church authorities, about which the people were very grateful in all their religious and secular diversity.

Reactions to his developing his childhood interest in magic in the church world as a visual device included children who could see very well that this was an illusion and wanted to know how they could do it to stupid adult fundamentalists that equated this with the satanic. But during the phase of being ejected by his bishop, he performed his more developed and religion-inclusive Derren Brown type peformance to a group of Druids (he could tell denominations by colour and word association, and these Druids included Christian Druids who were church attenders). Such a coincidence was one of those life-turning connections that make up our autobiographies, and this book is very autobiographical including some lifted illustrative dialogues with himself out of his journal.

His continuing connection with ministry also happened because a woman he had helped with a secular bias in a funeral sought his ministry again. He assumed he should not do it, and then discovered that this is what happens - funeral directors do engage independent people as celebrants.

This is not (yet) a tale of someone on the road to becoming an episcopi vagantes. He includes one in his account of other people, Alistair Bate was a Unitarian of Druidic tendencies who went via the LCCI to the created LCAC and is a good example of an esoteric Christian (a fine distinction between the magical and the supernatural, particularly around the Eucharist, as set out by founding Liberal Catholic Bishop Leadbeater), who then has within Druid and other sides. He also still preaches to Newcastle Unitarians. The latter part of the book has many such examples of other individuals and their stories, categorised (slightly odd as the author dislikes labels), from those who range from mainly Celtic biased Christianity through to Druidry, and then adds in American Indian traditions for good measure.

The book is very recent to its events, and the actually biography is unfolding. It may be too close to events. Nevertheless, there are some themes in there that I recognise myself. A key theme is liberalism:

An ancient Christian doctrine that I have always appreciated is The Incarnation. Traditional Christianity understands this as the becoming flesh of God, the place where God literally steps into our world in the form of one man. However I have grown to see it as a symbol of what already is, as if there is a hidden divinity to humankind itself. So Jesus somehow represents what is true for all humans, and perhaps for the whole of nature too - that God lives in it and through it. (Townsend, 2009, 77)

This is the doctrine that was developed by James Martineau, the Unitarian Free Christian theologian from the late nineteenth century, of a general incarnation, not a particular one. The whole interpretation from Mark Townsend particularly focusing on ritual becomes such a naturalistic one, as it is.

The real power of baptism is in the symbol of being buried and risen which, of course, will happen time and time again throughout life. In life we go through many deaths, be it a death of a career, a relationship or a literal death. Jesus (like the many god-man-Christ-figures before him) is, in part, a powerful symbol of what is true for all humankind – life, death, re-birth. Baptism acts this cycle out, which is why it appears in many other ancient cultures beyond the world of Christendom. Jung would possibly call it a universal archetypal ritual. (78)

...At a Eucharist [and here is where I’m likely to be accused of sacramental heresy] the priest, by ritual and drama, makes present the memory of something both shocking and wonderful that happened many years ago. The truth of this act is hard to fully comprehend [indeed there are possibly many truths] and the ritual enacted brings it to mind again. The most basic meaning is again Incarnation - we eat and drink bread and wine said to be the body and blood of God - because we are in some strange way the body and blood of God ourselves (humans filled with deity). Thus again it makes true what already is. The more I think about it the more the whole Christian story is about making true what already is. (78-79)

This is a realist and world affirming position, and not quite mine. But I want to address an alternative, say for someone who focuses on ritual and is keen to be within the Church of England (and I am not of this view I'm about to describe).

This alternative is a Celtic-rejecting, Benedictine using, ritual-discipline based Christianity that is indeed Churchianity, and exists as a kind of Radical Orthodoxy or postmodernism of Christian stories and of saints through the year. I suppose a question I have about this is motivation and its inherent anti-liberalism whilst being on the surface liberal within. For me, and clearly for Mark Townsend, the liberal spirit is that of freedom where really it wants to go. I raise this alternative because I am something of a postmodernist myself, but I find the closed and conserving version (if otherwise 'liberalish') sterile. It is full of, what Mark Townsend would call, "bullshit" and that bullshit is all those endless saints about whom we know bugger all but continue to mention, as if it is good for us. Of course bullshit comes in all sorts of forms, and one might be ritualism too. But then again, in the world, we act, and we repeat, and we develop rituals as reflections on how we see things.

I am a little bit more of an interpreter first, the world 'out there' next than is Mark Townsend, I think. I give more to language, and language is symbol. But like Mark, and indeed Alistair Bate, you do have to spread your wings a bit. We live in this wider world.

Another reflection is that of enchantment. As a sociologist I know from Max Weber all about disenchantment in this world of bureaucracy and rationality. Indeed the Unitarian tradition of rationality was joined by Romanticism in the Anglo-American tradition. This leads to the insights of the Unitarian Pagans or Pagan Unitarians, as well as a tiny bit more ritualistic understanding among liberal Christians. Certainly art and the image, movement and music, in religion must be more important.

So the book is one person's story, and then many others that relate to his own. He doesn't know his future, but the connections all the way back suggest an unfolding tale to go roughly as it has gone.

I doubt he can squeeze back into the Church of England. If he can it will be after it has got over its increasing troubles. It needs to have its women ordained as bishops, it needs to shift out the traditionalist Anglo-Catholics and lose some of the worst Conservative Evangelicals. A number have built their boats or had a galleon provided. But even then it may not be welcoming to the distinctly radical of various colours. There will have to be some sort of networking of the marginalised - those whose Blue Raven transformations cannot relate ministry to the Church of England - but the liberal groups are not very good at getting together. They should.

What a Knob!

What a Knob! The erection of Personal Ordinariates is the means by which Anglican men who are rumoured to be ordained can be confirmed and ordained as Roman Catholics inside a lookalike Anglican shell.

These Anglican types can continue to be as Anglican types, though many now appear within Anglicanism to be Roman types, as the ecclesiastical reporter to the world and Bishop of Sherborne Graham Kings notes in his virtually neutral piece (extended on Fulcrum, unless reduced online at the The Guardian). So it is good then that Roman Catholic liturgies are not excluded within, otherwise these newly Roman Catholics might have to retrain as Anglicans.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the managing organisation for these Personal Ordinariates, which will negotiate with local bishops but also effectively bypass them. The reason for this is not liturgical problems or external relationships with other ecclesiastical communities but potential doctrinal problems within, and making sure these new folks conform. Given the bypassing of the Roman Catholic locals and their hierarchies, money from the bishops around and about might be a bit tight. The ex-Anglican priests might have to work for a living, cleaning windows or toilets for example (I'm just reading about a more interesting ordained individual who did just the latter for six months - watch this space).

So what are the options. There is clearly a new spectacle coming up. This will be Anglican Catholics using Roman rites and prayers to the Holy Father within Anglicanism who haven't joined a Papal ordinariate where Anglican Catholics can be Roman Catholics using Anglican rites (non-exclusively). Perhaps they will invent and 'erect' their own Anglican Ordinariates under themselves, dodging and weaving male and female priests and eventually male and female bishops on the basis of an extensive autobiographical interview as to whether they have ever been contaminated by a woman through magical supernatural means. Forget statues and codes of conduct, whether these come or not from the General Synod. By such an extensive interview, cleansiness can still be established. This is entirely different from any ongoing homosexual preference that is to be carried on in secret, or as if in secret whilst well and truly known by anyone who cares to look. By this means, money and congregations will still be provided, and the happy fantasy mysteries can still be observed by those who have likened the Charles Gore tradition of liberal Catholicism (which wants full male and female ministry and more honesty regarding gay relationships) as the equivalent of the creation of pus.

By the way, as I become more semi-detached than I was from Anglicanism, I'm finding this stuff less interesting than I did. It's a bit like tying up loose ends.

To Bless this House

If you want to bless a house, or a building, then elements from the Hull Unitarian Church Service of Dedication and Opening Ceremony may be useful, from all the way back in 1977. Thus it forms a liturgy for buildings rather than archived as a specific Unitarian service. However, the hymns used at the time are there too. The building itself was designed for low maintenance, and thus is still doing well. It could do with a few more people in it, however cosy and warm it is for those that use the building.

The 1977 service turned up in a box of hand written sermons of the late minister Ernest Penn, hand written on pieces of paper with lots of crossings out and not always easy to follow. The previous entry about online Scrabble tells of the conversation ongoing as I called at a house to pick them up. He did not type anything, and you cannot OCR handwriting. There is plenty to be going on with for a long time. I have also just constructed an audio CD resource of music for the first twenty hymns in Hymns for Living and put about several copies for evaluation and use, although actually CDs can be made for custom use.