I’ve called it That Our Hearts May Burn With Fire.

I’d be honoured if you’d join me. This blog here will continue for software, integral theory, organisational rants and miscellaneous stuff.

Fortunately, the group was very welcoming and gentle with me. Several people who felt their needs weren’t being met very kindly asserted their needs without being critical, and I was able to adjust my course a little. I had an absolutely lovely time and some delightful conversation before, during and after.

Some folks made a recording of the talk, which I gather will appear on the web in due course, so I’ll update this entry with a link to that. In the meantime, I’m posting my Prezi, a gallery of the images I used and a brief bibliography for anyone who’d like to read further.

Images from "Religion Without Belief"

Bibliography

Wilber, K. “Integral Spirituality”, Integral Books, Boston, MA, 2006 – A lot of the ideas in the talk come from this book. If the idea of post-metaphysical spirituality appeals to you. Go look here.

Macarius the Egyptian, Spiritual Homilies – the vision of Ezekiel I read out came from the opening of this. Macarius goes on to discuss the symbolism of the vision.

Wallace, B. A. “The Attention Revolution”, Wisdom Publications, 2006 – Wallace is the neuro-scientist and Buddhist I mentioned briefly who is studying the effects of Buddhist meditation. Here is his web page, the page for his research institute and a description of the research project. He comes to Sydney once or twice a year to offer retreats.

Fowler, W. J. “Stages of faith: the psychology of human development and the quest for meaning”, Harper, 1995 – I mentioned Fowler’s developmental model of spirituality in passing. This is the book where he lays out his research. There are summaries on Wikipedia and here.

Bourgeault, C. “Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening”, Cowley, 2004 – The style of meditation in the Christian tradition that I’m most fond of is called Centering Prayer. This book is an excellent introduction to it.

Finally, I promised a few people a reference to my own church and what we’re up to. The main church website for the Apostolic Johannite Church is here, our local parish in Sydney is here and you can sign up to the regular newsletter via the form on the front page. I’m running a Centering Prayer workshop later this month, so if you’re interested in exploring the Christian tradition in terms of what you can do, rather than what you need to believe, come along!

Practice.

The news programs tell us of the scale of the earthquake in Haiti. They talk about how much suffering there is. One important part of that is how rickety civil society in Haiti was prior to the disaster. Haiti was the target of a lot of international relief in any case so they’re in an awful situation to cope with what’s just happened.

The results of a desperately exploitative colonial past, economic boycotts and successive dictatorships have left the island barely able to sustain itself in the best of times. And now this. So there’s a desperate, practical, humanitarian need for immediate, large-scale help.

The spiritual context for taking action is, to me, founded in the understanding that we are one human people, not separate. My devotion must be to my neighbour, as dear to me as my own soul. This isn’t a logical argument about why you should act, it is simply the spiritual fact of the matter – one we work hard to remain blind to because it is so terribly inconvenient, unwelcome and expensive.

I believe that choosing to act on behalf of another, especially another I do not know and will never meet, is a way of asserting to myself, to my logical mind, this eternal truth of non-separateness. A decision to give in a situation like this, or even to give to someone on the street who asks, made consciously, resonates through my being beyond my rational capacities and tells all of Me the truth. I am not helping “them” I am helping “us“.

So, with that as context, please consider doing something to help those who are already on the ground in Haiti. If you already support a charity which has a Haiti appeal, consider giving a little more. If you don’t here’s some suggestions.

• Save The Children
• UNICEF
• Australian Red Cross
• AVAAZ – Haiti Appeal

But don’t just send money, pray too. Pray for those of us in Haiti. Pray for those of us who have lost our parents. Pray for us who have lost our children, our sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. Pray for us in our need. Pray for our comfort and care and health and courage and will.

May the Unknown Father rain down loving-kindness and strength upon the people of Haiti and may the souls of all the faithful departed forever rest in peace.

Opening

Stand or kneel. Say the Name slowly.

In the name of the +Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

With devotion.

Open my lips O Lord : and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.

O God make speed to save me : O Lord make haste to help me.

Psalmody

Chant the psalm for this office. If you don’t use a psalter, just start at Psalm 1 and read the next one at each subsequent prayertime. Just chant in a monotone, if you are worried about your singing, but chant.

Do your best to keep your mind harnessed to the words of the chant, returning your attention to the chant when it drifts.

Once you’ve chanted the psalm, you may move into Lectio Divina based on the text or simply move on to the reading.

Reading

Using either the lectionary reading for the day or a reading you choose – perhaps by simply working your way through a Gospel or other book of your choice – read the text aloud.

Optionally, move through the phases of Lectio Divina – lectio, ruminatio, oratio and contemplatio.

Contemplation

The preceding phases help to quiet the mind and settle the subtle body, which makes this an ideal moment for:

• Shamatha meditation
• Hesychastic prayer
• Centering prayer

Prayer

From your heart, pray as you will. You may choose to:

• intercede for those in need of prayer;
• offer gratitude for blessings you have experienced;
• offer praise to the Divine for the ongoing sacrament of life
• reflect on the ways you have not lived up to your aspirations and pray for release from the debts you’ve incurred.

If there are several prayer times in the day – consider focusing on a particular kind of prayer every day at that time.

Closing

Slowly, treasuring the meaning of each phrase, with devotion.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy Name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory Forever, Amen.

Lord, bless me and bring me to wholeness, compassion and understanding. Amen

This sequence of meditations:

• the wealth of spirit
• divine grace
• divine protection
• divine aid toward liberation
• recognition of the human potential for liberation

… is intended to bring mind and heart into a space in which are able to recognise the level of assistance which we are provided. Liberation is not only possible, it is feasible and we have help, but we need to accept it.

You may find that contemplating and meditating on that sequence of five themes at any time in your life opens your heart into the possibility of freedom. What had seemed just too hard, can afterward seem effortless, pleasurable and essential. Try it!

We don’t refer to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as the ‘Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook.’

I’d like to just jot down a few notes about the aspect of the Divine which, in the Christian tradition, we call the Holy Spirit. The main things I’m interested in doing though is getting behind those particular English words and their implications.

In the Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic), the word which gets translated “Holy” is “ha-Qodesh” (or HaKodesh), which literally means “separated” or “set to one side”, but which comes to refer to those things set aside for sacred use: the Hebrew language, the ark of the covenant, the Temple. It acquires this sense of being reserved for the particular uses related to the Divine.

Spirit in English comes directly from Latin (“spiritus” and means both a non-corporeal entity (as in “the spirit was angry and threw the medium’s crystal ball at her head” and a certain tendency or drive (as in “the spirit of ’76″ or “school spirit” or “high spirited”. Because the Holy Spirit is one of the three Persons in the Trinity, I think the name tends to inherit mostly that first meaning. Perhaps because “spiritus” is a male-gendered noun in Latin, we also take the Holy Spirit to be masculine. The aggregate is kind of like Casper, the friendly ghost. A benign, helpful ghost sent by God.

The correlate word in Greek is “pneuma” and hence “Pneuma Hagion”. Pneuma means spirit and also air – it’s the root word of “pneumatic”. It doesn’t seem to usually refer to non-corporeal entities, at least in the Greek of the early Christian Period, I think one would usually use the word “daimon” to refer to what we’d call a spirit. “Demon” in English is reserved for malign spirits, but “daimon” is a value-neutral word in Greek. “Pneuma” is grammatically neuter in Greek.

In Hebrew, the correlate is “Ruach” (hence “Ruach ha-Qodesh”, the Aramaic is very similar, “Rukha d’koodsha” which means air, atmosphere and breath. “Ruach” is grammatically feminine. It’s not completely clear that the modern distinction we make between the metaphysical idea of our “spirit” and the physical notion of our breath was made by Middle Eastern folk in that time, they may have simply seen that breath is the animating, driving force of life.

What is almost certain is that the modern distinction between atmosphere and vacuum was not present in the thought-world of people in the first centuries of the common era. When we think of air or atmosphere, we have the dual notion of “vacuum” which co-defines the meaning. They had not concept of vacuum or of outer space, just air which stretches from the space between you and me all the way up past the celestial bodies, past the angels, to YHVH itself.

The other things to notice about “ruach” is that is invisible and only noticeable in movement. We can sense wind, voice and breath but when it doesn’t move, air doesn’t seem to be there at all. The breath is a process of inhalation and exhalation, and for the early Jewish Christians, the Holy Spirit would have been a process as well: a process which connects you and me via voice and breath, connects all of humanity to each other, to the Holy Beings and, ultimately to God. Neither wholly outside me, nor wholly inside me, but passing from the one to the other with each breath.

Ah, and female. The Holy Spirit (like the “shekinah”, the Presence of YHVH in the Temple) is a She.

This short sequence of linguistic digressions leads us from the benign Casper of Sunday School: anthropomorphic, kindly, somewhat useless, male to the more radical and immanent Ruach ha-Qodesh of antiquity: feminine, always moving, present in action, the voice and breath set aside as sacred, connecting us to the Father and to each other.

And there She is. Closer than my very breath. In She rushes, whispering encouragement, drawing my attention as She rushes out, out and up. Present in every word, the winds of change, blowing where She wills.

The other evening a fellow cleric asked me what I thought was the essence of a Gnostic reading of Easter. Leaving aside the canonical response (since one of the crucial aspects of a Gnostic theological position is the individual discernment of the person, we’re prone to asking “What do you think?”, I came up with a couple of thoughts which I thought might be useful to share.

Easter is pretty much the crux (pun intended) of the liturgical year for exoteric, orthodox Christianity. It’s the remembrance of the moment in history when a human being named Jesus (or if you want to be slightly fussy and pedantic, Yeshua) who was simultaneously also God, was betrayed by one of his followers, persecuted by his own people, executed, died and, in the quintessential miracle of the Christian Gospel, after a couple of days rose back to physical, embodied life.

As Gnostics, we tend to make non-literal readings of all scripture. These readings might be poetic or symbolic or they might be inner, esoteric or mystical readings. In any case, since the orthodox views of Easter are so very well documented, let’s take them as read and look at some other ways to understand the festival.

One way to approach the story of Easter is in the context of the cycle of the liturgical year. This is the annual cycle of festivals that make up the church calendar starting at Advent (the solemn season before Christmas), then Christmas, the new year, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost and through the “ordinary” time to Advent again, peppered with Saint’s days throughout. There are many ways to understand the liturgical year, but a popular way for Gnostics to grasp it is as a symbolic analogue of the journey of the individual seeker: from puzzlement or roadlessness (aporia) to the initial flash of insight (epiphany) to the dark night of the soul to theosis.

In this mystical reading, Good Friday is the culmination of the dark night and Easter Sunday is the inbreaking of God – the beginning of theosis which culminates in the Ascension.

Another way to understand Easter that I particularly like involves dwelling on what we can learn from the Person of Christ. There’s a longer post in there on ways to understand the doctrine of the Trinity, but for the moment I want to dwell on the way I understand the Person of Christ.

Much of the controversy among different traditions in fourth century Christianity arose from arguments about the nature of Jesus Christ. Was he Divine? Was he human? Did he have a material body or was he pure spirit? Did he have two natures or one nature? Was he of one being with the Father or not?

While communities of substantial size (notably, the Arians and the Nestorians) made their own decisions on these questions, the central communities that dominated in Constantinople and Rome felt that these questions were important enough to warrant the kind of painstakingly clear, doctrinal statement found in the Creed of St Athanasius. Jesus Christ was fully human and fully Divine, of one Being with the Father.

For those of us taking a Gnostic view, this means that all human beings are of one being with the Father, though we may be lost and not realise it. By setting foot upon the Path and putting on the mind of Christ, we come to see that which has always been true. Crucially, in this view, the Person of Christ is not just manifest within, as me, it’s also manifest to me as you… and that guy over there in the annoying sports car and that lady over the back with the stupid hat and the hated person at work who took my promotion. All Divine, no separation.

That’s all fine and while radical to put into practice is not a terribly radical idea. All of us are Divine is a very popular idea these days. The Gospel takes an extra step.

In the Gospel story Jesus dies. Gives up the ghost and dies, is taken down and buried. Now here’s a trick. Fully human, fully Divine, of One Being with the Father, does that stop, do you suppose, at death? When a person ceases to be a living being and becomes matter?

I feel that the Gospel story is telling us that just as the Life of Christ indicates to us the Divine nature of humanity, the Death of Christ is telling us that even matter itself is not separate from God. This is one way to begin to grasp the sanctification of the material world, to acknowledge the radiance of the Divine in the places where it is so evident: in the sea, the sky, galaxies seen through telescopes, crystals seen through microscopes, in snowflakes, in cliffs and mountains, lakes and streams.

One way to understand Easter is in the kind of paradoxical way that Jesus loved so much in his teaching. Perhaps we look in vain for sacred places, especially holy times of the year, especially saintly people in our attempt to “find God”. Perhaps the story of Easter emphasises to us that the divine is everpresent: everywhere, eternally, in every person and that our journey of seeking is not looking endlessly for the place that God is, but acknowledging the truth the Hermetic literature speaks so elegantly: There is nothing which is not God.

How do we come to notice that truth? Perhaps that’s the challenge of Holy Week.

Happy Easter! Stay off the roads and go easy on the chocolate.

A soup stone problem is one is which a community has everything it really needs to take an agreed action, but it needs a little injection of faith to galvanise collective action. I love soup stone problems.

I invited the people who had spoken to me to a meeting and proposed to them that they work together to form a “narthex” or lay community of the AJC. They agreed to undertake the necessary work and to support Prenna in applying to to the church lead the narthex. The AJC requires that anyone taking on a public role on behalf of the church undergo background checks as well as writing essays intended to clarify their intentions in the work they are proposing to undertake. This all took some time to manage and a certain amount of money and effort on behalf of all the people involved.

This week all this effort has borne fruit. The Apostolic Council of the church approved the group’s application and announced the formation of the Saint Teresa of Àvila Narthex, the church’s second community in Australia and tenth globally.

On Sunday, I had the enormous privilege of not only announcing that to the group in Brisbane, but also of baptising and confirming some of them and formally receiving a few more into the community of the AJC. We held a Eucharist in a park next to the Brisbane river and baptised Prenna through full immersion as people fished nearby and played soccer in the park. A very public coming-out for a new church!

It has been an enormous privilege to shepherd this community into formation and to initiate several of them into our beautiful tradition. I am deeply grateful to the people of St Teresa’s for their commitment, faith, hard work, perseverance, intelligence and love. They are a remarkable group of people and I foresee great things in their work together.

I offer my continuing blessings for their work and my ongoing practical support.

There will be photos soon I hope. I’ll post again when I’ve collected some of them. There may even be a video of the baptismal moment!

The third basic rule — that sex is delightful and sacred — still stands. The Song of Songs embodies it. The Song points both beyond the childish Eden of the past and beyond the sad history that followed Eden; it points to “Eden for grown-ups.” In the Song, bodies are no longer shameful, as they became after the mistake of Eden; the earth is playful, not our enemy; and women and men are equal in desire and in power. God is no longer Father/Mother as in Eden, giving orders, but — unnamed — is inherent in the very process of life, as our parents become when we are fully adult. God’s name never appears in the Song of Songs — because the entire Song is the name of God.

“Same-Sex Marriage: The Emerging Torah” By Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Liturgy also reminds us of the powerful deeds of God in Christ. And being reminded we remember, and remembering we celebrate, and celebrating we become what we do. The dancer dancing is the dance.

Robert F. Taft, “The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West”, p.345

Drasko Didzar on “The Spirit of Things”. Thanks to Sister Trish for the tip.

For those of us who have made our way through life trying to fix the problems of others, this insistence he had on being so completely, imperturbably himself was extremely irritating. Normal methods of guile, bullying or cajoling had as much effect as wind on stone.

I know I am not alone in trying to help nor in my frustration nor in noticing what I was left with in the face of James’ implacability.

When you can no longer pretend that you’re fixing or helping or mending someone’s distress you’re left with all there is left to give: Love.

James in his dogged insistence on ignoring all my advice left me with only one avenue to take: to simply love him. The one thing he’d accept from anyone really, was Love; which perhaps helps explain why James was one of the most lovable people most of us have ever met.

With most people there’s a sense of bargaining around the giving and receiving of Love. James didn’t negotiate. He simply was himself and thus inspired such great love from so many people.

If there’s a lesson to take from the life of James Denton, then perhaps it’s got something to do with that.

Rest in Peace, my dear friend.

Jesus said, “If you have money, do not give it at interest. Rather give [it] to someone from whom you will not get it (back).”

Gospel of Thomas 95.1-2

Saint John the Beloved disciple of Jesus fostered an affirming catholic and apostolic communion, universalist in outlook, rooted in the mystical core of Christianity and the tradition of St. John the Baptist. Johannite spirituality was handed down consciously and through the secrets of liturgy and chivalric orders within the Church. By the 18th century, some Roman and Anglican clergy openly celebrated the Johannite Communion using the languages of mystical Catholicism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and Hermeticism. Today Johannite priests, ordained by the hands of Apostolic Succession, are active building parishes on three continents, keeping the doors open and the candles lit for anyone who wishes to explore the Sacred Flame. All Johannite sacraments are open to all people.

I’ve been thinking about what I owe my Mum. Or maybe the thing to think about is what of myself I owe my Mum.

My mum didn’t cook with salt, didn’t give us soft drinks and fed us fruit instead of candy and left me with healthy eating habits I’ve only succeeded in overcoming after years of sharehousing.

My mum has been a voracious, insatiable reader who taught me to read and fostered in me a love of reading.

My mum has been a lifelong learner who never seemed happy unless she was learning something new, she taught me that our minds grow constantly or begin to go stale.

My mum has been an eccentric original thinker who taught me to trust my own opinion first, even if my view isn’t popular.

My mum has had a passion for justice and taught me to always seek to understand the other side of the argument I was making, often to my immense frustration.

My mum has been intensely curious about other cultures and taught me to inquire ever deeper into how other people thought, prayed, loved and lived their lives.

My mum has always valued peace and quiet and has taught me to let my brain settle down long enough to hear the gentle murmur of nature.

My mum has always been a secret mystic who taught me to value the quiet voice of God within over rules and regulations.

In her final days, Mum could only muster about five facial expressions and I’ve noticed myself doing every one of them at some time or other.

My mum has fought to maintain her dignity even as she lost control of her life and taught me that even at the end of days we can learn to love and respect each other more and to be truly present to each other even through great distress.

Now my mum’s spirit, soul and body have disentangled and gone their separate ways and who she was lives on in us, by us, with us, as us.

Farewell, Mum. I’ll miss You.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Adonai; et lux perpetua luceat eis.

I realised after reading his comment that I hadn’t been trying to define what makes the AJC different from other Gnostic churches – since I don’t see our churches as being in competition: we’re in different geographical areas and we’re all mostly aiming for the same thing, there doesn’t seem to be much sense in competing.

I thought I should also point out a little about my method. These posts are a way of me feeling my way towards what makes the AJC (and particularly our church in Sydney) unique for people I’m talking to. Each of the posts highlights something I think is distinctive or interesting and my intention is to synthesise a USP from the set. This may take a while, but hopefully it means that I’ll get better at communicating the church and you, gentle readers, may find out more than you already knew.

The final thing I wanted to note is that using a marketing approach like this supposes a market of consumers and some good and some scarcity (of money, time or attention) which causes competition among providers. It isn’t totally clear to me that among potential spiritual seekers there is a real scarcity, but certainly people need to allocate their time among a large set of possible activities and spiritual seekers among a large set of possible groups and practices.

Given where Saint Uriel’s is in the world, we compete with TV and going out to drink with friends, we compete with the local Buddhist meditation group and with the Roman Catholic cathedral. I think I’ve been thinking about these posts in terms of laying out what makes us distinct from other churches, so perhaps some of this might be useful for clergy and lay ministers in other Gnostic churches who are probably facing similar competition.

One of the distinctive things about the AJC is our inclusivity. This manifests in several ways.

Usually the first way that strikes people when meeting the church is the last statement in our statement of principles:

We recognize the Sacred Flame to be present in all Beings and therefore our Offices are open to all humanity without discrimination on the basis of gender, race, social status or sexual orientation.

This seemingly anodyne statement, nudged into the list right at the end, has a range of radical consequences which painlessly locate us as a church in the current era.

We ordain women and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folk as deacons, priests and bishops. This isn’t something we’ve struggled with and come to tolerate; it’s a natural, effortless consequence of our founding principles. No argument required.

We marry any two people who are prepared to commit to making a marriage together. Simple. (EDIT: That is, any two people who are of a legal age to marry, who aren’t already married to someone else, who the celebrant is convinced are making a genuine commitment – we simplify the gender stuff, not the rest of it)

We offer the Eucharist to any person prepared to receive it, baptised or not, Christian or not.

I believe there is a pattern underlying the way these norms arise that we see manifest in various ways in the AJC. My way of describing that pattern is: it’s more important to maintain clarity about the centre than it is to merely police the boundaries. We certainly do police boundaries from time to time, but clarity about the centre means that’s a lot less necessary.

In this case, the centre is the experience of the Sacred Flame present in all beings and an understanding that our role as a church is to point out the Flame, to foster an individual’s experience and awareness of it in their own being and to get out of the damn way.

Obviously, those three consequences (inclusive ordination, simplified marriage, open communion) are some of the advantages that arise from being an organisation founded in the third millennium. We get to choose what aspects of Being Church we draw out of history rather than being the captive of organisational norms and cultural prejudices stretching back to the feudal era in Europe.

While we are a young organisation, we also embed an ancient tradition. In the next post, I’d like to explore some consequences of inclusivity in our tradition and the way the Clear Centre pattern plays out in how we engage with theology and scripture.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I’d like to share a flawless piece of pop by Sam Sparro called “Black and Gold” (video). It’s a desperate, despairing love song hiding within dancey electro-pop, but the pleas for certainty don’t seem aimed at a simply human lover. Ah, actually he’s just said it straight up.

Well, so much for my musings about spiritual secrets hidden in plain sight. Instead, let’s hear it for the Hafiz of Australian electrofunk-soul.

The fish swam out of the ocean
and grew legs and they started walking
and the apes climbed down from the trees
and grew tall and they started talking

and the stars fell out of the sky
and my tears rolled into the ocean
now I’m looking for a reason why
you even set my world into motion

’cause if you’re not really here
then the stars don’t even matter
now I’m filled to the top with fear
but it’s all just a bunch of matter
’cause if you’re not really here
then i don’t want to be either
i wanna be next to you
black and gold
black and gold
black and gold

i looked up into the night sky
and see a thousand eyes staring back
and all around these golden beacons
i see nothing but black

i feel a way of something beyond them
i don’t see what i can feel
if vision is the only validation
then most of my life isn’t real

’cause if you’re not really here
then the stars don’t even matter
now I’m filled to the top with fear
but it’s all just a bunch of matter
’cause if you’re not really here
then i don’t want to be either
i wanna be next to you
black and gold
black and gold
black and gold

Some of that is uncertainty about the person I’m talking to. If the person is a Christian, it’s not too bad, I know where to start. If they’re a Buddhist I have a few places to go. My problem is with secular, unchurched folk who don’t have a practice themselves. Where to begin?

On the weekend, I spent the afternoon at a friend’s birthday on Cockatoo Island and one of the other guests (let’s call her C) was curious about my ordination and the church and did me the favour of asking smart questions. C is a public relations professional and after I’d mumbled and stumbled around for a while, she decided to hit me with The Question:

C: What’s your USP?

Me: My what?

C: Your Unique Selling Proposition. What is it about your church that makes it uniquely great?

She asked me other great questions like “How do people know you’re there?”, but the USP question has stuck with me. We talked about my thought that it’s more that we have a set of things that make us unique and interesting. Apparently in PR this is OK, but I just need to get snappy at articulating them.

Some folk in spiritual circles, especially church circles, might be horrified by thinking about our church in PR terms, but I suspect if that’s the case, you’ve never tried setting up a parish from scratch on a continent where your organisation has no other foothold. C’s questions really pointed my attention very clearly at where I lack clarity.

So, I’m going to take it on. A USP for the AJC. If you, my 3 or 4 readers, will bear with me I’m going to devote a series of posts to things about my church that I think are remarkable or interesting. These comments are solely my own opinion and not representative of any official AJC position or the thoughts of any other clergy.

Perhaps when I’m done, I’ll be able to field questions from interested people without looking like a dope.