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>>Statement of Principles of E.A.D.M.
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>>On the Relationship of E.A.D.M. with the Manifestations of the Outer Church
Principles of mission
The outer church is concerned with public worship. The inner church, as represented by the Ecclesia Apostolica Divinorum Mysteriorum, is not primarily a public body, and while its parishes provide some ministry to the public, does not seek to supplant the outer church in this role. Its mission is mystic, contemplative and dedicated towards the fulfilment of the potential of its members as spiritual adepts. Within such an understanding the sacraments are by nature private encounters with Christ.
This mission is a work embracing the intellect and the spirit, but giving its highest place to experience rather than simply knowledge. Creative endeavour of all kinds is held by the E.A.D.M. as the highest expression of the meeting-place between the Divine spark and the human, and is therefore a part of the witness of all adherents of the church. This and other key aspects of E.A.D.M.’s worldview are outlined below.
Legal status
The Presiding Bishop of E.A.D.M. is constituted a Corporation Sole under the law of England and Wales with responsibility of governance over the Provinces. The Province of the United States (which has additional responsibility for Canada) is incorporated as The Catholic Liberal Church, Inc., a 501(c) tax exempt nonprofit California corporation.
Devotion to the Sacraments
E.A.D.M. is a Traditional Catholic community. All Sacraments are preserved according to the Rites in use long before the fundamental changes to the Church that occurred with the First and Second Vatican Councils. The Mass is celebrated either in Latin or in the vernacular, but always in a liturgical form that preserves the essentials of the Tridentine Rite. Our normative liturgy is the Rite of the Liberal Catholic Church. The Sarum Rite, the +Nicholson Rite, the +Wadle Mass and the Rite of the Pre-Nicene Catholic Church are also approved for use.
The Liberal Catholic Rite differs from the customary form of the Latin Mass not in its substance but in its theological emphasis. The nature of this emphasis is best expressed by the founder of the Liberal Catholic movement, +James I. Wedgwood, in his Preface to the Liturgy.
When the Eucharist is celebrated with members of the public present, all who wish to are welcome to receive Holy Communion.
A creative approach
In the preface to his book “Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet“, theologian the Revd. Dr. Matthew Fox writes,
“When we consider creativity we are considering the most elemental and innermost and deeply spiritual aspects of our beings. The great mystic Meister Eckhart asks: “What is it that remains?” And his answer is: “That which is inborn in me remains.” That which we give birth to from our depths is that which lives on after us. That which is inborn in us constitutes our most intimate moments—intimate with self, intimate with God the Creative Spirit and intimate with others. To speak of creativity is to speak of profound intimacy. It is also to speak of our connecting to the Divine in us and of our bringing the Divine back to the community.
This is true whether we understand our creativity to be begetting and nourishing our children, making music, doing theater, gardening, writing, teaching, running a business, painting, constructing houses or sharing the healing arts of medicine and therapy. Imagination brings about not just intimacy but a big intimacy, a sense of union with the cosmos, a sense of belonging and being at home, of our knowing we have not only a right to be here but a task to do as well while we are here. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says that “great dreamers possess intimacy with the world.” The artist in us and among us shares intimacy, returns one’s intimacy to the world, nourishing the community with one’s inner experience. This process of intimacy shared feels a lot like a sacred experience.
An example of what I mean can be found in a letter the psychologist Carl Rogers wrote about his work to theologian Paul Tillich. Rogers was very ‘secular’ in his outlook until very near the end of his life, yet in this letter he confesses as follows: “I feel as though I am somehow in tune with the forces of the universe or that forces are operating through me in regard to this helping relationship.” And his creativity as a therapist elicited awe from him: “I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself.” I do not believe that Carl Rogers at work is that different from any of us in our work and relationships. In our creativity, however it is expressed, we can all feel “in tune with the forces of the universe” and the result of our work often urges us to “stand by with awe.” Indeed, we must feel these things if we are to carry on with integrity.”
This interpretation emphasises that creativity is as much about a creative approach to any productive endeavour – that is, one that is in tune with the Divine energies – as about those arts that society deems “creative”. In creativity, as in gnosis, we are in search not of a transient flash of light, but of a life lived in a constant state of illumination. We hold that such illumination is a state of mind where the mind has been attuned and focussed upon those things that are of God, so that its context is changed from an earthbound view to a higher plane of consciousness. This is the spiritual power Jesus had in mind when He said, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matt. 17:20)
Jung and the Western tradition
Although some of the leading Wisdom Tradition currents of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, notably Theosophy, looked to the East for inspiration, the spiritual focus of E.A.D.M. is solidly on the West. In this, we are influenced by Carl Jung. Jung points out (in a view opposed by that of Guénon) that Eastern practices from Buddhism and related heritages can act as suppressing forces rather than liberating the individual.
“When desire is snuffed out by a variety of meditation and concentration practices, what remains is a psychic corpse from which the libidinal cosmic force of the vital urge has been artificially removed. One can perish of psychic pernicious anemia as well as from its physiological analogue, and the fulfillment of such objectives as desirelessness and egolessness may very well lead to just such a condition. The desire for self-knowledge is just as much a desire as the desire for food or sex.” [Jung: Seven Sermons to the Dead, translated by Tau Stephanus Hoeller]
The relationship with the outside world
The mission of E.A.D.M. might well be expressed in terms of awakening not merely the desire for self-knowledge, but the desire for the fulfilment of the self in its greatest potential – in other words, through its union with the Divine. Jung describes this process as “individuation”; a transition from collective interpretation towards individual interpretation. This rejection of the collectivity so characteristic of the outer church is nevertheless fully compatible with the Christian duty towards our neighbour. It is the case that the person who fully knows themself and whose relationship with the Divine energies is strong and continuous is firstly much more likely to be able to offer efficacious help to others from a position of expertise and experience, and secondly is much more likely to be conscious of their duties to lead others who are in need to a state of improvement.
It goes without saying, however, that such an approach is in stark opposition to the politicised ideologies of egalitarianism (and their resulting reduction to the lowest common denominator) that tend to predominate in the outer church and the society of today. To that end, we should also remember the words of Krishnamurti in “Freedom from the Known”,
“In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Critics of Gnosticism and related traditions often seek to present them as a dualistic, world-rejecting outlook. We in E.A.D.M. are not dualists in the Manichaean sense; rather, we are united to the world with the same dichotomy as that which applies to the union of the inner and outer church. Our duty is to the inner mission, and in that sense we must regard much of the approach of the outer world as external to that mission. What we are not, however, is separate. We live fully within the world and embrace what it has to offer, and in turn conceive our mission as of direct importance to its future development.
Our embrace of the world, however, is strictly tempered by the discrimination that inheres to the inner mission. Many Christians would refer to this as moral conscience, but in practice it is a more complex set of values extending beyond morality to issues of meaning, essence and purpose. It is a reflection that the systems and structures prevalent in our world today are not the world itself, but the result of a falling away from the Divine. While we are part of the world, we do not necessarily endorse its dominant cultural norms and ethos. This is what Jesus means when he says of his followers, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.” [John 17:16]
Union with nature
As a counterpoint to the aspect of individuation, E.A.D.M. also lays emphasis on a oneness with nature, recognising that the regenerative power exemplified in nature is also a powerfully positive force upon the development of spiritual consciousness. The connexion of the mystic with nature is as old as mankind; like gnosis, it also defies any form of precise analysis, being primarily experiential. What we can discern, however, is that in affirming our union with the natural world, we are connecting with something profound in human consciousness; just as we have discussed the role of creativity in the convergence between the human and the Divine, so in nature we observe Divine creativity at its most absorbing. Indeed, observation of the natural world is a means by which we can separate the artificial construct of the non-Divine systems of the world from the innate creative spark that marks out the Divine hand and proclaims our connexion with the Infinite – thus being a conduit to theosis. It follows that the recognition of this connexion should also certainly impel us to be good, though not sentimental, stewards of the environment in our charge, but we should also beware of those who would use this innate and essential conservation instinct for their own political and worldly ends.
Radical traditionalism
It is perhaps appropriate to define where E.A.D.M. stands in relation to tradition and modernism. There has been a recent tendency for the smaller churches espousing a progressive theology to define themselves as “new religious movements” and to consciously break with the past, rather in the mode of the postmodern and Marxist Kulturkampf that confronts an “oppressive culture” – that is to say the mainstream church – with its diametric opposite, which aims to supplant it.
Doubtless some Marxist analyses of the work of E.A.D.M. would come to the conclusion that its role is not dissimilar, particularly in terms of the eventual and evolutionary relationships of the inner and outer church. However, we posit that there is in fact a significant difference, in that E.A.D.M. represents an approach that is not new, but in fact integral to the Church from its earliest years. The church has always had within itself the concept of a dualistic structure – one for initiates (clergy), another for the general public. It is not in any sense an innovation to work within this tradition, though for the public it may be unfamiliar since to many even now the inner church tradition remains hidden and discouraged. Moreover, within E.A.D.M. there is no denial of the outer church. It has its role, and we have ours, and those roles are complementary rather than in conflict.
It is certainly the case that E.A.D.M. shares certain aspects with the new churches in that access to its sacraments, including Holy Orders, is not limited by such considerations as gender and sexuality. However, it does so on the basis that there is specific evidence in support of these practices from within the teachings of Jesus Christ and the practice of the undivided Church. It does not do so to further the agenda of any minority group or as part of any commitment to egalitarianism or post-modernism. Indeed, Plotinus in the Enneads warns specifically against egalitarian approaches: “Wealth and poverty, and all inequalities of that order, are made ground of complaint. But this is to ignore that the Sage demands no equality in such matters: he cannot think that to own many things is to be richer or that the powerful have the better of the simple; he leaves all such preoccupations to another kind of man. He has learned that life on earth has two distinct forms, the way of the Sage and the way of the mass, the Sage intent upon the sublimest, upon the realm above, while those of the more strictly human type fall, again, under two classes, the one reminiscent of virtue and therefore not without touch with good, the other mere populace, serving to provide necessaries to the better sort.” [Ennead 2:9:9]
If our conclusions are reached in full affirmation of our Catholicity and Orthodoxy, they are not conclusions that lead us away from the true faith. Nevertheless, for all that we hold to them as representing our considered viewpoint, we continue to recognise in amity that others may differ on these and other points as matters of interpretation.
The inner church tradition is thus radical and traditionalist at the same time. It is radical in that the inner church is the nexus of those teachings over the centuries that have been deemed too difficult, too revolutionary or too dangerous to the unity of the outer church for all but adepts to handle. It is traditionalist in that it sees no need to divorce itself from the outer church tradition in order to further its mission.
