From the Presiding Bishop

X Johannes

The Editorial Staff
In the latest issue of The Liberal Catholic (August 1997), the appointment of the Rev Graham Wale as Executive Editor was announced, while no appointment could yet be made for a Manager. Unfortunately it transpired that for Rev Wale, who had returned to England in the course of this year, the offer to take on the Editorship of the Magazine came too early to enable him to do justice to such responsibility.

It therefore remained to find another suitable person as Executive Editor, be it though that this might well be a temporary appointment. It was then that Markus van Alphen offered his services for the time being. He is the Executive Editor of the Provincial Magazine in the Netherlands, VKVisie, and has a fully equipped office to do publishing work on a professional basis. The British Province offered the services of Ms Edwina Barnett as Manager, an offer that was readily accepted.

The outgoing team must again be congratulated on the magnificent work done by them. The latest issue was again an example of a high quality production of our magazine. As the reader will have noticed, the new production of the magazine is less lush. It should be known, however, that Rev William Keidan’s exquisite multicolour covers and multicolour pictures were not an extravaganza on the part of the Editorial staff. It was the Presiding Bishop who had asked that something be done to place the magazine forcibly back again in the forefront of religious publications. It is believed that this has been achieved.

A great thank-you to the hard work of Rev William Keidan and Quentin Jones in publishing our Magazine so well, and also to Ms Marlene Uren for her painstaking work to get the administration on a sound footing again.

Animal and Human Stress
Elephants in several nature reserves were found to have turned into killers, attacking and killing amongst others white rhinos, which are an endangered species. Rangers thought that this was the work of poachers, but these animals were left intact, precious horns untouched. It turned out that the perpetrators were young aggressive bull elephants. The cause? One theory is that the elephants may be depraved because as children they were deprived (Time Oct 20, 1997). The troublemakers are apparently all orphans taken as calves from their slaughtered parents and relocated to establish elephant populations in parks and other reserves. Elephants in the wild live in tight-knit groups. Orphan calves have been moved to unfamiliar locations and raised with no exposure to adult elephants or the hierarchical social structure that defines elephant life.

A chimpanzee pair in captivity did not produce any offspring. Here again the theory is that these chimpanzees have never experienced the social life in the wild where mating is the necessary ingredient to survival, but where also through male dominance the hierarchical structure determines who is to mate with whom. Rats when confined to too small an environment have been found to become killers of their own species. The females who normally are the proud mothers of their young, coaching them to prepare them for life, abandon their young and their whole family structure is left to deteriorate.

Animals are not immune to stress. Nor is mankind. Children today live in virtual reality, captured by most horrible scenes of murder and rape and by computer games and tamagotchi. (A tamagotchi is a little computerised toy, which the child is meant to bring up by regularly feeding, cleaning and playing with, leaving little time for activities such as concentrating on lessons at school.)

Churches in the past fulfilled a role in society by providing people with a code of ethics - which could be "work yourselves to the bone as it is God's command to please your landlords" - and by setting up schools. Those things worked because people were forced by circumstances to live, like the elephants, in tight-knit groups with a well-defined social structure. Schools were a rarity in those days and many people would not have been here, where they are today, had it not been for their Forebears having had to sustain the hardships in those schools. Discipline was often harsh and unkind, but for those times they were part of the evolution of the typical hard-working and obedient Piscean. Churches thereby became institutions, and inevitably often played a decisive role in politics.

The Liberal Catholic Church from the start was given a mandate to meet the people of the new age, the Aquarian Age to be specific, with a freedom to explore and to become conscious of the need for an ethical code of conduct which must come from within, nurtured by communal activities in arts and crafts. Does the L.C.C. do enough to meet these objectives? The answer is mostly negative. A kindred movement set up the Waldorf Schools, based on Rudolf Steiner's principles of meeting the demands of growing-up children. These schools do marvellous work by instilling in the children some form of reverence for life. The author was invited to attend one of their many school festivals in South Africa. It was the St John's midsummer festival (midwinter on the Northern Hemisphere). The author expected the stench of barbecues and the jolly of emptying beer cans. This was not so, not because the children had been indoctrinated that such things are bad (typical Piscean), but that the alternative life style is good (typical Aquarian). And this rubs off onto the parents.

Community Centres
Within the L.C.C. there are certainly some fine examples of centres for community life. Bishop Maurice Warnon has established Kings Garden in a rural area in the U.S.A., where people can come with their children for congresses and camps and participate in a variety of projects and subjects, which may include certain health practices such as homeopathy, reflexology, etc. Also people in need of help are given a place of rest, but always for a certain period only, a week for example. The Church needs community centres, one in every Province at least, if this were to be possible. Community centres to teach young and old about what is broadly referred to as the alternative life style. There is a Villagio Verde in Italy and Saint Michael's Centre in the Netherlands. Bishop Miguel in Argentina took the courageous step to move into the country with the objective to form an L.C.C. centre around a biodynamic farm, which he intends to develop. In Brazil there is a similar enterprise undertaken by the Theosophical Society, probably based on the model of Krotona in Ojai. Reading about how many Liberal Catholics are suffering, and how often, from all those diseases that are so common to ordinary life, one wonders why it is that natural health is not one of the prime concerns of the Church. Head learning of the Piscean Age must be replaced by stimulating natural health of the Aquarian Age, spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically.

The Church is often scoffed at for promoting a vegetarian, non-smoking and teetotal discipline, a discipline that is particularly encouraged among the clergy and is required of the episcopacy. Once one is in earnest about leading a spiritual life, such discipline is a natural extension of a spiritual life, not a prescription to be adopted. Spiritual health may be enhanced by regularly partaking in Divine rituals and mental health may be enhanced by the deep study of the esoteric in the Ancient Wisdom, the Theo-Sophia of old.

It would appear that Jesus was an Essene who thereafter instituted a sect of the later Nazarenes. According to the Talmud, Peter was a Nazarene. The Nazaria were a branch of the Therapeutae, the healers. The Theodoret stated that "The nazarenes are Jews, honoring the Anointed (Jesus)". By honouring Jesus, should we not strive likewise to become Nazaria, seeking our own therapeutics in health food, healing by alternative methods, being emotionally free from fear and bigotry, mentally ready to discover truths in the Ancient Wisdom, and spiritually taking part in the ancient rites which our Church so zealously guards against so-called innovations, sly efforts in order to make the Church what modernists call emotionally inclusive. To the contrary, the Church must elevate mankind above the emotional and guide them to become spiritually inclusive. But this requires a certain sense of community life of like-minded people to serve a well-defined purpose and be prepared to honour, even only in part for a beginning, a meaningful discipline of being healthy in body, soul and spirit.