u/1AMthatIAM

I have read Genesis a hundred times and never once noticed it. Right after God makes the first human, a deep sleep falls on him. And the story never says he woke up.

I didn’t catch it until I sat with the Secret Book of John, one of the old texts found at Nag Hammadi. And once you see it, you start hearing the same two words on nearly every page of the Bible.

This week’s message, “The Whole Bible in Two Words,” is up now. Come see if you can guess them before I say them.

https://www.youtube.com/live/kbfWWluWvWE?t=2426&is=SvZ1N0c7mBExcHk\_

Shawn is preaching a short series through the illustrations of his newly published book, "The Secret Book of John" — an illustrated retelling of the Nag Hammadi text. Each Sunday service takes one of the book's illustrations as its text: the aeons, the fall of Sophia, the archons, and the path of return to ultimate reality. This week's service video is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/dfDyTCAhg9c?si=jV75_gCHSZRuo5E0&t=120 — would love to hear how others here relate Gnostic cosmology to their own mystical practice. #secretbookofjohn #NagHammadi #SundayService

I'm preaching a short series through the illustrations of The Secret Book of John, my new illustrated retelling of the Nag Hammadi text. This week's Sunday service is on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/live/dfDyTCAhg9c?si=jV75_gCHSZRuo5E0&t=120

#secretbookofjohn #NagHammadi #SundayService

Hello all,

I'm sharing a project I've been working on. Over the years I've met a lot of people who are curious about Gnosticism, but the texts can be confusing. So I combined my art and wordsmithing to create The Secret Book of John, an illustrated retelling of one of the most important texts found at Nag Hammadi. It's a picture book for adults, with a glossary of key names and symbols and questions for reflection along the way.

It's the first book in a series called Before the Canon, exploring early Christian writings that didn't make it into the Bible.

I do hope it helps!

The ancient Christians called him the Demiurge in the Secret Book of John. Some have called him God throughout the ages. Come learn stories from Jesus's time that you never heard before in our 4th part of the our series, "The God Who Forgot."

#ancienthistory #protoorthodoxchristianity #secretbookofjohn

Most of us were handed one version of Christianity. It turns out there were many.

This Sunday we continue our series on the Secret Book of John, an actual early Christian text, with part 3, The Fall of Wisdom.

Meet Sophia. Wisdom. She's in your Bible, in Proverbs, present at creation, rejoicing at God's side, and then Scripture quietly loses track of her. These ancient writings pick her story back up, and it turns out to be our story: the good thing we reached for alone, the mess we made and hid, and the ache we've carried ever since.

We're reading the primary sources, the writings of the 2nd through 4th centuries that show just how wide and wild and diverse the early church really was. Not to leave the faith. To find more of it.

There is more here than you were shown.

This Sunday I preached on the opening vision of the Secret Book of John, dug out of the Egyptian desert in 1945, where God is the Fullness beyond every name, and the first act of all creation is a mind waking up.

Call it the Self. Call it the imago Dei. Call it the divine spark within.

The text says before anything, "You came from fullness."

This fall we're reading the Nag Hammadi library beside Jung and asking what the church left in the basement. Not to leave the faith. To wake it up.

This Sunday I preached on the opening vision of the Secret Book of John, dug out of the Egyptian desert in 1945, where God is the Fullness beyond every name, and the first act of all creation is a mind waking up.

Call it the Self. Call it the imago Dei. Call it the divine spark within.

The text says before anything, "You came from fullness."

This fall we're reading the Nag Hammadi library beside Jung and asking what the church left in the basement. Not to leave the faith. To wake it up.

I've been itching to read and write 🙂 Im officially back from vacation on Tuesday but here is something I am working on as I prepare to preach for our Unitarian neighbors in a couple of weeks.

#jung #edinger #consciousness

While not technically Gnostic, Jungs ideas very much were Gnostic in spirit. Here is a sermon on Psalm 14 and a psychological approach to it given at our church on Sunday.

A Gnostic, a Christian, and a psychologist rarely read the same book the same way. But there is one reading where all three converge...

I was thinking, what if I read the Bible not as a rulebook or a history to defend, but as a living symbol. A collective dream the human species has dreamed for three thousand years. A Rorschach for the soul. Read this way, the text stops being about people long ago and quietly becomes about you.

The psychologist sees the figures as parts of the self. The mystic sees a door made to be walked through, with gnosis waiting on the far side. The believer finds not less than faith, but more, the Word made alive in an actual life.

Psalm 1's righteous and wicked are not two kinds of people. They are two states of one heart, the rooted day and the dry one.

Not backward into literalism or old cosmologies. Forward, into the depth where all three meet.

Here is the inkblot. What do you see?

#TheLivingSymbol #DepthPsychology #Jung #Gnosis #ChristianMysticism #ProgressiveChristianity #Scripture #Psychology #Soul #poetry

Sharing an idea I am working through...

This Sunday's sermon, "Learning to See Again: A Gospel of Partial Sight," sits where scripture and depth psychology meet. 

We'll spend time with the prophet Jeremiah, who could not see in himself what God saw so plainly, and with the quiet, distorting work that fear does on the way we see ourselves.

If you are drawn to the work of Carl Jung, to the long conversation between faith and the inner life, or simply to the question of why we are so often the last to recognize who we really are, this message is for you. 

Most of us are praying to a god we made. Not on purpose. We just had to make sense of God before anybody asked us if we wanted to. So we built one out of the materials we had.

Mom's voice.
Dad's voice.
The youth pastor who told us to be afraid of ourselves.

The version of God somebody handed us before we could ask whether it was actually him.

That god is real. He just is not God.
This Sunday at UCC Southbury, we sit with the verse most of us think we know. You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Free from what?
Free from the god you constructed.
Free from the script you were handed.
Free to believe what you see, and not what you have been told to see.

Bring your wounds, your questions, your doubts, your foggy glasses. In this message we will clean them together.

#church #christianity #mentalhealth #uccsouthbury #southburyct #religioustrauma