Colourful Dreamer

The last two mornings were led by Paulo Ueti ,and Budi Tjahjono who helped us explore our third theme - Sharing our Good News. Paulo is the Theological Adviser and Latin America Regional Director of The Anglican Alliance. Paulo encouraged us to look again at our understanding of who Jesus is. He asserts that most of us are probably strongly influenced by Roman imperial imagery. As I write this we have just had Christ the King Sunday, a Sunday filled with imperial imagery if we are not careful. If we look on the internet for images to use, they mostly show Jesus as "emperor"! – We see it in the Christian Nationalism in the States and spreading out from there. This is something I have been confronted with every Christ the King Sunday. Who is Jesus? Paulo used Luke 24.13-35 (Road to Emmaus), as his recurring text. He suggested that this story was added later to encourage the Christian community to not be drawn into the power struggles of the Roman Church and civic hierarch...

As I have reflected on these sessions, I realise how much Jeff has affected me over these last few years. Certainly he has made the urgency crystal clear. Inspired by his contribution in 2018 I took a motion to our synod asking for the then leadership team to offer some leadership around this. And they did, and I got pulled into that, broken shoulder and all. And I made sure my parish observed the Season of Creation each year, and that we as a parish thought about how to reduce our carbon footprint. But Jeff was talking about something more. Because all of that still treats creation as something other. Something that I can use to exploit for economic gain, or to care for to avoid the economic hardship that is coming. That is where most of the conversation sits. But he is inviting us to both critique the underlying assumptions around this and then to go deeper.  In the question and answer time at the end of the first session we talked about the underlying assumption within "western...

The second half of the mornings that Cathy spoke were led by Jeff Golliher. Jeff is one of my heroes. He has been a gift to the Order and to the wider church for a long time now. I first met Jeff in October 2018 at a meeting of the Chapter of the Province of the Americas. On the final day he took us through the very recently released IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.  Jeff is a Franciscan, a retired Episcopal priest, and a cultural anthropologist. He has travelled widely to explore the spiritual path in the Western and Eastern traditions and among indigenous peoples. Much of his work has focused on the spiritual dimension of the environmental crisis. For more than ten years, he served as Canon for Environmental Justice and Community Development at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. For nearly 30 years he was the environmental representative for the worldwide Anglican Communion at the United Nations. He...