The Purpose of The Grail Community

Some ideas that may be of interest

    This is not an official church document, but it offers a summary of ancient and modern ideas, particularly from a spiritual psychology rather than theological point of view. It may be helpful in your individual journey of spiritual discovery and understanding of truth. It is emphasised that in The Grail Community each person is free to interpret scriptures and teachings based on their own experience and studies.

      A human being can be said to be made up of spirit, soul and personality. The personality consisting of mind, emotion and physical body is what we usually think of as ‘me’. Deeper intuitive thought and spiritual experiences open the personality to the soul which is therefore beyond the limitations imposed by the mind. ‘You’ in essence, are a soul and have a personality taken on at birth and shed again at death.

     As a personality we learn lessons. These are frequently repeated so that the soul eventually integrates the experiences of the tension of duality such as pleasure and pain, loving or needing love. We are then capable of seeing both sides of a situation, the ‘and’ rather than just the ‘or’. We see the unity of the whole picture. Accepting and understanding in a deeper sense can be called love and wisdom. These qualities when fully expressed suggest a perfected human being, a Christ-like person (to grow into the stature of the fullness of Christ). Love and wisdom are the inner essence of all human beings ‘the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world’, the ‘Christ in you’, the Krishna consciousness of the Hindus and the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Through these qualities we come to know the spirit, our divine essence ‘our Father in Heaven’. Truly then Christ can say ‘I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me’.

     The only point of power and of change is now, not the past or the future. The past is made up of memories, the future of fantasies and fears. In a sense all is our thought and importantly we can change what we think. ‘Now’ is beyond time and space and therefore eternal. In this state we simply ‘are’, rather than defining ourselves by what we ‘have’, including identity, possessions and relationships.

     Religion comes from the Latin ‘to bind back’. In this case the personality to its’ origin the soul and later the spirit. Spirituality can be defined as living according to the fact of the one life in all beings and therefore transcends religion.

     Most religions embody a story of how the universe was made, our place in it and some method of how to find that place and our purpose in life. Most give an example of a founder who demonstrates what divine qualities look like expressed in the life of the material world (incarnated).

     The more we live and think as such a personage, the more we ‘tune in’ to their ‘vibrations’, the more we become like them. Prayer, singing, ritual and meditation are all ways of ‘tuning in’. All require a grounding in silence. Eventually belief can dissolve into experience and an inner knowing, a gnosis. This is what the mystics describe as being one with God.

     Religious stories can be interpreted at many different levels, including the historical, the symbolic, the mythological and the cosmic and are all interwoven. As the ancient saying goes ‘as above so below’. The life of Jesus can be seen as the spiritual journey of all mankind. The ‘birth’ of Christ consciousness at Christmas through to the ‘letting go’ of the personality, releasing the soul to a fuller life as depicted by the crucifixion and resurrection at Easter.

      The Holy Eucharist has been the central act of Christian worship for over two thousand years. This ancient mystery rite as a physical representation through symbol and ritual combines the whole process of the divine principle incarnating into matter through the seven spirits and becoming the manifested universe and of the human journey of return to the source. We purify in succession our physical, emotional and mental bodies and integrate them before emptying the personality of a sense of self, so that the chalice of ourselves is able to receive the love of Christ as the wine and the life of Christ as the bread, the body or vehicle. In partaking of these we commune with the divine. Our consciousness is raised beyond time, space and form to eternal life. Through this channel the Christ life floods out into the world and into our being. This uplifting of consciousness is one of the main functions of the Eucharist. In this great work (Liturgy) all aids are used; beautiful words, music, incense, colour, symbol and angelic cooperation.

© 2009 The Liberal Catholic Church Grail Community

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