[Apologetics] Coming this Halloween to an Episcopal parish near you?

[Stuart D. Gathman]

Coming this Halloween to an Episcopal parish near you?

Just in time for Halloween, the Episcopal Church Center is offered a new 
liturgical resource, complete with links to pagan goddess worship and 
wiccan practices.  In an October 25, 2004 story, Episcopal News Service 
reported that the Womens Ministries Office is requesting resources for 
their Womens Liturgy Project to memorialize the aspects of womens lives 
that have historically been left unrecognized in the rites, rituals, and 
ceremonies of the Episcopal Church.  A Womens Eucharist:  A Celebration of 
the Divine Feminine was on the Episcopal Churchs website as a resource 
available to be used by women, men, parishes, dioceses, small groups, 
within the context of a Sunday morning service, or any other appropriate 
setting. [For more information on the availability of the article, see 
Erik Nelsons article. ED]

Even the most cursory glance reveals that this liturgy has little in 
common with the Christian celebration of Holy Eucharist.  Rather than 
being a service of remembrance and thanksgiving for the sacrificial and 
atoning death of Christ, this Eucharist does exactly what the title 
suggests:  it celebrates human femininity as divine.

Awareness of the feminine attributes of God is not inherently 
objectionable or unorthodox:  Isaiah likening God to a woman crying in 
labor pains (41:14), and Jesus comparing his desire for Jerusalem to that 
of a mother hen gathering her chicks are two examples.

However, the Womens Eucharist makes no attempt to ascribe worship to the 
Trinitarian God of Christianity;  the liturgy is explicitly focused on 
addressing a pagan goddess and celebrating womens bodies as divine.

Towards the end of the rite, the participants are to raise a plate of 
raisin cakes and say, Mother God, our ancient sisters called you Queen of 
Heaven and baked these cakes in your honor in defiance of their brothers 
and husbands who would not see your feminine face.  This is a reference to 
the idolatrous practices of the Old Testament that were soundly rebuked by 
God through his prophets.  Loving the sacred raisin cakes is a sign of 
total depravity and prostitution in Hosea.  And in Jeremiah, raisin cakes 
are associated with the same pagan gods who desired ritual child 
sacrifice, provoking the wrath and fury of God.  It was not in defiance of 
their brothers and husbands that these ancient sisters baked the raisin 
cakes.  It was in defiance of God.  And to participate in such a ritual 
for the Queen of Heaven is to worship pagan deities specifically condemned 
in Scripture.

Just as disturbing as addressing worship to a pagan goddess is the 
encouragement to set up our own bodies as objects of worship;  it is an 
equally severe form of idolatry.  The liturgy elevates womens sexuality, 
water, blood, and breasts to divine status.  The third section of the 
liturgy borrows imagery from the Gospel of Matthew of flowers blooming and 
fading, but places it within a context of female sexuality.  The liturgy 
declares that the flowers shape evokes in us the unfolding of our own 
sexuality.  The celebration is of eroticism, and is self-focused. 

In the next section of the rite, the participants are to celebrate water 
of the womb and of tears. It  dips a bit deeper into heresy by asserting 
that Mother Earth brought forth life from the womb of the sea.  Not only 
does the rite assert the power of the water of the womb, but the water of 
tears also has redemptive qualities.  Of course, we may weep tears of 
repentance as we seek redemption, but to assume that redemption comes from 
sorrow negates the atoning role of Christ and gives far too much authority 
to individual people.  If tears are the water of life, then everyone who 
cries and does not see life re-emerge from her personal sorrow is bound to 
be disappointed.  Life, and redemption of life, can come only from Christ 
who gives living water; it is not something we can conjure up through 
crying.

The fifth section, concerned with red wine, symbolizing blood, moves the 
focus even more onto the women who are involved, not to something outside 
themselves.  It is their blood, specifically menstrual blood, that is 
being celebrated.  In the Christian Eucharist, the emphasis is on the 
power of Christs redemptive action on the cross for people who are 
entirely powerless to effect their own salvation.  In a directly 
contradictory statement, the Womens Eucharist declares to the goddess, we 
bless you for the power of this drink to remind us of our own power. They 
go on to pray for the day when. . .womens blood is honored as holy and in 
your image.  The liturgist is reducing women to one body part, asserting 
that only a womans blood is in the image of God.

The trend of women honoring their own bodies redemptive power continues in 
the sixth section, where the liturgist expresses a desire for women to 
honor our breasts as symbols of your abundance, after which the 
participants drink from a communal cup of milk and honey. This 
over-emphasis of life-giving faculties of womens bodies brings us back to 
a fundamental denial of Christian doctrine by asserting that we, not 
Christ, are responsible for our own salvation.

The Womens Eucharist was created by the Reverend Glyn Lorraine 
Ruppe-Melnyk, rector of St. Francis in the Fields; shes married to Bill 
Melnyk.  Both are priests in Diocese of Pennsylvania, whose bishop stated 
at General Convention 1997 that we offer resolutions apologizing to women 
for the sacrifice language of the Eucharist.  A virtually identical ritual 
to the one on the Episcopal Churchs website, called A Celebration of the 
Divine Feminine in a Eucharist to our Mother Goddess, could be found on 
the website of Tuatha de Brighid, a clan of modern Druids.  The 
Celebration of the Divine Feminine ceremony was created by Glispa, who, 
with another Druid Oak Wyse, also created the Wiccan Lunar Ritual.  The 
careers and musings of Episcopal priests Glyn and Bill Melnyk are 
uncannily similar to those of Glispa and Oak Wyse; in fact, Bill Melnyk is 
addressed as Oak Wyse on the Druid Network.  In addition to the liturgical 
rites mentioned above, the Melnyks have written a Goddess Prayer Chant to 
go with goddess prayer beads, available for sale on the site.  Also 
included were step by step directions for creating non traditional 
rosaries or NTRs.  Oak Wyse writes there that Christians have always 
borrowed from the Pagans, so creating alternative rosaries is just 
borrowing back.  He continues that the common people from the first 
century CE onwards saw Mary as the continuation of the Queen of Heaven: 
Astarte in Palestine, or Isis in Egypt. It is fitting, then, to adapt a 
Marian devotion for honor to the Goddess, the Queen of Heaven. These beads 
honor the Goddess in her three-fold, or triple, nature as Maiden, Mother, 
and Crone.  One wonders how fitting the Mother of our Lord might think it.

Ruppe-Melnyk habitually finishes her messages on the St. 
Francis-in-the-Fields web site, and her emails to the authors of this 
article, with the closing, Peace and Brightest Blessings.  It sounds like 
a charming, unusual, and innocuous term until one learns that Brightest 
Blessings is the salute given by wiccans, witches, and other pagan 
practitioners all over the world.

It is profoundly ironic that this story broke as American bishops are 
dismissing the bishops of the Global South as backward.  Six years ago at 
the world-wide Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops, the Rt. Reverend 
John Spong, angry with the African bishops adherence to biblical 
orthodoxy, declared that Christians in Africa had moved out of animism 
into a very superstitious kind of Christianity.  They've yet to face the 
intellectual revolution of Copernicus and Einstein that we've had to face 
in the developing world, he intoned.  At that same meeting Richard 
Holloway, then Primate of Scotland added his own insults to the faithful 
African bishops saying that they needed to be taught Biblical scholarship 
of the last 150 years. 

Here in the U.S. Episcopal Church, the intellectual revolution has come 
and gone.  Apparently having out-grown Copernicus and Einstein, 
contemporary Episcopalians are offered pre-Christian, pagan teachings.   
We already knew that the Biblical scholarship that they were taught and 
are teaching has led them to heresy.  Now we know it has led them to 
paganism, too. 

 

Note: Since this story broke, much of the information available on the 
pagan websites about these rites and their authors has been removed.


Commentary on the above:
http://www.ird-renew.org/Episcopal/Episcopal.cfm?ID=985&c=21


-- 
	      Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
    Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.