What Happens When A Church is Listing to the Left?

All the loose nuts roll to that side causing the church to capsize.

This is what has been happening to the Episcopal church. The latest example is the case of the Rev. Matthew Fox. According to a report by Jeff Walton at the Institute on Religion & Democracy Fox was expelled from the Dominicans in 1993 after 34 years for refusing to respond to a summons to discuss his heretical writings. He promptly landed a spot in the Episcopal Diocese of California. This April he gave a lecture and workshop on “Earth Spirituality and the Mystical Tradition” at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockville, Maryland. Here is part of Walton's report:

"In addition to creating his own theology independent of Scripture, Fox waded into science, authoring his own physical laws for the universe.

'Matter is frozen light,' Fox asserted, also adding that plants and animals had souls, as they share the properties of being 'living, sensory and intelligent.'

Fox conducted elements of the 'cosmic mass' during the seminar. Among them was a grieving ritual, which Fox equated with confession during the traditional mass. In preparation for the ritual, Fox invited participants to place their feet, knees, hands and forehead in direct contact with the floor, in order to increase connection with the earth below. Seminar participants then were instructed to release their grief into the earth in three stages: anger, sorrow, and concluding with 'bottoming out.'

As the 'grief work' began, animal-like barking and growls punctuated guttural wails and whimpering that filled the church sanctuary, rising to a crescendo and then concluding. Fox pronounced the 'grief work' as authentic, saying that which came from the gut was correctly in line with the third chakra, a point of spiritual power located along the body in yoga.

The clergyman also prescribed another practice of grieving: 'Find a rock, dig a hole, ask the rock if it is willing to do this, and then you get a bandanna or some piece of cloth that means something to you, and you put your grief into that rock and wrap it, wrap the bandanna around it and bury it, and then cover it up. The Earth is so generous and large that she can absorb our grief for us.'

Despite Fox’s efforts to correlate portions of the cosmic mass with the traditional mass, such as having a modified communion service, he seemed eager to jettison the theme of the Eucharist.

'We’ve been told by bad preachers that Jesus died on the cross for your sins,' Fox said. In the place of sacrificial atonement, the Episcopal priest argued that liturgy and worship was about the Universe itself, 'veneration of the sacred.'"

Read it all here, just be sure your ship is on an even keel before you go there.