Articles from the Religious Research Journal

 

The following are the remarks offered by Sancta Sophia Board of Governors member Rev. Margaret Stephens at a recent seminary graduation ceremony.  We appreciate Rev. Stephens' and Sancta Sophia Seminary’s cooperation in permitting us to share them with our readers.

 

Sancta Sophia Seminary Graduation, Governor Remarks (10/25/02)

 

By Rev. Margaret Stephens

 

Good Evening,

        As I look out and see this year’s graduates and remember those who could not be with us tonight, I’m filled with pride in the work that we do here. And I am filled with gratitude that when our dean, Carol Parrish, heard the call to expanded service, she said:

 “I will respond. I will establish a school, a church, and a community. And I will so do it in Oklahoma.”

         The Friends of Sancta Sophia brochure this year announces in big print “Sancta Sophia Seminary is Different!” – and it truly is! The primary focus of the seminary is not on theology or dogma but on personal growth and transformation, because its founder understood very clearly that the outer condition is but the reflection of the inner reality.

         Book learning – knowledge – is a good thing. Standard education has been occupied with synthesizing past history and achievements. It has been primarily backward-looking, not forward-looking, and it has concerned itself mostly with the organizing of the lower mind.

         The education that many of us experienced was mostly memory training. And the yardstick used to measure the caliber or intelligence of a child or adult was largely their ability to recite back the accepted interpretations of the past.

        Today we are in the critical transition period between the end of the Piscean Age, with its emphasis upon authority and belief, and the beginning of the Aquarian Age, with its emphasis upon individual understanding and direct knowing.

        At the close of one age and beginning of the new, many well-loved and well-established cultural guidelines, religious dogmas, societal beliefs, and educational systems no longer work the way they once did. And many of the people on earth today are no longer working the way they once did! 

        During the Piscean Age – the age of striving to measure up to a sensed ideal – children and adults had to assimilate facts that the race believed to be true, had tested in the past, and found to be adequate. But each age has different characteristics, different methods, and different measures of adequacy. It’s suggested that today we are making the transition from the age of the intellect, dogma, and religion to the age of intuition and spirituality. The incoming new energies of the Aquarian Age (synthesis, inclusiveness, and intuitive understanding) demand that a new type of education must begin to penetrate the human aura.

         In 1936 the Master D.K. wrote in A Treatise on the Seven Rays, vol. I (pg. 181):

 The world structure emerges from and is built upon certain inner thought patterns, and it is these thought patterns which are producing the world today. But there is no training given upon the process of contacting the world of patterns and upon the true interpretation of ideas, and hence the problems. Later, when the race sees its problems with clarity, it will act with wisdom and train with care its Observers and Communicators. These will be men and women in whom the intuition has awakened at the behest of an urgent intellect. They will be people whose minds are so subordinated to the group good, and so free from all sense of separativeness, that their minds present no impediment to the contact with the world of reality and of inner truth. They will not necessarily be people who could be termed ‘religious’ in the ordinary sense of that word, but they will be men (and women) of goodwill, of high mental caliber, with minds well stocked and equipped; they will be free from personal ambition and selfishness, animated by love of humanity and by a desire to help the race.”

That was in 1936. 

Over 40 years later, Rev. Carol Parrish saw the problem with clarity and responded by establishing Sancta Sophia Seminary whose purpose it is to educate men and women about the reality of the world of patterns and ideas, regardless of their religious affiliation. She established an educational program to train students how to access levels of inspiration previously untouched and how to utilize the insights gained in service to humanity.

Humanity is striving to make the transition from intellect, dogma and religion to the age of intuition and spirituality. The future, which is now, demands that its leaders have the intuitive understanding that blends knowledge with wisdom and compassion and mind with heart. The activity of the forces that characterize the two signs, outgoing Pisces and incoming Aquarius, produces a corresponding activity in the atoms of the human body.

We heard today that one of the results of the present world condition is the speeding up of all the atomic lives upon and within the planet. The atoms that are predominately Piscean are beginning to slow down their activity and to be “occultly withdrawn”, while those that are responsive to the new energy are being stimulated, and their vibratory activity increased, with a consequent effect upon the psychic nature that produces new sensitivity and new psychic awareness.

Today our conference speakers also suggested that we are on the verge of a new knowledge, and the atoms of our bodies are being tuned up to receive these new frequencies. Leaders must ask: Is humanity equipped to deal with this new sensitivity and has humanity been appropriate and adequately educated to accurately interpret these new frequencies?

This inflow of new energy has brought many thousands of people into a new and deeper spiritual realization. It has opened a door through which many will pass and learn to control negative emotions, glamours, and psychological hang-ups, and thus take the second major initiation. It has also opened a door through which a few will pass, learn how to utilize the three aspects of mind, and begin to live as conscious souls upon the physical plane. It probably opened the door for each of you to find your way to Sparrow Hawk Village (home of Sancta Sophia) and pursue your spiritual education here.

Which brings me to the main theme of my remarks tonight: why the education offered by Sancta Sophia Seminary is so vitally important during this critical transition time.

The word education is really interesting. Its Latin root, educare, means “to draw forth” or “to lead out”. So we might think of education, in its true meaning, as drawing forth the Spirit from within the prison of personality or as leading personality out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of the wisdom of the soul. The education offered at the seminary – with its unique combination of self-paced study, meditation, contemplation, service, and opportunities to stretch beyond one's comfort zone - provides the environment where the Self (capital “S”) can be educed or drawn forth. 

Each year, seminary advisors, teachers, and governors watch our students move through the program and emerge transformed into a fuller expression of their innermost nature.

Each one is different. 

Each one is cherished as a unique expression of divinity on earth.

Spiritual education today and into the future must meet the needs of the human spirit that is striving to grow beyond personality limitations. Spiritual education must assist the student to grow in the ability to analyze problems and arrive at thoughtful conclusions. It must also assist people to develop a satisfactory personal philosophy and individual sense of values. 

Remember that spiritual does not refer only to so-called religious matters, because all activity that drives the human being forward towards some form of development – social, physical, emotional mental, intuitional – if it is in advance of his present state – is essentially spiritual in nature. 

One of the major objectives of spiritual education is to make a man or woman an intelligent citizen, to enable him to play his part in the work of the world, and fit him for living peaceably, helpfully, and in harmony with his neighbors. 

        We might say that education is a continuous process of learning how to reconcile the human and the divine elements in the constitution of man. Education, in its true meaning, helps to create right relationship between God and man, spirit and matter, the whole and the part. Education is, or should be, a continuous process from birth to death and concerned not so much with the acquisition of knowledge as with the expansion of consciousness. 

        Knowledge by itself becomes a dead end unless it is brought into functioning relationship with our environment, our social responsibilities, human and world conditions, and, above all, with the evolution of consciousness that brings the infinite vastness of an unknown universe within the range of the finite human mind. 

        Sancta Sophia Seminary has offered you an outstanding example of spiritual education. 

        You have taken full advantage of what has been offered. 

        With minds well equipped, hearts full of compassion, and animated by a desire to help humanity, you have graduated. 

        Congratulations!

 

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