A Stand-Alone Boy and the Utterly Profound Touch of Heaven: From the Western Plains of Nsw to Southern Shepherd and Lecturer in Asia and Latin America

By Arthur Lucas Jones

“Seeing thoughts as text”, to quote a creative poet, has been part of what is attempted here. The Child at Bethlehem who became the adult Jesus of Nazareth has never left us. He left no money or property. He left the Paraclete as his Voice and listener. We do not pray through a ceiling, we pray to “someone who calls out alongside us” and brings our prayers to the heart of God. I have been conversing with Jesus every day since I was a child. Prayer is both speaking and listening to God. The term used to describe this process and experience is The Utterly Profound Touch of Heaven. I call its practice Conversational Spirituality and I want to share it. It is based on our innate capacity to turn thoughts into speech and listen for the response and then turn our thoughts into texts for the guidance of life. That’s how the New Testament was written. Welcome the Christ as we speak and listen to him through his bequeathed Voice in the world, the Paraclete. We speak, and we listen. That’s how we talked to God so naturally as children. Let’s recapture it! We are speech-making beings, and there is no point in speech without a listener to respond. The brand here is Christian, but it applies with great respect across the board to all faiths and wider spiritual searches. A scientist uses many lenses to see the universe and we use many lenses to ‘see’ God. Sometimes we stand-alone to do it, as with the boy and man in this book. My personal life has its unusual traits, for my profession, in that I have been married three times. That is not hidden here. A trail of sadness has followed me, as well as a trail of joy. Read on to follow the unusual aspects of my story ultimately as a Bishop of the Church. I pay tribute to those leaders of the Church who gave me permission via compassion to emerge with someone at my side who encouraged me to stay “fully alive” as a person of faith. That is a great gift of love and forgiveness. This story is set in very diverse backgrounds and cultures. The spirituality herein depends on the “still small voice of God” answering our speech when it is projected into the mystery of God. That is a clear test of faith in the “Numinous”, the Divine Presence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Feb 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781504316804

Arthur Lucas Jones

The author left school at age 15 and his path towards a Ph.D was a long one. He is a retired Bishop of Gippsland, Australia. He is also an academic, and he has been a missionary in Panama for six years. He has a passion for learning, not only in books and degrees, but also about people and their needs. He has a love of languages and Jungian Psychology and a focus on mystical contemplation. He practises what he calls Conversational Spirituality.

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Copyright © 2019 Arthur Lucas Jones.

Cover Artist: Bailey Mogensen

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Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-1679-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-1680-4 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:  02/21/2019

Contents

Personal Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1     Original Setting Part I

Chapter 2     Original Setting Part II

Chapter 3     Working at Wright Heatons And With My Father

Chapter 4     From Work to Vocation. Training for the Anglican Priesthood at St. John’s College, Morpeth

Chapter 5     Holy Trinity Orange 1966 –1969

Chapter 6     Panama Pilgrimage I

Chapter 7     St. Barnabas Orange 1973–77

Chapter 8     Panama Pilgrimage II

Chapter 9     A Southern Return after Panama: Alvie, Colac and Corangamite

Chapter 10   Lecturer St. John’s College, Morpeth

Chapter 11   Rector of the Parish of Woy Woy on the Central Coast of NSW

Chapter 12   Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Sale, Victoria

Chapter 13   From Western Plains to Southern Shepherd 9th Bishop of Gippsland

Chapter 14   St. Andrew’s Seminary Quezon City Metro Manila The Philippines

Chapter 15   Holy Trinity Dubbo and St. John’s, Molong after Retirement

Chapter 16   Holy Trinity Makati

Chapter 17   International Lecturer and Biblical School in India

Chapter 18   My Spiritual Journey and its Literary Pathway: What I Have learned

Epilogue:

Vision at Nazareth

Personal Preface

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I AM DR. Arthur Jones, an Anglican Bishop. I am from the western plains in New South Wales, about 600 kms. west of Sydney, Australia. I reflect that bush background. This background has a great respect for core values and integrity and is people-centred,

I have been a parish priest, a missionary for six years in Panama, a full-time academic, and a diocesan bishop. I have lectured in New Testament in Asia and Latin America (in Spanish). I lectured in New Testament at St. Andrew’s Seminary in Quezon City, Manila, every year but one from 2000. My last year was 2016. I have great respect for the Filipino people and I have many friends in the Philippines. The citation for my Order of Australia Medal (OAM) reads: For service to the Anglican Church of Australia and as a theological and language lecturer in developing countries.

I try to bring an open and gracious approach to every person that I meet. I also bring sound biblical teaching, aligned to a passionate interest in people and pastoral ministry. I love beautiful liturgy and both traditional and contemporary music and lyrics.

My speciality is the writings of Luke in the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles. I am also deeply interested in the Interpretation of the Scriptures in the 21st Century.

I conduct an International Biblical School in Tamil Nadu south of Bangalore in India. I have written a dialogue-style Commentary on Luke’s Gospel and Acts of the Apostles to meet the needs of over 200 independent pastors who have placed themselves under my care in Tamil Nadu. I am very orthodox in the core matters of the faith but sensitive to the needs of people and reluctant to make categorical judgments about anyone who causes no harm to others. And even when there appears to be ‘harm’ I am suspicious of hasty judgments until I know more of the circumstances. My vision is to build more and more relationships. I am colour-blind when it comes to race and gender-free when it comes to people’s opportunities and gifts. I also think that more and more Christians should be biblically informed and any added part that I can play in that would be wonderful! We should be respectful of other Faiths and different Christian approaches but well-equipped to give an account of our own Faith, without apology. I concluded my ministry at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Manila on January 1st 2017 after eight years and returned to Traralgon in Victoria. I have a ream of scripts that I would like to publish on U Tube and the Net in general as well as in print.

I am a graduate of London and Deakin Universities and I hold an M.A. in Classics from Newcastle University and a Masters in Counselling from La Trobe University. My Ph. D is from La Trobe University and the title was Jesus as Prophet. All my degrees are from Australian Colleges and Universities except the Bachelor of Divinity from London University.

What follows traces out the various events of my life and the various interests listed in this precis.

Introduction

I WAS STAND-ALONE in my family, stand-alone at school and stand-alone in the workplace. I felt cared for at home, deeply so, but it was always with a sense of being on my own, the pathway to standing alone.

I was stand-alone alone as a priest and stand-alone as a bishop. Yet the utterly profound touch of heaven has been a dominant thread of my life-story. I felt awed by it as a child and I still do. It has prompted me never to grow old, though inevitably I have aged. It is discernible. When people tell me that I still look the same after not seeing me for fifteeen years or so, it may be well meant, but I know that it is not true.

The touch of heaven is utterly profound for several reasons. It cannot be explained, and we prize explanations. It cannot be measured or located, because it is everywhere. It is like a rainbow, in that seeing it depends on where one is standing. It is like love, in that it never falls to the ground empty: it always falls into a human heart. It ‘earths’ in human receptors. It cannot be described or dissected, only experienced. Yet the experience of it lends reality to our most artistic descriptions of creation and our role in it. Rudolf Otto was a perceptive and insightful thinker, and he described the utterly profound touch of heaven as the numinous. It is light in darkness and wisdom and beauty and love beyond our imagining. It is what Eckhart Tolle describes as The Power of Now. It invites us to enter its ever-present shalom, or complete wholeness. Nothing can delete this Presence, and nothing can capture it. It requires deliberate effort to become aware of it, aligned to its enormously gifted lavishing of Presence from time to time. It has always been part of holy people’s lives and those who have shown it have left luminous signposts in the indelible tracks of history. That is, the unforgettable ones who reside in our psyche to remind us of what we can become.

What follows is my interaction with the touch of heavenly numinous which we flee and yet cannot escape. It is hard to bear because it is beyond us and yet within us. It is utterly profound because we cannot reach it and we cannot find our identity without it. The grief associated with this is exemplified in the cry of dereliction from the Cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34). Christ’s surely spoke those words because the Church would not have dreamed up the use of them unless they came from Christ himself. They are our cry as well in a world which is devastated by the anxiety that human violence and greed promotes.

Christ clearly felt utterly alone at the Cross, stripped of his clothes and stripped of his humanity, and yet he committed himself to the Father of heaven.

A boy with an awareness of being alone and an at times stand-alone man follows the Solitary One from Cross in the following pages. I hope that my journey may inspire others to become more aware of the utterly profound touch of heaven in their most stand-alone moments on their pilgrimage.

There was a signal moment that I shall mention later when I went from the Diocese of Ballarat in Victoria in 1982 to be the New Testament Lecturer at St. John’s College in Morpeth, New South Wales. I found the spirituality not as warm or as focussed as it had been when I was a student there in 1965–1966. It felt a little flat to me, and it added to my sense of innate alone-ness. One day the Bishop of Ballarat came to visit his students at the college. Bishop John Hazlewood was the most flamboyant Bishop in the Australian Church and not without discernible earthly foibles, yet he had the utterly profound touch of heaven within his person. He entered the beautiful stone chapel wearing a steeple mitre, and the touch of heaven came in with him. I burst into tears, because the inescapable presence touched me so much at a time of need.

We cannot fully grasp the touch of heaven, but it aids us in the search of being human before God. Christ himself was the utterly profound touch of heaven and he was executed because of its innate ‘fatal attraction’ in his public life. It was unbearable for those who wore the mantle of religious people because the numinous reveals the shadow as well