About Our Temple
Sekhet-Maat offers religious services to the people of Portland, Oregon on behalf of the Gnostic Catholic Church (Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica) as administered by Ordo Templi Orientis. As such, we are merely a local outcropping of an international movement comprising thousands of members in more than two dozen countries. Our work is performed with love and devotion by an all-volunteer staff of Sekhet-Maat Lodge initiates.
|
“And I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is Thelema.” —from the Gnostic Catholic Creed |
Our church’s motto espouses five doctrinal values:
Of course, those values are made meaningful through the hard work and caring fellowship of our community:
- Light: the ineffable and sublimely joyous fabric of reality, illuminating the world, both universal and absolutely personal.
- Life: the eternal, incorruptible self that is each person. Bodily life and death are but the pulse of this deeper Life.
- Love: not sweet, sentimental love that finds comfort in sameness, but the vigorous love that affirms difference and seeks to unite itself with it.
- Liberty: the ultimate freedom to be yourself, and the strictest bond to be nothing but.
- Law: “There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.”
Of course, those values are made meaningful through the hard work and caring fellowship of our community: