Bear with me, this post is going to get a little convoluted.

I am sure that you are familiar with the work of Monastery Icons. They make the western / eastern looking “icons” of saints. They have been popular because they give a Byzantine flavor to a lot of western saints that have never been written in a real icon.

Back in the 70’s an “Abbot Bishop” George Burke showed up in Oklahoma City and founded a Hindu community. That community became “Christian” and changed its name to “Holy Protection Old Catholic Benedictine Monastery of the Primitive Observance.” In the early 80’s the community “converted” to Orthodoxy and changed its name to Holy Protection Orthodox Monastery. A few years later they decided they were really Coptic Christians. Eventually they left Oklahoma, moved to Nebraska and then to California where they formed the Light of Christ Monastery at 1482 Rango Way, Borrego Springs, CA.  Light of Christ Monastery is the original organization behind Monastery Icons . ( source )

On the Monastery Icons website you will find the following information:

Sacred Arts Foundation is a non-profit foundation created to strengthen faith and encourage Christian devotion in churches, schools, and individuals through a ministry of traditional Christian art. As the contemporary iconographer Photios Kontoglou expressed so well, “Icons raise the soul and mind to the realm of the spirit.” Our foundation is a cooperative effort of artisans and craftsmen throughout the United States and the world who strive to make our Monastery Icons products the highest quality available.

The Sacred Arts Foundation acquired Monastery Icons in 2004 . This wouldn’t seem very odd except that the Sacred Arts Foundation had  the exact same California address as the Light of Christ Monastery, Monastery Icons and as you will see below, the Atma Jyoti Ashram .

If you look at the address on the Monastery Icons catalog you will find an Ohio address. This is the distribution center that handles fulfillment for their “icons.” Doing a search of the Ohio Secretary of State website shows that Monastery Icons is actually the Sacred Arts Foundation, a foreign (out-of-state) non-profit located at 1482 Rango Way, Borrego Springs, CA. The Sacred Arts Foundation was dissolved in Ohio in August of 2008 for failing to update their records.

The Sacred Arts Foundation filed its 2007 annual registration report in Missouri with a primary business address of 1482 Rango Way, Borrego Springs, CA. The contact email at the bottom of the form is someone at Monastery Icons. The Sacred Arts Foundation was dissolved by the State of Missouri in December of 2008 for failing to file a current registration.

The California address at that time in 2007 was also the home to the Atma Jyoti Ashram , “a spiritual institution devoted to the practice and teaching of Sanatana Dharma, the Eternal Religion, as found in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and the Sankhya Karika.”

The same California address is also listed as the mailing address for Monastery Icons back in 1999 .

What, exactly, does a supposedly Christian Monastery in the icon business have to do with a Hindu Ashram?  Well, everything when the icon business is a money-making front for your new-age religious institute.

Sometime between August and September of 2007 the Ashram moved to  PO Box 1370 Cedar Crest, NM.  If you look at the Q&A on the new Ashram site, the Swami bares a striking resemblance to Abbot George, the founder of the Hindu community back at the beginning of this post.

Remember the dissolved Sacred Arts Foundation from Missouri and Ohio? It pops up again in New Mexico, registered with the Secretary of State as a Missouri Non-Profit doing business in New Mexico at – wait for it – PO Box 1370 Cedar Crest, NM.

You can also see that the Sacred Arts Foundation is listed as a Corporation in California at the 1482 Rango Way, Borrego Springs address with a headquarters in Missouri. This record is current as of 9/2009. The question should be asked, how is it that a corporation can be listed both in California and New Mexico with a headquarters in Missouri when the corporation in Missouri was dissolved in 2008 for failure to file updated records?

A quick perusal of the Sacred Arts Foundation website (the website is registered in the town of Tijeras , two miles from Cedar Crest) reveals:

• Workshops in “Transformational Movement”, Feng Shui, Yoga and Art of Aware Communication
• Tutorials on Astrology, Tarot and Feng Shui

It is clear both from the origins of Monastery Icons, its tangled web of corporate arrangements and its ongoing ownership by a completely anti-Christian new-age group that no Christian organization should be giving any financial support to this company by buying its art.

Much of the material for this post was mined from the Byzantine Forum .