Entangled States

Notes from the Archbishop of Canterbury's presentation at General Convention

These are my "unedited notes" from the session. Sorry about any typos - it's late and I'm on the run. Not a whole lot of time to proofread...

Opening remarks by Bp. Greg Rickel - introducing guests, etc.

Whole presentation will be on demand rebroadcast later tonight.

Our calling as Christians require us to see Global Poverty as our problem. The Presiding Bishop was referring to this when she talked about the crisis of the present day in her remarks yesterday. Rickel is challenging us to not turn inward in this moment but rather to do the unexpected thing of claiming our place as global citizens.

The Presiding Bishop's remarks:

"We are all interconnected."

• Scientists and engineers are telling us this again and again in increasingly strident language.
• Our consumption patterns in the US change the economies and climates of cultures on the other side of the world, whether we know it or not.
• We are still taking our ease in Bashan sadly.
• Our willingness to respond to the hope offered in the Kingdom of God is the challenge before us.

The Archbishop Canterbury's remarks:

Will speak on the central spiritual challenges of our present situation.

• Taking a leaf from Pope Benedict's recent encyclical: Truth needs to be sought found and expressed in the light of charity. Charity however needs to be expressed in the light of truth and love.
• We have suddenly discovered that we have been lying to ourselves.
• We have lied in three ways
  • 1. We have allowed there to be a break down in truth-telling in finance and governance and trust in our financial life. Our word has not been our bound. We have learned to tolerate high levels of anti-relational practices.
  • 2. We have lied to ourselves about the possibliity of limitless growth in a limited world. We have lied about the possibility of profit without risk.
  • 3. We have lied about the nature of our relationships between other human beings. We have thought that a single person's profit can be achieved without expense by others.
• Our task is not to find a new "normal". There is no normal anymore. We are moving into the Unknown.
• Our response must be to commit to live in the Truth.
  • Trust happens when you learn to know the quality of the person you are dealing with.
  • We must learn to show respect for the limited world in which we live.
  • We must not live as a disembodied economic will, but instead as an embodied part of creation.
  • We must learn to know who carries the greatest part of the risk that must be a necessary part of profit.
• What is good for human beings is not necessarily what is good for individuals.
• What can be done doesn't have to be done - because there are other goods to be considered...
• The exaction in the abstract of what the market seems to demand is never a very satisfactory basis for our common life.
• These three points emerged in an inter-faith dialogue in England a few months ago.
• The Common Good: We are made so that what is given to us, is meant to given in turn to another.
• This is what it means to be the Body of Christ in the World.
• There is an unbreakable connection between the presence of God in our lives with what we do in our relationships with other.
• Five ideas in response
  • We must move away from a model of economics that is about making money to one that engenders trust. We will have to redefine what we mean by wealth. Well being meaning not what we have in the bank.
  • We include an environmental cost in any economic calculation we make. "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment." 
  • We must no longer undermine democratic government and the role of business internationally. We must no longer allow business concerns to destabilize a small economy.
  • We must think about our existing financial institutions. How are they to be reconcieved as monitors, agents of growth and playing field levelers that protect the smallest and weakest nations.
  • What does the real economy have to be equipped to do? What do we really need to produce? What should we put in place with these stimulus packages?
• Skepticism in politics is a good thing. Cynicism is a bad thing, because it assumes that all answers we are given are untruthful. This can be achieved by the recreation of small civil institutions and micro-economic settings. Things like Habitat for Humanity are critical to our next decades. The Churches are astonishingly well placed to be able to do this.
• The business communities must learn to factor in the needs of the local communities in which they are placed. When the employees are encouraged to build relationships with their local community morale rises across the board. The Churches are uniquely equipped to teach this because of what we believe about the nature of human beings.
• We believe that human beings are made in the image of God... This is not a static thing. It is in the dynamic processes we see this most clearly. Growing into relationality is what human beings are actually for...

Bonnie Anderson: Thanks for coming. The issues are the heart of God's call to us.

Presentations by three young leaders of the Episcopal Church working in MDG areas followed.

Archbishop's presentation

We are in a very crowded ballroom waiting for the Archbishop of Canterbury's presentation on global poverty to the Episcopal Church's General Convention.

I'll try to take notes and post them later.

Protestors show up

They aren't Fred Phelps folks but LA does not dissapoint.

First full day of Convention - no news yet.

Quick note on Wed. Morning. Yesterday was the longest first day of Convention that I’ve ever experienced. I suppose that’s a good thing. Last Convention - in Columbus - we effectively ran out the clock in the end by not attacking the work we had before us agressively in the beginning of Convention. By the time resolutions with any substance started making their way out of committees and on to the floor, we were well into the second week. Many important resolutions simply didn’t come up for vote or discussion because of the time we spent deliberating the big resolutions regarding the commitment of the Episcopal Church to the Anglican Communion.

Not so this time apparently. We’re already holding hearings in the Communications committee regarding a number of resolutions. The big issues of the moment for us is the proposed plan to move Episcopal Life from a monthly cooperatively published newspaper format to a hybrid online and quarterly magazine format. We’re holding hearings on that tomorrow afternoon and will hopefully get it out to the floor by Sat. That’s important because it has budgetary implications. It could cost us between half a million and a million dollars a year according to some folks to decide to continue things the way they are…

Did have a chance to meet up with old friends yesterday. Had a visit with Bethlehem Deputation, got to see Bishop Paul Marshall and talk about how things are going back east. Sounds like they’re managing to keep on doing the work of the Kingdom in that diocese.

Karen and Kenney spent the day doing the Theme Parks. Apparently the big deal yesterday was that Kenney found the one and only “Owl” pin (my favorite Disney character) in the whole of Disneyland. So now I’m proudly wearing my Owl pin for all to see. Grin.

In terms of the mood of Convention - I have no idea. Things are spinning up so fast I’ve not really had time to have more than briefest of conversations with folks about anything other than the weather. The one thing I’m hearing from folks is that they are recognizing the crisis moment facing the Episcopal Church. (In terms of membership and money.) What I’ve not heard is any coherent response. Hopefully that will emerge.

But I’m not particularly worried. If it doesn’t emerge from General Convention (and I’m not optimisitic), I think is emerging now from the grassroots of the Church.

We just need to be able to recognize it...

A word to the world?

Karen, Kenney and I spent last night at Disneyland. We had a blast. I finally got to visit the park for the first time in my life. I'd been reading about it since I was a child but I've only been out to LA a few times in my life and Disneyland never really figured in my plans before.

I was watching the fireworks finale at the end, marveling at the choreography between the explosions and the music. I noticed the way that the songs quoted just enough of the various Disney movie dialogue that you were immediately taken to the same emotional space that you were in watching the movie. It was masterful manipulation. All the chicas and chicos were hugging, the children were in awe and the parents were misty eyed. (Except me of course... I always respond to emotional manipulation by getting fiercely analytical. It's a problem I have...) It was a brilliantly done bit of stagecraft with a final message that, if you just wished hard enough, and believed in yourself, you could anything you wanted.

Which isn't true of course, but it's a lovely bit of American mythology.

What really took me back though was the realization of how much better the smart folks of Disney were at presenting their message than we in the Church are at presenting ours. Would that we would commit to doing such a good job in our proclamation that people would stand for hours just to get a good view of the 10 minutes sermon...

Might make situations such as we're facing in the Episcopal Church right now be a thing of our past.

Juxtapositions

We made it to Anaheim in more or less one piece. The most exciting part of the trip was watching the temperature drop from about 113 F as we crossed the desert between Phoenix and Los Angeles to about 84 F as we descended down to sea level and arrived in Anaheim. (For those of us who have grown accustomed to the summer heat of Phoenix, that’s a pretty big shift.) My wife and daughter are now snuggled under double blankets in our hotel room.

We met up with my sister-in-law who lives here in California last night and went on a walking tour of the Convention Center complex. We walked down the long promenade in front of the building and suddenly saw the entrance to Disneyland across the street. A quick confab and a tram ride later and there we were in Downtown Disney.

I’ve been in Downtown Disney in Florida before. (We spent a week in Disney World three years ago as one of our few big vacation trips.) I was surprised at how similar this one was here in Anaheim, though it was admittedly smaller and more intimate. The crowd density was about the same.

What struck me though was the contrast between what I’m here to do and what the setting is that we’re attempting to do it in.

The single largest issue according to the people of Arizona that is facing the Episcopal Church is our lack of obvious commitment to the world’s poor. The lack of commitment is seen by most in the Episcopal Church’s budgetary change for the coming three years to remove the agreed upon 0.7% of the total budget to be spent in support of the Millenium Development Goals. I’ve gotten an endless stream of mail asking me and others from the Arizona deputation to work to restore that funding.

(To be fair, the Executive Council and the Presiding Bishop’s staff are arguing that the funding is still in the budget and always has been, it’s just not being broken out explicitly. I and others are responding that the point of the MDG’s is to increase the level of funding not to identify funding that’s already being spent…)

So there I was walking down a street filled with expensive disposable commercial trademark characters thinking about that controversy. I was wondering what it would be like to take the intellectual enterprise and obvious project management skills that created this street full of temples to world commerce and consumerism and use those powers for good.

I don’t know that the Disney imagineers and marketers would be able to solve the world’s problems, but gosh, I imagine they’d find it a much more fulfilling task to try to do that rather than to sell another character-branded widget.

Sort of shame that we as a church have lost the bully pulpit we once had to say that in a compelling way to the community.

Maybe the Episcopal Church (and other churches) might think less about accounting issues and more on how to regain the moral voice and suasion that we once had in society.

Young people from the finest universities in England used to catch the vision of traveling to the poorest parts of the world in hopes of serving the poor. Maybe the foot-soldiers of coroporation motivated consumerism might convinced to do the same thing.

Heading to Anaheim via a return to Columbus

So all the bags are packed, waiting by the door. We’re leaving this morning for the drive to Anaheim and the start of General Convention.

Jamie McMahon, a friend of mine for years now, is one of the volunteer coordinators on the floor of the House of Deputies. He’s created a Facebook group for folks who are interested in watching the proceedings from that level. There are already three pictures posted of the main convention areas over on that group’s page.

It’s the pictures that give me pause. This is my fourth General Convention (my third as a deputy.) The overwhelming sense that I have each time I walk into the House of Deputies and/or the Exhibit Hall each Convention is that I’m in the same place I was three years ago. It’s really quite striking. The curtains in the House that surround the floor, the basic layout, the dais arrangement, the speaker’s platforms are all the same. (I’m thinking the Episcopal Church must actually own them all and just has them shipped from one Convention center to the next.) It’s the same with the Exhibit Hall. The same yellow and white curtains, the same basic layout, even the same table arrangement in the standard food court area in the back of the hall.

George Werner, former Dean of the Cathedral in Pittsburgh and for six years President of the House of Deputies, once described General Convention as a sort of Brigadoon that rises once every three years from the mist and exists for two weeks and then disappears again.

I thought he was just being clever the first time I heard him say that. Now I realize that intentional or not, there’s a profound truth behind what he said.

As I’m getting ready to throw myself back into the work of Convention, I finding myself back in the same emotional space  I was in the final couple of days of Convention in Columbus. We’re finally going to give people a chance to react with anger to events of that final day in Columbus when we passed B033 unexpectedly as a last ditch effort. Because that event was so stunning to so many who thought that the defeat of A161 the day before was going to be definitive, there really wasn’t a chance for those who felt the pain the most strongly to react and speak their pain to the majority of Convention who voted for B033 (as I did).

I think the toxicity of the blog sphere this past three years is in part a result of that lack. People were speaking their pain and their anger to anyone who would listen, but the real audience needed to be Convention again.

And this Brigadoon quality that Convention posses might just give folks that opportunity. As it rises again from the mist, and the deputies gather, it appears the first order of business is going to be a special listening session. Which I expect is going to be dominated by those who never got to tell Convention about how hurt they were by its actions.

Which I’m not particularly looking forward to doing. But it has to happen. Because if it doesn’t, we have no hope of the sort of healing and reconciliation that the Episcopal Church so desperately needs right now.

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General Convention Guide in PDF format

Looking for the General Convention Guide in good ole PDF format, suitable for reading on all sorts of devices?

You can find it right here.

If you'd be more interested in the Adobe AIR version...

Well, you'll find that here.

It's useful to have at any rate - it has the calendar of events and the daily legislative schedule.

Lighten your load

Quick note as I’m finishing up packing up my "office" for the trip to Anaheim.

It turns out that pretty much all the big publications that deputies will need access to on the floor can be downloaded to be stored on a computer. The Blue Book and the Bishop's and Deputies Handbooks are online from the General Convention website. The Report of the Church Pension Group, with the additional information about the proposed resolutions to this coming Convention are found on the CPG.org website here.

Don't forget to grab a copy of the proposed budget here.

And the latest version of the draft schedule appears to be posted here.

PRO TIP: Check out Evernote if you have a blackberry or an iPhone as well as a laptop. You can store any or all of these documents on your laptop and have them synced to your PDA. Very useful to be able to add notes and have the full document available to you no matter where you are. I've been using Evernote for a few months now and I've found it invaluable when I'm traveling.

Packing now commencing

So with just a few appointments on my calendar today (mostly my spiritual directees checking in for the summer) I’m starting to figure out what I need to take with me to Anaheim from my pile of General Convention material and what I can safely leave behind.

For my first General Convention I pretty much took the whole pile. It’s a surprisingly large pile of information for those who haven’t been deputies. You get all sorts of “free advice” books and pamphlets in the run up to Convention. Some of them have great and useful details about upcoming legislation (like the ones I’ve gotten from the Pension Fund). Some of them are basically campaign brochures from people running for Executive Council or the Pension Fund board. (Actually this year most of those have come by email - so it’s going to be much easier to keep track of them on the floor of convention. I’ll just need to make sure I have offline access to my email.)

I’m debating whether or not it makes sense to schlepp the Blue Book hard copy though. I have a nice PDF version of it on my laptop. I’ll be carrying my laptop either way to pretty much everything. And the full copy of the Blue Book actually weighs a little more than my laptop does. On the other hand laptops do die occasionally, and then what would I do?

My first convention I dutifully bought a little wheeled suitcase to carry all the needed material with me from my hotel room to the floor of the Convention daily. The thing was that about the second day I realized that I had no time to read the materials back in my hotel room. I was better off leaving everything at my seat on the floor in the Convention center. Besides, we rarely had legislation coming out to us in time that we’d be able to take it with us overnight to our rooms. (Though this actually got a little better in Columbus.) Instead I used the time that we “wasted” with all the greetings to the House by very important visitors to read the legislation that was upcoming. I never really fell all that much behind. Plus, when we voted on something, there was generally time to read the legislation while people where speaking to the matter during the debate.

There are really only a few bills that one can manage to track on ones own during convention. If you keep an ear out for when those are going to be coming to the floor, you’re really doing as much prep work as you can. People tend to speak to bills that they’ve been tracking through Convention. I’ll speak to the Moravian-Episcopal Full Communion agreement when it comes out the floor for a vote. I’ll track all the Communications legislation, but that will be relatively easy to do since I’m serving on the legislative committee. Most of the Communications legislation ends up on the consent calendar anyhow.

(Brief digression: The consent calendar is a daily omnibus resolution that includes all the various resolutions that have been reported out of committee and which are not particularly viewed as controversial. The whole mess gets passed in one fell swoop. If a resolution is listed on the consent calendar and there are objections to that listing, deputies can move to have that resolution broken out and brought to the floor separately. But that’s fraught with some peril because of the crowded schedule. In 2006 the majority (I believe, I could be wrong it might be a little less) of resolutions that were reported out of committee to the floor never came to a vote. We were reduced to trying to pass them one by one with a minute or less of debate in the final afternoon of Convention. Taking a resolution off the Consent Calendar and putting it back into play with the Dispatch of Business Committee means you risk having the bill go to the end of the line. Which is a good strategy if you are in opposition to a bill. Bad plan if you favor it - it might end up never being voted upon.)

(Returning to the original flow now:) Since I find that I do most of my reading on the floor during the breaks and while people are speaking to issues that don’t really need to be spoken to, I’m thinking I might continue my practice of leaving my GIANT binder of resolutions and my other reference material on the Convention floor. Which means less to schlep. Which is good.

I think I might look through the pile and see if I can download any of the documents... especially the Pension Fund docs. That would save a lot of weight and give me a quickly searchable copy. And may some of the booklets I can send to the scanner in advance of my leaving this afternoon. That would help too.

Someday we’re going to get to the point where we really don’t need to use as much paper. We’re not there yet...

Oh yeah, that reminds me, I need to find out where I stashed my little office tools in a notebook kit that I use at Convention. I think I remembered to pack it when we moved out here to Phoenix. Gotta run. More later...

Questions about Health Insurance in the Episcopal Church

I just got a nice mailing from the Church Pension Fund regarding the proposed legislation that would create a single national health plan for Episcopal Church employees. As of the moment each diocese (and in some places each parish) makes their own arrangements. In some cases the diocese decides to use the health insurance plans offered by the Pension Group. That’s what we do here in Arizona. In other cases dioceses make their own arrangements with insurance companies or encourage their parishes to do the best they can do on their own. That was my experience in my previous three dioceses.

The upshot of the patchwork system is that the health care benefits one is offered aren’t always exactly the same. It’s not been a real issue for us yet, but I imagine it could be. I have noticed that our vision and dental plans are different here in Phoenix than they were in the Diocese of Bethlehem. (They’re not as good here where we are enrolled in the national plan as they were in Bethlehem where we were enrolled in the state Chamber of Commerce plan.)

The downside though of finding your best deal on your own is that someone is going to have to be the plan administrator. In the case of my last parish, that someone was our assistant priest because she had the most experience of anyone on the staff in dealing with such situations. If it hadn’t been for her in a couple of insurance snafu situations I don’t know what we would have done. I certainly couldn’t have done what she managed to do - and that was true for most of the other parishes in the diocese. We had it pretty good because we had Mother Laura. Other places that didn’t have her had the experience of routine coverage being denied and claims being denied without the tenacious Mother Laura to make their insurance companies back down.

So, in principle, I am in favor of the national plan resolutions. It would create a single experienced advocate office for those of us needing help navigating the corridors of the insurance mess. It would give standard benefits to all the clergy across the country. And it costs, apparently, a little bit less.

But it’s only a little bit less. For us in Arizona, according the nice mailing I mentioned above, we’re looking at about 3% savings or so. That’s nice. But it’s not that big a deal for most of us.

What I don’t have is a sense of whether or not our health insurance is going to increase at the same rate it has been increasing. It’s now something like 20k to insure a family. That’s a real stretch for a small parish trying to hire a priest when you add that to salary, housing and pension.

The other thing is the savings are calculated on the basis of just the clergy who are presently enrolled. But, if the legislation passes as written, that group is going to be joined by a group of full-time lay employees who will now be mandated by canon to receive coverage comparable to what the clergy receive. That’s not a change for us here at the Cathedral in Phoenix since that’s already the case. But it will be a huge stretch for a number of parishes that are not now making that available. Suddenly they may be looking at something between an additional 10k to 20k cost per full-time employee. 

In a season of budgetary pressure, that may be a serious issue for a number of parishes already running in the red.

I wish the nice mailing told us how much the bottom line bill would increase if the new lay employee coverage was factored in. It might not be too much. It might be much more than I think. I just wish I knew that before I vote on the resolutions in the coming weeks.

Quick test of the blogging software

So, I’m just checking to see if I have my software configured properly. As annoying as it many bugs are, I still keep coming back to MacJournal to write my longer blog posts. It’s a great little program for writing while one is offline - and since there’s very little connectivity on the floor of the House of Deputies during General Convention - that’s how I’ll be writing down most of my observations.

Once you get back to a place where there’s a wireless signal, it’s a simple thing to upload the new entries. I used this package to write up my “live-blog” from the floor of convention the day that the new Presiding Bishop’s election was announced. I managed to be one of the first “eye-witnesses” to get my post up following the house’s motion to go into recess that evening.

The down side of the software is that it’s still rather clunky. It’s meant more for writing up a personal journal or diary than it is for blogging. And for posting links to other sites, or for quoting blocks of material by another writer, it’s missing a lot of the regular functionality that a dedicated application like MarsEdit includes.

But for longer pieces that are written in my own voice, it’s still my favorite. It has a nice full screen mode where you basically turn off all the computer distractions and just focus on getting your words down on the screen. It’s a lot like sitting down to a blank piece of paper on a typewriter. Which, as I recall, was one of the best parts of writing; at least for me.

So, if you’re reading this, you’ll know that I’ve got it working. And I’ll be planning on using it from the floor of Convention.

Watch this space as they say.

All Anaheim, all the time

I quipped the other day that I’m starting to think about the General Convention in Anaheim pretty much all the time right now. The start is less than a week away as I write this, and things are heating up a bit.

There are a couple of important things that I really think we’re going to need to ask ourselves, and they’re not things I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere. 1. Is it possible for the General Convention to set policy for the Episcopal Church?  Certainly the Convention is charged with creating changes to the Constitution, Canons and worship life of the Episcopal Church, but is it realistic to believe that Convention can find a way to manage the tactical day to day operations of the Episcopal Church. Lots of deputies attending General Convention believe that it can and should have responsibility for that level of management. And yet for the last nine years, the one constant refrain I’ve heard is the frustration of the Church Center staff with the actions of General Convention and the folks of General Convention being frustrated with the actions of the Church Center staff. Many of the Church Center staff were members of Convention or active in the Episcopal Church’s interim bodies before they were appointed or hired to their present positions in the Church Center. So it stands to reason that they shared the same frustrations that so many have on the outside of the staff. So, since most of the Church Center folks I’ve talked with now are frustrated with the Convention folks, I’d be very curious to hear what sorts of experiences they’ve had which have changed their minds. I’m not at all convinced that such a large body at the Episcopal Church and/or General Convention can really manage itself by the direction of a once every three year convention. I’m thinking that even Executive Council is too large to be very effective - and they are maybe a 1/10th the size of Convention and meet something like 3 times a year. Decisions just need to be made too quickly and second guessing everything by outsiders isn’t really helping. The result seems to be that we spend a great deal of time being frustrated with each other and watching mutual trust erode. It’s the eroding trust that exacerbates the situation and makes it generally so bad that people who are competent in their positions either refuse to apply, or when hired quickly decide that this is simply untenable and quit. I’m thinking that Convention needs to set broad policy and get out of the way of the folks being charged with implementing that policy. Which is how things work when they work well... 2. Have we become so addicted to fighting amongst ourselves in Convention that we’re going to unconsciously find conflict when there really isn’t any present?  I’m seeing signs that this is unfolding in front of us as we prepare for the opening gavel next week. Most of the angry conservatives have left. The folks who remain who are conservative are loyal Episcopalians and have, as yet, not prepared any real agenda to attack with at Convention. And yet friends of mine on the Progressive side are acting as if these remaining conservative voices need to be fought against with the same sort of vigor as they used in years past. Those who would really swing back to a provocation are now gone - for good or for ill. Those who remain are here to witness to what they believe but have no real expectation of being successful anymore. Dan Martins has something to say about all this here. With the absence of the true opposition to progressive voices, I’m watching the House of Bishops be deputized to fill the vacancy in the rhetoric of those on the progressive end of the spectrum. And I’m thinking that it’s happening not because the House of Bishop’s are really the bad people they’re being portrayed to be, but rather because we’re all so used to the conflict that we’re going to nominate someone to be the opposition no matter what the facts are... Which is probably not a healthy way to do things.

Ubuntu Mix

My friend Mel Ahlborn, the driving force behind ECVA, has created the following iTunes mix for General Convention.

(It's comprised of the tunes that will be quietly played as people are coming into the worship space and before the beginning of the preludes for the daily eucharists in Anaheim.)