Entangled States

Pusey in support of Common Prayer to Christ as the root of catholic community

Hurrah for Jeffrey who dug out this quote from Fr. Pusey (of Blessed Memory):

"'At Holy Communion we pray to God to 'inspire continually the Universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity and concord,' and for 'all Bishops,' not our own only. Certainly, since prayer is the voice of the soul to God, we express not our inmost belief only, but a loving belief, that the Church is one.

How it is one, the Church nowhere defines; but the faith is kept alive by prayer more than by definitions. Yet, whatever duties may follow up in the Unity of the Church, it is plain that no harmony of men's will can constitute a supernatural and Divine unity.

Unity, in part, is the direct gift of God; in part, it is the fruit of that gift in the mutual love of the members of the Church. In part, it is a spiritual oneness wrought by God the Holy Ghost; in part, it is a grace to be exercised by man, a consequence and fruit of that gift. In one way, it is organic unity derived from Christ and binding all to Christ, descending from the Head to the Body, and uniting the Body to the Head; in another, it consists in acts of love from the members one to another. Christ our Lord, God and Man, binds us to Him by the indwelling of His Spirit, by the gift of His Sacraments, administered by those to whom He gave the commission so to do, by the right faith in Himself. We are bound to one another, in that we are members of Him, and by the love which He sheds abroad in our hearts through the Spirit which he giveth us, and by common acts of worship and intercommunion.

Of these, the highest and chief is that which binds us to Christ Himself. Our highest union with one another is an organic union with one another through union with Him.'

--Edward Pusey's , Eirenicon"

Read the full comment here.

Thanks Jeffrey. I stayed up late last night reading a Life of Fr. Wainwright; Vicar of St. Peter's Dockside that Dean Dick George lent me. Besides the thrill of a number of appearances of Fr. Benson (founder of the Cowleys, who's American branch I have a relationship with), this lovely little book reminds of what catholic Anglicanism used to be and might become again.

Let me take the opportunity btw to commend Christopher's latest essay on the roots of catholic faith. Christopher quotes F.D. Maurice to good effect in making essentially the same point, and I think both Fr. Pusey and Maurice would be happy to be so connected.

He writes:

Catholicity is rooted in the New Humanity of Jesus Christ. This New Humanity treats others as they would wish to be treated, is patient, kind, generous, und so weite, and confronts our fallen humanity, including in the Churches. Catholicity is something to which the Churches, Christ’s Body, live into, not something we hold of our own accord or can grasp at. Only in Him in the Consummation will we see the fulness of catholicity in Christ. And we can err terribly against catholicity in the meantime, as we have in our history more than once. Correction is often painful and divisive. Dividing walls break down at high cost.

(For some reason Christopher's blog appears to not be available to the public at the moment, but hopefully that will soon be set right.)

Vatican announces its support for Rowan Willams' position

Thought this was interesting given my speculation earlier this week...

"The Vatican office 'supports the archbishop in his desire to strengthen these bonds of communion, and to articulate more fully the relationship between the local and the universal within the church,' the statement said.

'It is our prayer that the Anglican Communion, even in this difficult situation, may find a way to maintain its unity and its witness to Christ as a worldwide communion,' it added."

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Kendall Harmon for pointing this out to me.

David Simmons: Why am I an Episcopalian?

David has posted an essay today that echos a similar sentiment to what I just posted earlier this morning.

"A large portion of the reason for me is because our denomination historically refuses to play the cultural games others have been drawn into. The Episcopal Church is drastically worship-centered. This goes all the way back to the ‘Elizabethan Compromise’ in the Church of England in which unity in worship was considered more important than conformity in belief. This idea was codified in the ‘Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral’ (BCP 876) which set out the basics of a generous, creedal orthodoxy which could be affirmed by a wide variety of Christians of good faith.

As I became a member of the church, I noticed how diverse it was. We had Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Anglo-Catholics and liturgical Protestants. We had people of color in a culture where Sunday was still the most segregated day of the week. Any conversation in the parish hall that touched on religion was bound to bring up differences. In fact, if one had only come to the coffee hour, one might conclude that this was some sort of interdenominational gathering. But on Sunday mornings, we worshipped together as a family. While I could look at other churches in our town and pin exactly where the members of that church would live and how they would vote, our Episcopal church could not be so categorized. Five hundred years after the Elizabethan Compromise, our church still found its unity in the community-building mystery of worship, rather than in politics or intellectual assent to set principles. It was that vision of the Episcopal Church that I fell in love with - Christ-centered, faithful in worship, diverse in belief, and tolerant of difference. In a culture that tended to force churches to take set identities, we steadfastly refused and instead centered ourself on worship of the living God."

There's more to his essay - but this is my favorite bit. You should follow the link below and read the whole thing.

Read the full article here.

We pray together. And that's enough.

Here's the post I've been working on since the end of General Convention. People at Trinity Cathedral will recognize the language...

It's posted here on the Episcopal Café - where articles always tend to receive interesting feedback.

------

A few months ago one of the staff here at the Cathedral forwarded an email to me with a request that I answer the question it posed as he had no idea what he should say. The email was very simple. It was from a person in the community who was looking for a new church home. But, before he would consider a congregation, it was very important for him to know where we stood on the question of blessing same-sex couples.

There wasn’t any hint in the email about whether or not the sender wanted us to say we were for blessing same-sex couples or opposed. Just that it was critically important to him that we give the right answer so that he wouldn’t waste his time unnecessarily.

I get letters or questions like this quite commonly. I think most Episcopal clergy do these days. It’s the BIG question that seems to be used as a way to sort through congregations and dioceses so that we can determine which ones are right-thinking and therefore worthy of support and which ones are wrong and worthy of nothing. What was different about this letter though was that I simply couldn’t figure out what the person wanted me to say.

So rather than trying to be pastoral and sensitive in trying to respond to the question behind the question (as is my wont), I decided to be bluntly honest.

“There are people in this congregation who are fully supportive of the Church’s blessing of same-gender unions. There are people in this congregation who are opposed to the Church’s blessing of same-gender unions. While the Episcopal Church as a denomination is on record as calling for equal protection under the law for all citizens, if you’re looking for a congregation that is of one mind on this issue, you’re going to be disappointed with this one. We don’t have agreement internally on this particular - or many - issues. Instead, we just agree to pray and worship together”

We don’t agree with each other. We pray together.

Friends of mine who are involved in the church growth movement offer me their sympathy every three years or so following our denomination’s General Convention. “It must be really hard to grow a church that spends so much time fighting” they say. In the past I’ve agreed with them. But I think I’ve decided that it’s time we as Episcopalians tell the truth about who we are though in a way that tries to explain to

others why our struggles are not a “bug” - they’re a “feature”!

The Elizabethan Settlement, which for me is modeled at every Eucharist when I present the host to a communicant with the paradoxical words (to a person of Tudor England) “the body of Christ, the bread of Heaven”, is fundamental to our identity as Anglicans. We are willing to be in relationship with people who will gather with us around Jesus; whether they by free or slave, man or women, Jew or Greek. We

are the anti-puritans caring less about clarity of theological categories than we do about loving relationship. “If you will pray to Jesus with me, I will pray to Jesus with you.”

At least we try to when we’re at our best. Which isn’t always that often admittedly.

In my mind, as an Episcopalian of catholic leanings and ecumenical enthusiasm, if there’s one thing that argues for the continued existence of an Anglican witness in the Universal Church - it’s our charism of holding firm to praying with those with whom we disagree no matter how hard that is to do.

Eusebius writes that in the latter days of his life, St. John the Evangelist would respond to repeated requests of visitors to “tell of us of Jesus” by only repeating again and again “Little children, love one another.” When asked by those caring for him why he would only say that he is supposed to have responded “Because if they do only that, it is enough.”

Episcopalians don’t agree to agree. We pray with each other. Because if we can manage to just do that, it seems to me, that we will have done enough.

What happened when I responded to my inquirer wanting to know where the Cathedral I serve stood on the question of same-gender blessings? I sent my short note off fully expecting to never hear from him again.

I got a note back a day later; “That’s so awesome. I’ll be there this Sunday.”

Sam Candler on "choice" in the Archbishop of Canterbury's essay

My friend Keith points out in the comments on the blog entry immediately preceding this one that the Archbishop of Canterbury makes a strange rhetorical choice (to our ears) of describing the experience of being gay or lesbian as being, at one level at least, a lifestyle "choice".

Sam Candler, the Dean of the Cathedral in Atlanta has picked up on this usage of the Archbishop's and sees in his writing a sign of a more fundamental issue:

"Though descriptive, Archbishop Rowan’s essay also dips into diagnosis and prescription. In some of these matters, he will be open to theological critique. A primary critique will certainly be directed toward his repetition of the common perception that homosexuality is a ‘chosen lifestyle.’ Within two paragraphs, he uses ‘chosen lifestyle’ and ‘choice’ three different times.

The Episcopal Church’s General Convention resolutions concerning homosexuality have never claimed that homosexuality was simply a choice, or, much more, a ‘chosen lifestyle.’ Rather, Episcopal leaders have realized, over time, that being gay or lesbian was definitely not a choice for those members of our Church. Indeed, for many heterosexual persons, the realization that homosexuality is not chosen at all – no more than heterosexual persons choose their heterosexuality—has been the turning point in their ability to recognize God’s grace in homosexual relationships.

Obviously, the most prescriptive of Archbishop Rowan’s remarks is his suggestion, again, that the Anglican Communion of churches might develop a ‘two-tier’, or, less provocatively, a ‘two-way’ structure of formal Anglicanism. One way of being Anglican would stress the values of local faith and theology, and local autonomy; the other way would stress the values of more global, and probably more ordered, forms of the church.

I find it curious that Archbishop Rowan repeats the language of ‘choice’ not only in relation to homosexuality, but also in relation to Anglican Communion matters. He suggests that there may be those who will, in good faith, decline a covenanted structure. He implies that those who ‘elect this model’ will also ‘not take official roles in the ecumenical interchanges and processes in which the 'covenanted' body participates.’

It is the way that Archbishop Rowan uses ‘choice’ which is bothersome, as if it would be as easy for someone to choose a homosexual lifestyle as it would be them to choose a certain way of being Anglican. At their deepest levels of identity, neither homosexuality nor Anglicanism is a choice. In particular, Anglicans have claimed that Anglican Christianity is a gift; and part of that gift is a joint realization of local grace and global grace. I understand that certain formal parameters of an Anglican Covenant have yet to be developed, notably any ‘two-way’ system. However, it seems to me a distinctly un-Anglican maneuver to sever local autonomy from global communion. Those very poles, taken together within one orbit, are exactly what define the structure of the wider Anglican tradition."

Read the full article here.

What is Rowan Williams thinking?

Yesterday the Archbishop of Canterbury published his essay on the actions of the most recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church. You can find reactions to his essay here and here.

For what it’s worth I’m still not sure what to think. The language he uses in this letter is relatively strong for him. He takes a clear position opposing the ordination of partnered gay or lesbian bishops - and apparently argues that the same reason leads us to oppose the ordination of any partnered gay or lesbian person to any order. I suppose by extension he’s opened the door to opposition to any partnered relationship for the laity as well.

This is a major shift for him. He’s written both publicly and privately in the past that he does not in principle see any reason that gay and lesbian relationships, within certain boundaries (including sexual expression) can be and are holy. His argument in his letter is that the majority of Christians in the world have not come to a consensus on the question.

Which makes little sense, and he knows that. He’s possibly the finest theologian to sit in St. Augustine’s chair since St. Anselm. He knows that change in the church happens at the grassroots level or in the mission field and is then judged by the body as to whether or not it is God’s will. He knows that this takes centuries in some instances.

So why is he not talking about this now?

The Anglican Curmudgeon I think has the nub of it when he points out that Williams mentions ecumenism again and again in the essay. We have a Pope in Benedict that has apparently decided to make Ecumenical reunion a major theme of his Pontificate. The Pope has made overtures to the Orthodox, but that is going to be slow going given the fractious nature of Orthodoxy right now and the competing claims between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church as to who is the real voice of that Church in the 21st century. The Lutherans are probably near to the German Pope’s heart, but Lutheranism is at present a federation - there’s no official entity to enter into talks with at the moment. The broad spectrum of Protestant denominations have little interest in reunification.

That leaves the Anglicans.

A covenanted Anglicanism, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as primus inter pares, with a particular Archbishop who comes from the Catholic wing of the Communion, makes the most likely candidate to achieve reunion in the near future.

There is a great deal to gained in this possible reunion. I think most importantly for the British, it would give Her Majesty a real chance at reuniting the believers in England, and then perhaps of Britain into one shared faith again. Which, if I were her, I’d see as a goal worthy of pursuing with everything I had. Imagine what it might mean for Great Britain, for Ireland, for the Commonwealth, to put aside the religious tensions between the established churches and the resurgent Roman Catholics.

If this is true, and I suspect for a number of reasons that it is, given that the Archbishop and the Queen would probably agree on this reunion as being worthy of pursuing, the problem with it is that it is asking the Anglican Communion to achieve it by sacrificing it’s gay and lesbian members and their friends.

That, at least for me, no matter how committed I am to ecumenism, is not an option. I’ll do whatever I can to bring all of God’s people into a reconciled relationship with each other. But I won’t intentionally work to exclude any of God’s people to achieve it. Real reconciliation does not require us to deny who we are so as to be reconciled. I won’t consider jettisoning the conservative voices in the Episcopal Church so that our life would be less fractious. I can’t consider asking the LGBT members to leave either for the same reason. Doing either would cause us to cease being truly catholic - and would not speak to the hope that a catholic church can bring into a divided world.

New form of matter created in lab - transparent aluminum

News of the publication in Nature of new technique for bombarding crystalline metals, changing the electronic structure and fundamentally changing the resultant materials ability to interact with electro-magnetic radiation.

"''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UK’s Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

[...]

Professor Wark added: ‘What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’"

Read the full article here.

Pretty amazing stuff actually. Perhaps the folks on Star Trek weren't being so far-fetched when they first came up with the idea of see-through metals.

The Archbishop of Canterbury | Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future

The Archbishop of Canterbury has posted his thoughts on the work of the most recent General Convention. His essay opens:

"No-one could be in any doubt about the eagerness of the Bishops and Deputies of the Episcopal Church at the General Convention to affirm their concern about the wider Anglican Communion. Their generous welcome to guests from elsewhere, including myself, the manifest engagement with the crushing problems of the developing world and even the wording of one of the more controversial resolutions all make plain the fact that the Episcopal Church does not wish to cut its moorings from other parts of the Anglican family. There has been an insistence at the highest level that the two most strongly debated resolutions (DO25 and CO56) do not have the automatic effect of overturning the requested moratoria, if the wording is studied carefully. There is a clear commitment to seek counsel from elsewhere in the Communion about certain issues and an eloquent resolution in support of the 'Covenant for a Communion in Mission' as commended by ACC13. All of this merits grateful acknowledgement. The relationship between the Episcopal Church and the wider Communion is a reality which needs continued engagement and encouragement.

2. However, a realistic assessment of what Convention has resolved does not suggest that it will repair the broken bridges into the life of other Anglican provinces; very serious anxieties have already been expressed. The repeated request for moratoria on the election of partnered gay clergy as bishops and on liturgical recognition of same-sex partnerships has clearly not found universal favour, although a significant minority of bishops has just as clearly expressed its intention to remain with the consensus of the Communion. The statement that the Resolutions are essentially 'descriptive' is helpful, but unlikely to allay anxieties.

3. There are two points which I believe need to be reiterated and thought through further, and it seems to fall to the Archbishop of Canterbury to try and articulate them. To some extent they echo part of what I wrote after the last General Convention, as well as things said at the Lambeth Conference and the ACC, but they still have some pertinence."

Read the full article here.

Pierre Whalon | What did and didn't happen at General Convention 2009

Helpful article by Bishop Whalon over at Anglicans Online, of which the following is only a small excerpt:

"Every three years, for at least thirty years, the media have descended upon the General Convention, fishing for tidbits that make for great headlines: ‘Episcopal Church Votes to [fill in the blank]!’ They often get it completely wrong, either because of ignorance (qualified religion journalists being even scarcer than qualified curling reporters) or malice (Episcopalians are fun to ridicule because we are so open, and we present a much safer target than say, radical Muslims). Other commentators, usually more thoughtful, joined the chorus of inaccurate reporting this time. Philip Jenkins asserted in the Wall Street Journal that this Convention ‘ended the ban on gay clergy.’[1] Bishop Tom Wright of Durham, England, a noted New Testament scholar, went further. Writing in the Church Times, he opined that ‘The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States has voted decisively to allow in principle the appointment, to all orders of ministry, of persons in active same-sex relationships. This marks a clear break with the rest of the Anglican Communion.’[2]

Both are wrong. We did not pass any such resolutions. What did happen was that, after a protracted struggle in the House of Deputies over the moratorium on ordination of partnered gay bishops, a compromise resolution, numbered D025 and entitled ‘Commitment and Witness to the Anglican Communion,’ passed both Houses. It described the situation in The Episcopal Church, namely, that the prevailing sentiment these days is that gay people can be ordained to all three orders, though disagreement certainly continues within the church as well as within the rest of the Communion. There was also a lot of language about listening to the rest of the Anglican Communion, about our constituent membership and desire to remain a part of it, in this resolution and others."

Read the full article here.

As Bishop Whalon points out, there are other headlines that might have been written, such as Convention affirms that "Jesus is Lord". But that's hardly newsworthy - at least to people within the Episcopal Church. But listening to our critics, you might think that they'd find the clear statement on the fundamentals of the faith that was passed to occasion at least a nod.

General Convention Video wrap-up

Jim Dela, president of Episcopal Communicators and font of many many useful resources, has done it again with this video wrap of what happened at General Convention.

It's worth the six minutes of your time.

Lessons from the Fall

(I'm working on a piece about General Convention but it's not ready to post yet. So in the meantime, here's something for y'all to chew on.)

The cause of the Roman Empire's collapse has been variously attributed. Gibbons thought that it had to do in part with the empire's adoption of Christianity. I just finished a book that argued it had to do with the fundamental need of the Roman economic model to constantly grow, meeting the relatively un-forrested steppes of Eastern Europe. That's two. There are many others. One of my favorites is that the Roman cavalry was slow to adopt the stirrup.

There's an essay posted on Peak Oil that argues that the collapse was a result of Roman Society reaching an unsustainable level of complexity. Once the peak had been reached, it took more and more effort to maintain the status-quo, which consumed greater and greater amounts of capital and quickly exhausted the necessary resources required for evolutionary change.

(It seems to me to be analogous to the effect to churches of drawing down endowment principle to balance short term budget deficits. It creates a positive-feedback cycle that quickly exhausts an organizations reserves.

NB: I'm worried, as are some friends of mine, that the Episcopal Church tends to do this in an attempt to be fair rather than in an disciplined attempt to respond strategically.)

From the article on The Oil Drum that discusses the reasons for the Roman Fall:

"So, our Druid had seen the future and was describing it to Emperor Aurelius. He had seen the solution of the problems of Empire: Middle Ages. It was where the Empire was going and where it could not avoid going. What the Druid was proposing was to go there in a controlled way. Ease the transition, don't fight it! If you know where you are going, you can travel in style and comfort. If you don't, well, it will be a rough ride.

We may imagine a hypothetical 'driven transition' in which the government of the Roman Empire at the time of Marcus Aurelius would have done exactly that: abandon the walls, reduce the number of legions and transform them into city militias, reduce bureaucracy and Imperial expenses, delocalize authority, reduce the strain on agriculture: reforest the land. The transition would not have been traumatic and would have involved a lower loss of complexity: books, skills, works of art and much more could have been saved and passed to future generations.

All that is, of course, pure fantasy. Even for a Roman Emperor, disbanding the legions couldn't be easy. After all, the name 'Emperor' comes from the Latin word 'imperator' that simply means 'commander'. The Roman Emperor was a military commander and the way to be Emperor was to please the legions that the Emperor commanded. A Roman Emperor who threatened to disband the legions wouldn't have been very popular and, most likely, he was to be a short lived Emperor. So, Emperors couldn't have done much even if they had understood system dynamics. In practice, they spent most of their time trying to reinforce the army by having as many legions as they could. Emperors, and the whole Roman world, fought as hard as they could to keep the status quo ante , to keep things as they had always been. After the 3rd century crisis, Emperor Diocletian resurrected the Empire transforming it into something that reminds us of the Soviet Union at the time of Breznev. An oppressive dictatorship that included a suffocating bureaucracy, heavy taxes for the citizens, and a heavy military apparatus. It was such a burden for the Empire that it destroyed it utterly in little more than a century."

Read the full article here.

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the past 10 years or so about how the Episcopal Church is seeing the future of some of our depopulating dioceses (especially in Appalachia and the increasingly de-industrialized midwest). We know where we're heading given the decrease in population in areas that used to be able to support a full-service congregation.

It would be better for us to try to live into the future now, so that we make a relatively painless transition. But instead we seem to be engaged in finger pointing and blame about the causes of the decline and that's leading us fritter away critical time and resources that will lead to a much more painful transition that is necessary.

Swine Flu update

Swine Flu Update
21 July 2009

The World Health Organization has recently announced that the new H1N1 strain of swine flu is “unstoppable” and that every country should vaccinate its citizens against the virus. This statement came as New Zealand researchers announced further that H1N1 has replaced seasonal influenza as the dominant strain during that country’s current wintertime flu season. Of significance, Sue Huang, head of New Zealand’s influenza center, said it’s the most contagious bug she has ever seen.
Other recent reports point to older people being more immune to H1N1 due to exposure to similar strains when they were younger, whereas younger people can sometimes have life-threatening implications having little or no immunity to H1N1.
It is of interest to note that H1N1 doesn’t remain in the nose and throat as do most seasonal flu viruses. It can replicate aggressively in the lungs and intestines, doing severe damage to multiple organs, especially among those who are overweight. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) noted that 9 out of 10 patients treated for H1N1 in an ICU at the University of Michigan were obese.
Several companies are currently rushing to produce vaccines in time for the Northern Hemisphere’s winter flu season. The real question(s) that will be central on the minds of the decision makers will be: 1) Will there be enough vaccine available to vaccinate everyone?, and 2) if not, who will establish the list of priorities for those who get vaccinated and those who do not??

Sources: CDC, WHO

A very handy and useful check list is available for individuals and families that wish to plan for influenza pandemic now at: www.pandemicflu.gov. On the left-hand side of the screen scroll down to the Plan and Prepare heading and open. Depending on one’s particular interest, there is a wide variety of items to choose from.............

First thought after General Convention 2009

I'm still processing what has happened at General Convention in Anaheim. I think I'll try to post something of a reflection at some point this week. Probably sooner than later. While I'm tired following Convention, I'm not as absolutely blown as I was following the conventions in 2003 and 2006. That's probably because there was so much less question about what was going to happen once we took the vote of D025 in the form it was presented in to the House of Deputies. The big surprise for me was the margins in the passage.

But I do have this one thought kicking around in my head. It's a riff off a lecture that I heard given by Margaret Mitchell of Chicago Div School on St. Paul's letters to the Church in Corinth and the main point that Paul was making to the people asking him to adjudicate between them.

If you're looking for who won or who lost then you've lost. The problem isn't being right and others wrong. The problem is that we don't love each other enough.

What to do after General Convention adjourns today?

Warning: This post is not on the topic of what the Episcopal Church should do, or what the Anglican Communion should do, it's what *I* personally intend to do on Monday and Tuesday...

When I returned home from Convention in Columbus, I was emotionally drained. The intensity and the anguish felt by so many over the last few days of that Convention took a massive toll. When I got home, besides sleeping for a day or two, I just sort of sat and stared out the window. I ended up digging out my director versions of the Lord of Rings movies and spent a few days watching the whole series sequentially. Sort of like going to Bayreuth for a full Ring cycle.

I'm not as drained this Convention. The bishops have made the big decisions already (and there's little or no question about where the House of Deputies is standing on this during this particular Convention) and the budget discussions yesterday were mostly a waste of time in terms of accomplishing anything. So given that I'm not exhausted, I'm thinking I need to find a nice mental challenge for a couple of days of vacation.

I think I've found it:

"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates believes that if he had been able to watch physicist Richard Feynman lecture on physics in 1964 his life might have played out differently.

Mr. Gates, of course, is legendary as a Harvard University dropout who went on to create the world’s most successful software firm. He has told associates that if had watched the lectures earlier in his life he might have become a physicist instead of a software entrepreneur.

However, Mr. Gates, who is also well known for his sharp and varied intellectual interests and his philanthropic commitment to education, said this week that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Dr. Feynman gave at Cornell University called “The Character of Physical Law,” in an effort to make them broadly available via the Internet."

Read the full article here.

My advisor back when I was working in the area of General Relativity was Ed Kerner. Kerner was famous around the school as having been Feynman's first grad student. Dr. Kerner (I never ever called him by his first name, not even behind his back) was said to have had much of the same lecture style as his advisor had. Kerner, while certainly one of the finest mathematical minds I've ever known, never ever lost sight of the physics behind the equations. He told me that he'd learned that skill from *his* advisor.

I've read the Feynman lectures a couple of times now, but I always wished I could have seen Dr. Feynman actually deliver them. Now I can apparently.

I think I'm going to do just that for my aperitif in the coming week.

A word of Prophecy to the Episcopal Church

Those of you who know me, know that I'm not the sort of person who uses the word "prophesy" lightly. So pay attention when I tell you that we may have seen a prophet speaking to us in the halls of General Convention yesterday.

And it had nothing to do with who held hands with who.

Bishop Stephen Charleston explicitly asked God to grant him the mantle and voice of a prophet as he spoke to Convention. He called upon the Holy Spirit to quicken his words in our hearts. He predicted a miracle. Pretty much all the typical signs of a prophet.

It was a call to live into a new relationship with each other and with the Earth.

From his sermon:

"'The day will come when the future will look back on what we have been doing here and see in our discussions -- though they appear to us in this moment, so fraught with importance -- issues as antique as the concern as to whether or not women could have the right to vote and whether we should stop the practice of child labor,' said Charleston.

'And yet they will consider our folly on a planet that is but a burnt cinder, compared to the garden that has allowed us the luxury to have these self same debates. They will live in a world in which wars over water will make ours over oil pale in comparison.'

But, he said, it doesn't have to be so. As the history of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion have shown, people can live in peace even when they disagree and people are capable of living in harmony with the natural world.

'In the name of Jesus of Nazareth I call upon the presence of the Holy Spirit … the spirit of the very earth itself and ask that that spirit come into this room and touch each and every one of you who is listening to me now,' Charleston concluded. 'Let your mind be opened to the truth of what I have spoken here today, let your heart be set on fire … be not afraid Episcopal Church, but stand proud and tall into this great commission of God.

'This is our moment, this is our time, this is our call and under an anointing of the spirit of God we will not fail in that call, but be in the vanguard of a change that will resound around the world full of hope and grace to renew humanity itself through the hope and power of Jesus in whose name I have preached and in whose name I have prayed.' "

Read a fuller report here. There's a video of the Bishop's sermon on the right hand side of the page. (And linked here I hope.)

Episcopal Church likely to approve pastoral provisions to support those in same-sex marriages

So now what?

What’s going to happen now?

Yesterday, to my surprise, the House of Bishops voted the way most of us expected them to vote going into General Convention and acted to begin a process that allows the Episcopal Church to respond to the context in which we are doing ministry. (To my surprise because I had heard from a number of bishops that they thought they would act to table the resolution that would have allowed this to happen.) A number of states have approved legal marriage for same-sex couples over the two years, and we have every reason to expect that this approval will expand to other states.

As a result we have in our midst couples who have been married in the eyes of the State but for whom there is no authorized liturgy to mark that event. There’s no clear teaching that’s broadly issued that explains what the Church believes about such relationships and what it will commit to doing in pastoral support of couples.

Given the state’s actions and the resulting need, the Episcopal Church is starting to respond. Our tradition has been to create liturgies in a thoughtful, broadly inclusive process that carefully tries to fashion a common mind that is expressed in the language of the prayers we use. To date we’ve not done this. Individuals and organizations have done this, but the Episcopal Church has not responded by bringing the fullness of its liturgical mind to the question.

It appears to me that the ammended resolution, C055 - that is coming to the House of Deputies either today or tomorrow from the House of Bishops - is going to allow this process to begin. It’s also going to make explicit what has been implicit to this point. It’s going to give permission for bishops and dioceses in states and districts where same-sex marriage is now legal to work openly to find ways to minister pastorally to those who are now allowed to be married.

It doesn’t cross the explicit line of actually authorizing the useage for the whole Episcopal Church, but clearly that is the expected next step. And I’d be very surprised if we didn’t do that in Indianapolis in 2012.

I remember reading somewhere that Julius Caesar is said to have remarked as he and his legions crossed the Rubicon, “thus the dice is thrown.” For obvious reasons I’ve been thinking about that phrase this morning. So, here we go…

For what it’s worth, Bishop Smith of Arizona voted for the provision. I expect the Arizona deputation will unanimously as well.

Wait..., what?

So what exactly has happened here at Anaheim. Truthfully? No one is really completely sure. But some people appear certain.

The Episcopal News Service had what some bishops have described as a very unfortunate headline on Monday that declared confidently that the Episcopal Church had decided to "open ordination to gay and lesbian Christians". (Or something to that effect… I believe the headline has been pulled and the story spiked.) I’m told that something close to controlled fury errupted in the House of Bishops about that yesterday. Or at least that’s how it was described to me. The Presiding Bishop was not pleased. Not pleased at all. A new version of the story will be issued. Apologies were made to the bishops that the “inaccurate” story had been posted. The ordination process in the Episcopal Church has been open to Gay and Lesbian members for a very long time. There was never any question of backtracking on that question. The issue was over whether or not there would be additional ordinations of priests in same-gender partnerships to the episcopate at this time.

One hears that the phone lines between Anaheim and Lambeth have been burning over the last 24 hours.

Bishop NT Wright, the Bishop of Durham in the UK has written an op-ed, apparently reacting the the Episcopal News Service version of events, that charges the Episcopal Church with willfully deciding to walk apart from the rest of the Anglican Communion.

For my part, I did no such thing, nor to the best of my knowledge did anyone at the deputations around me on the floor. We tried to express our internal conflict as best we could. It’s hard to understand the import of what happened. We believe that there will be more partnered gay and lesbian bishops in the future. We strongly desire to be allowed to remain a part of the Communion. We don’t see those two statements as contradictory, but others do.

The lack of clarity is not meant to be obfuscatory - certainly not on my part. It represents the muddled and confused place the Episcopal Church finds itself right now. It’s was not meant to, and it does not deliver clarity according to the standards of those demanding it. It struggles to be honest. That’s why I was writing earlier this week that I would certainly be understanding of the anger of people on the left of the Episcopal Church and our gay and lebian brothers and sisters who feel that this action in D025 is pretty-weak sauce.

Bishop Kirk Smith probably has it right. If B033 was in fact a dejure ban on the ordination of additional gay or lesbian partnered bishops (and that’s been debatable for a while), that dejure ban is reasonably read to be ended. If B033 is read to be a defacto ban, then the ban is demonstratably still in effect until another gay or lesbian partnered bishop’s election is confirmed by the larger Episcopal Church. Is that going to happen soon? I don’t know. I’m not thinking its terribly likely right now when people are worried about balancing budgets and doing whatever they can to avoid conflict. On the other hand there’s nothing in formal in place to stop that election and consent from happening.

I’ve learned at General Convention to not worry about what may happen or what we might do. I’ve learned that we are asked to vote on specifics of the legislation in front of us, not the generalities of the explanations or the rhetoric of the debate. I think this focus on the particulars of each situation is going to be the best thing for us going forward. Anglican Moral Theology has always insisted that “circumstances alter cases”. Focusing on what is rather than on what might be coming right now is probably the best strategy going forward.

We have gay bishops in the Episcopal Church. We have two partnered gay bishops, one retired and one active. That’s a fact on the ground. Will we have more? Yes. When? That’s still not clear. We’ve moved beyond B033 certainly. But honestly, for good or ill, we’ve not moved very far. 

Bishop Wright's op-ed piece seems a little prematurely posted. Americans are very good at being willful and sending clear signals. If we've not done so, it wasn't by mistake.

Tears of truth

Over the weekend, the work of the House of Deputies was interupted for 20 minutes when the President of the House invited a group of speakers from parts of the Anglican South to address the deputies. It was an unexpected event and Bonnie Anderson was pretty mysterious about what was going to happen when she proposed suspending the rules to allow our guests access to the floor of the House.

Something like six visitors from all around the world, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, New Zealand (and one other?) brought us greetings from their provinces and assured us of their prayers for us.

I have to admit that I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. I’m so used to having visitors from the Communion take us to task for what we have done or not done in the Episcopal Church. But as the speakers went on, there was none of that, at least in the beginning.

But when the Dean of Georgetown began to speak to us I realized that this was going to be different. He spoke of the admiration that the people of the Province of South Africa have for the Episcopal Church and our struggles to remain faithful to the tasks God has given us and the context in which we minister. He brought us words from Desmond Tutu thanking us for our Christlike restraint and obedience to the harsh words of the larger Communion. And he gently chided us for being too accomadating to our critics in the Communion… 

When he got to that point I knew something was different.

So when the final speaker, Jenny Te Paa, a member of the Lambeth Commission which had created the Windsor Report, rose to speak to us, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. Dr. Te Paa had spoken to us in 2006 when General Convention met in Columbus. I don’t remember her exact words, but they were something to the effect that while she loved the Episcopal Church and the many progressive stands we had taken, she was concerned that we were willfullly damaging the Communion and that we needed to slow down. Coming from a liberal member of the Windsor Commission, I listened very carefully to what she said.

But this day, in Anaheim, her tone was very different. She began by reminding us that she came from the only Province of the Communion (New Zealand) that has ever been formally censured by the Communion. (They were censured for creating a polity that explicitly required a parity among the various races of New Zealand in the leadership of that Province, which was a critically important response to the context in which they lived.) She then confessed her sadness that she had misunderstood the polity of the Episocpal Church when she had served on the Lambeth Commission. She specifically mentioned her being misled as to the role and authority of our Presiding Bishop within the Episcopal Church. And she both apologized and shared her regret that she had been party to the harsh words spoken. (You can read her full remarks here.)

What surprised me as she was speaking was the GIANT lump that was rising in my chest. I was almost overwhelmed by an emotion of gratitude that someone finally had recognized the truth about the Episcopal Church. We have been accused of doing so many things, most of which we simply haven’t done. General Convention did not force Gene Robinson on the people of New Hampshire. Frank Griswold did not ordain Gene contrary to the wishes of the people of the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church has not turned its back on the Anglican Communion no matter what voices in the Communion are saying.

I was so grateful that someone of stature from the rest of the Communion was finally hearing us and publicly admitting error.

...

Fast forward to Sunday lunchtime. I’d been invited (for some reason unknown to me) to a lovely lunch sponsored by the Chicago Consultation. The Consultation is a group of people in the Episcopal Church who are striving to find a both/and solution to the question of Inclusion in the Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church’s membership in the wider Communion. I was seated at a table with a theologian, another priest, two lay women, one of the Communion’s primates and an Episcopal bishop. We had lunch, listened to speakers, and then we talked.

It was in the talking that the emotions stirred up in Jenny Te Paa’s speech finally overwhelmed me. I was recounting to people around the table how deeply touched I had been by her words, my voice cracked and I started to cry. Frankly I was stunned. I don’t actually cry that often. And hardly ever in public. That I was doing so here, in this luncheon told me how very profoundly I have buried the hurt that the words by others have caused. Some of the others from around the Communion at the table joined me in my tears. And the weight on my heart began to lift and by the end of the day on Sunday was gone.

Sometimes tears are cleansing. Perhaps this is one of those. So many tears have been shed by so many people in Anglican Church over the past decade. Most of those have been tears of hurt shed by LGBT members of the Communion. My tears on Sunday were to me a symbol of reconciliation that the Episcopal Church is faithfully attempting with them and with the larger Communion. Reconcilliation begins, can only begin, with telling the full truth of who we are. I believe that the actions that have just been passed by the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops are truthful. They are come with tears of relief on the part of many and tears of regret by a few. 

But such is always the case with the truth.

Perhaps now we can begin the work of reconciliation in earnest inside the Episcopal Church and inside the Anglican Communion, so that we can get back to the fundamental mission of Christ’s Church; Reconciling the world to God.

D025, the blogsphere and the House of Bishops

What happened yesterday in the House of Deputies?

According to many, not much. According to some, full steam toward Anglican Schism. It depends who you read.

A resolution was passed (D025) by wide margins in the House of Deputies that was clearly understood to be a compromise. It intends, according to the committee that wrote its final form, to do nothing more than state the truth of where we are and what are practice is and has been. It states that we have many partnered gay and lesbian clergy in the Episcopal Church, and that the Episcopal Church does not intend to change that. It states that our constitution specificially forbids automatically closing down an ordination process because of a candidate’s orientation. (Our constitution actually doesn’t speak to whether a person is partnered or not.) It does not mention B033 at all.

During the debate on the floor, a number of folks asked the parliamentarian whether or not this resolution had the effect of repealing B033. There was no clear answer. Apparently the resolution’s ambiguity is intentional. At least you can say that the House of Deputies acted to pass that resolution fully aware that it was ambiguous. In fact, ambiguity was part of the appeal to a number of conservative voters, at least according to what they told me. They didn’t support the resolution in principle, but they could live with it.

It is an honest attempt to express where the Episcopal Church is at the moment. Which is that the Episcopal Church is living in an ambiguous moment in its life where the tension created by lack of clarity is something that is being embraced rather than rejected.

I voted for it. It is to my mind honest.

Reading online this morning I see that people are already projecting onto its lack of specificity whatever ever they are desiring. Some authors and some in the Church of England are claiming that this action represents a “thumbing of the nose” at the Communion by the House of Deputies. If that’s what this is, then truth be told, it’s pretty weak sauce. This resolution is explicit in stating the Episcopal Church’s desire to be a full participant in the life of the Communion. It does, admittedly, express the Episcopal Church’s full resolve however to not move to repeal the progress made thus far on the question of the full inclusion of Gay and Lesbian Christians.

I see other voices, in the LGBT community, who see this as yet another half-assed compromise that is a form of appeasement toward those for whom no appeasement has yet to have been enough. For them, if this is a repeal of B033, it’s pretty thin gruel. I have to admit that I think they have some validity for their frustration. As written, it’s a compromise and not the ringing rejection they hoped for, and certainly there’s no sense of apology to the LBGT community.

Other voices in the LBGT community are delighted with the passage, and heartned at the strong margins that the voters on the floor delivered. They are willing to live into what is possible in democratic processes and hear the Episcopal Church’s resolve to not back down any further at the very least, and to be willing to edge forward a bit more. (Which I believe is a fair reading of the language.)

All of this is going to be moot of course depending on what the House of Bishops decideds to do with the legislation. If they do not pass it, it’s dead. If they ammend it, it’s probably going to face a difficult passage back through the House of Deputies. It’s really going to be up to them to pass it unammended if there is going to be a unambigious ambiguous response…

The sense here at Convention is that no one can tell what the Bishops will do. Many of them are in favor of moving on this resolution and some are dissappointed that this resolution doesn’t go further. But watch over the next couple of days to see how the ambiguity of the resolution is spun in the press. If the press and the blogsphere, in their pursuit of a good summer conflict story, decide to claim that D025 represents a repudiation of 2006-B033, then the chances of D025 passing the House of Bishops drop significantly. I’m told the bishops are not going to send that sort of a signal to the Communion. If the press and others are able to see D025 as the compromise it was understood to be by so many in the House of Deputies, perhaps it will have a chance of passing.

Funny thing that D025’s passage depends not on what it says at the moment, but on what people say that it represents.

But that’s the way things have been for a while now in the Anglican Communion. We’re not actually reading with a hermenuetic of charity what each other is saying, we’re reading it with the lens of what the blogsphere decides was meant.

There is movement from 2006

There’s one major change I noticed in the open committee discussion of B033 that happened yesterday on the floor of the House of Deputies. Only one of the 30 or so people who spoke even came close to arguing that same-sex relationships were fundamentaly wrong and even that person insisted on saying the behavior didn’t trump his love for his lesbian daughter.

That’s different from the way the conversations were happening in 1997,2003 and 2006 (the other General Conventions that I’ve attended). In those, there were always more than a few strong voices who would loudly proclaim the either orientation (or just behavior) were fundamentally wrong. This year the one third or so of the voices who were arguing for B033 almost all implied that it would be going away.

Now granted, the way that the voices were chosen to speak yesterday meant that they were a great deal more random than they have been before and they may not represent a totally accurate representation of where we are as a body, I was struck by this observation.

We’re no longer arguing “if”, we’re discussing “when”. We are now working on tactics not strategy.

That’s different.

Most of that can attributed to a number of folks either leaving the Episcopal Church, or deciding to stay away from Convention this year, but still…

Convention seems to me to be the best way we have of gauging the broad opinion spectrum in the Episcopal Church. So it’s worth thinking through what this shift implies.

Now, the other interesting thing is that the two-thirds or so of those who spoke for changing the official stance of the Episcopal Church seemed to be implying different actions as their suggested course.

Maybe half called for the outright repeal of B033. The others called to move “beyond” it. It’s the “move beyond” details that seems to be the question in the House of Deputies at General Convention right now.

Still no sense of where the House of Bishops is standing in all this.

The first sort of bellwether vote is coming for them on language that would guide the language and support for trans-gendered people in the ordination process. The committee that voted it to move forward to the legislative houses was deeply divided. The bishops were apparently unanimous in opposition. I think it comes for a vote in their House sometime today or tomorrow...