Nate Knows Nada

God owns many cars! See for yourself!

Yesterday, in The New York Times, there was an article about the fracas engaging my church.

I don’t know if I have mentioned it in this forum before, but my religious affiliation is with the Episcopal Church. I’m a member in good standing (whatever that means), but I haven’t found a parish here in the Boston area that I’ve felt like I wanted to join yet. It’s been hard to give up my old parish, but I have grown to enjoy the monks here in Cambridge.

I converted about six years ago, from a childhood spent among conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists (which are different groups almost entirely). I was raised a Free Methodist (like Nazarenes, if you know what they are), attended schools run by the Southern Baptists and then the Christian Reformed Church. I left church for a few years, especially during college, and when I was becoming more and more aware that at the least I was not straight.

One of the reasons that I joined the Episcopal Church was because large parts of it are pretty welcoming to GLBTQ people. There were other reasons, equally important and which are theologically and liturgically based. In fact, the gay stance flowed from the theology and liturgy that I found so *right*, especially in comparison to the churches I grew up in. Two wonderful aspects of Anglicanism to me were the idea that church wasn’t something we made up that morning, that there was a sense of connection to some historic institution that stretched across the centuries, and second that the unity of the Church at large was the greatest goal that we as a religious body could achieve. The uber-Protestantism of my youth was pretty deficient on both counts. Church service was about doing what seemed most convenient or trendy at the time (for example, I believe that my old church has now adopted the “Southern California”, three praise choruses and a sermon model of worship services.). There was no sense that anything was any older than the oldest congregant. And on the second note, these churches had put the “Protestant principle” into full practice — when there was any doubt about doctrinal purity or interpretation, split up instead of trying to figure out how to live in love and peace with one another. Compromise was a greater “sin” than harmony.

Now we’re facing a big set of problems in the Anglican Communion. They’re two, fairly separate to my mind, but linked by the issue of homosexuality in the Church. Without going into the background (the NYT article above does a decent job of doing so), here’s my take.

First, the diocese of New Hampshire has decided by election to take as their new bishop an openly gay man who’s living in a committed partnership. (He was once married, but his wife and he parted amicably, and she remarried before he met his partner. Also, because it was the understanding at the time, he underwent “reparative therapy” twice a week before the divorce/annulment/whatever it was happened.) Anglicans reckon that each diocese is fairly independent from one another and that the people of a diocese are to be allowed independence in the governing of their affairs. We intentionally do not have a hierarch like the modern Roman Catholic pope, because that model is not our understanding of the best form of church government. Now, New Hampshire is not a diocese full of liberals or reformers — if you know anything about New Hampshire, you know it’s the conservative, libertarian part of New England. These are the people who have the motto “Live Free or Die” on their flag. After working with Gene Robinson for years, they went through an exhaustive search procedure, and they decided that he was the man God was leading them to select as their new leader. But 24 conservative bishops of the US Church, and several archbishops worldwide have threatened to break with the American church should Robinson be approved in the next couple of weeks. They have threatened to do the Protestant thing and split, rather than stay in bed with what they regard as a tainted church. (I might note that Anglicans generally consider themselves to be both Catholic and Protestant — we’re both and neither. So we have strains of both in our practice and theology. I think we tend to get in trouble when we fall too far to one of those sides or the other.)

Second is the issue of blessing gay unions in the church. In the ECUSA, we’ve come to recognize that gay partnerships have made a valuable contribution to our common life together as brothers and sisters in Christ. We have had no official, churchwide liturgies available to recognize the blessign of God on such unions, and one of the hot topics at the convention will be whether we should direct our liturgical body to develop rites available for use in this situtation, should anyone want them. It’s important to note that these rites would actually be for the use of people who want to have an ecclesiastical recognition of their relationship(s) that are not marriage, so it could be for male-female, male-male, or female-female relationships. It’s also good to recognize that no one will be MADE to perform or use these liturgies — they are simply optional.

So, unsurprisingly, I have two opinions here. On the first, I think the Primates of the southern hemisphere should get their noses out of New Hampshire’s business. Their threats made with the intent of dictating to the American and Canadian churches what will or will not be approvable behavior violates the Anglican understanding of church governance. Moreover, it’s a blatantly hypocritical move, as these churches have demonstrated problems of their own (polygamy, for example, including among a couple of bishops, which if we are getting picky, is expressly against Biblical injunction, whereas the case against homosexuality is much shakier and probably just the reification of prejudice) but have not seen fit to make a huge case out of them. “First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see fit to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Bishop-elect Robinson is exactly right: he’s not the one splitting the Communion, these bishops are the ones creating the schism. If you’re asking me (and since you’re reading here, you are, in a sense), the greater sin is in the sacrifice of unity than in a matter that still seems up for debate and discussion. But rather than continue to discuss, which they agreed to do six years ago at the Lambeth conference, they would rather cut and run. (In addition to the ecclesiological problem, they may be committing a form of organizational suicide. From the anecdotal evidence that I have been able to gather, the southern hemisphere churches receive a great deal or money and support from dioceses and parishes that are overwhelmingly “liberal,” such as Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York, about a block from the former World Trade Center (and this church did a lot of work in helping to support the relief work surrounding the terrorist disaster in Spetember 2001).) More important than “purity” (which actually smells a lot like a doctrine of legalism, rather than of love), we are called by God to work out our salvation in love with each other. So the threat to break things off with the intent of forcing others to follow your interpretation of God and His hopes for humanity seems far worse than perhaps (and how are we to know?) having the “wrong” person in one of many jobs. As St. Augustine said in one of his Sermons, “Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God.”

As to the move to approve liturgies for the blessing of non-marriage relationships, I think that we need to hold off for one more triennium. I fear that this will split the American Church in a far worse way than the above matter. I think we would sacrifice the unity of the church on an altar of our own making, and I think, again, that we must seek to preserve that Unity, not at whatever cost, but with a view toward understanding that this institution has existed for 2000 years, and we have only just the beginning understanding of what that means and how the church lives its common life. It will probably take another 2000 years to find our way back to one another, but I don’t think we should necessarily encourage splitting. Yes, we need these liturgies; yes, they are right and “all right”; yes, the church has moved too slowly on the issues of justice for us GLBT people. But let us drag the church kicking and screaming into the conversation about sexuality promised us three years ago, which has barely happened, and from there we will move forward to the liturgies we desperately need. This can be how we work out our salvation in love, as we are commanded to do.

I love God and I love his Church, because I’ve found a life in God through it. (I’ve found G-d outside the Church, too, but that’s another blog for another day.) I don’t want to see it receive another set of body blows that break it down.

… if your appetite was whetted for my musings on The West Wing by that post from a few weeks ago, here it is.

This article on collective nouns is one of the funniest bits I’ve read in recent memory. Where else can you get a discussion of a “hide of leather daddies”?

Big Brother, the confabulist antagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, can’t be found in the Bush Administration. Much as the Left hates (at least somewhat justifiably) the Ashcroft gulag and the Rumsfeld poetry machine, the real danger probably does not come from agents of the government. Rather than the control of how we speak, think, receive information, and act coming from a centralized authority with the power to imprison and forcibly deprive us of our liberties (and I’m not sure whether I shouldn’t put that last term in quotes), we will probably give them up willingly in the pursuit of consumer goods and material power.

I first starting thinking about this after watching Bowling for Columbine with BF. (He was thinking pretty intently about it also.) Michael Moore conducts a semi-social science experiment to try to figure out what the differences between Canada and the U.S. are in terms of the attitude toward guns. Part of the difference lies in the approach to fear in each country. We (U.S.) seem to be a more fearful society. Our news is full of it, our entertainment builds on it, and our politics thrives upon it. And Marilyn Manson (of all people) seems to hit it right on the head when he notes that what this seems to result in is the consumption of ever more and more stuff. We buy to palliate our fears, relieve our tensions, pick up our moods, and make ourselves “better.” (I know I have engaged in “retail therapy”, and I’d be willing to bet that you have too.)

This is not a profound point. Plenty of religious thinkers and holy people have noted that fear is one of the mechanisms that drives acquisition and that happiness cannot be found there. Marx also made the point quite stunningly. When Jesus Christ and the Buddha and Karl Marx all agree on something, you know that you’ve got a problem…. (Thanks, Dixie Chicks! *wink*)

But there is more than truth in it — we don’t buy to live and satisfy our needs. We live to buy. Why else would every town in America need a Super Wal-Mart AND a Super Target? Even if the catchment area is only a few thousand people….

And in the resulting orientation to consumables, we become easily impressed by the demands of everyone out there willing to sell us stuff. Feeling low? Buy a new pair of shoes! Feeling ugly? We’ve got a new facial cleanser for you! Feeling scared? Buy a new super lock for your front door! Feeling threatened? Buy a weapon and turn the threat back on others! Feeling insignificant? Buy time on the news by doing something outlandish! Feeling? Buy something to revalidate that you ARE a person! Pretty soon we just buy because we buy, and it is at that point that we can be told to do almost anything.

The new Big Brother will not come from the government. He won’t even be a single person. He’ll be driven by market research, focus groups, and ad campaigns. He’ll be diffuse and collectively created. No one will be him or control him, because he will only exist as an aggregation of all of us. He will be the human tendency of group think, given sinews and a place to stand. He will be driven by our desire for security and self-validation, for happiness and community. We’ll surrender ourselves to him, because we will be afraid of not doing such, and we won’t know what else to do. We will buy and fill our outsides because we can’t face our insides. Rather than being one with everything, we’ll work to possess one of everything.

This isn’t an anti-corporate screed or some diatribe against capitalism — rather it’s my acknowledgement that our social system, like all human inventions, contains both the potential for great benefit and great harm. And I think we’re tipping in balance to the latter.

Al Sharpton, of whom I am not really a fan, had a quote in the Times this morning that sums it all up. When asked whether he favored gay marriage at a candidate forum (sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign), he responded, “That’s like asking me whether I favor ‘black marriage’ or ‘white marriage.'” Sharpton, who is black, received thunderous applause. Exactly.

In other news, there’s evidence now that HIV has begun to develop resistance to the drugs involved in the triple cocktail. Not only does this bode ominously for continued advances against the virus, but it also complicates treatment in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where the administration of treatment will have to be quite strict in order to prevent massive resistance development from occurring.

Things like this need to be said more often.

Well, I wrote my parents back today, and I told them that we won’t come to a meeting point about different readings of the Bible. But more important than that, I told them that what I found in being out and in a church that accepts that is that I have lived the experience and learned some of the lessons of love. “…God loves and is in everything. Since I have joined my piece of the Church, I have found that….I have a walk of faith, rather than a rote of rules and procedures.”

Now we’ll see what’s up when they respond.

On another note, my roommate just received word from his girlfriend of ten years that she wants to break up. She lives in Colorado, while he’s here. She told him via a text message on his cell phone. She isn’t responding right now. He has to get up for work in four hours.

Whoa.

I wish I knew what to do or say.

I have been avoiding this forum because I don’t want to introspect. I might have to confront my current demons if I thought out loud here.

Not that anyone seems to be out there hurriedly awaiting news from Nathanland.