Nate Knows Nada

Philocrites continues to comment on the archdiocesan closure of a school two days before elementary school graduations.

(Advance apologies to BF.)

Archbp. Sean and the hierarchy have a historical problem.  They
run an essentially feudal institution that does not sit well with
notions of democratic governance.  And in late democracy, people
have more and more unwilling to retain the feudal elements in their
lives in any more than a ceremonial, quaint, and castrated sense. 

So in the developed world, the Roman church has found its influence
more and more on the wane, while Protestant sects (which are
fundamentally more comfortable with democracy, on some level)
flourish.  I’d predict that as democracy becomes a more inculcated
value in the areas of the world where the Roman church is strongest
now, the church will look more and more the fool that it plays right
now.  Can anyone say that this latest escapade isn’t worthy of a
sick episode of Laurel and Hardy (except that L&H didn’t hurt
people)?  How can absolutism compete when it’s surrounded by individual empowerment?

I’m willing to go along with the (whole) Church’s notion that simply
because
something is popular does not mean that the Spirit works within
that.  But I think the Roman hierarchy have missed the
counter-notion that simply
because an idea, course of action, or doctrine becomes “evident” in the
mind of a fairly miniscule group of clergy that it has any more
validity.  The time has come, especially with the
professionalization of the Catholic laity (many of whom have
exceedingly more organizational and theological training than their
leaders), to drop the notion that discipline and doctine may only
derive authority from the top of the hierarchy.  If there’d been a
role that laity were allowed to play, these b****** bishops wouldn’t be
in
office.  And spitefully executed closings would be the least of
the evils probably eliminated–two generations of children wouldn’t
have the scars of sexual abuse.

I’m not the only one angry about this.  Among others, Mayor Menino said,

”We were making progress, and where’s the credibility now? Where’s the
credibility in the decision-making process? Why don’t we have a say in
what’s going on? It’s our church.”

And Allston-Brighton city councillor Jerry McDermott said,

”We own those schoolhouses, and we own those churches,” he said. ”Our
parents and grandparents have paid over and over again to fix the
boilers and replace the roofs and repair the windows and to pay for the
priests and the nuns, and how dare they tell us now that it’s not our
building and change the locks and deny our kids their diplomas?

”They had four pedophile priests assigned over the years to Our Lady
of the Presentation, and now they want to protect the children? Isn’t
that refreshing? I’m not the best Catholic out there, but these are the
supposed elders of the Catholic faith, and they’ve made a mockery of
it.”

No, Tom and Jerry, they are not your
churches.  Not technically, not organizationally, and not in the
eyes of the hierarchy.  This just shows that for all the talk that
the church is its people, the leaders think that they are the church and that the people are either accessories to the ordained or too much like children to really matter.

I like to think that I have become more of a Catholic since I became an
Anglican, but this reminds me how infintely Protestant I still
am.  And wish to be.  And, while I hope we Protestants (and via media semi-Protestants) can
learn from and someday come back into unity with the Roman church, there’s still a lot
of reform and witness that the Roman church has to learn from us.

Public Radio has this new show, with Christopher Lydon as host, called “Open Source.” 
It’s an attempt to bring radio talk (the intelligent kind) together
with blogging, and it combines its topics, it seems, with their
presence on the Internet.

Tonight’s show was on God-blogging, with Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer, Gordon Atkinson of Real Live Preacher, and Sarah Dylan Breuer.  They all had intelligent and insightful things to say.

(I don’t read RLP too often any more, which may be too bad.  I
once had what I can only describe as a mystical experience, just a tiny
fraction of what the great mystics like Julian or Teresa seem to
describe.  But on reading one of his stories, I had a brief few
moments where I understood, and I gasped.  My molecules got
it for a small piece of time.  God was very big and very small,
all around and right in front of me, overpowering and still as
night.  I’ve had a similar experience at a U2 concert [don’t
laugh, it’s true] though not as intense.)

Jeff is one of the smartest people out there right now, besides a
couple of sociologists that I know;  he has an intuitive grasp of
what the contours of a religious sensibility feel like.  On
tonight’s show, Jeff spoke lots about how the Internet is a sort of
“protestant” place for religion, in that it offers the God-bloggers a
place to be, to talk, to worship, to do religion where they don’t have
a mediating authority.

Jeff’s partly right, but I think he dates this tendency altogether too
late.  The tendency to individualize the religious experience
exists in all religions, whether hierarchical or
hyper-individualized.  And it takes two different forms, because
it’s about the rejection of the world (a la Max Weber): one can either
become a protestant, seeking to make the world over for God, or one can
withdraw from the world, seeking to experience God within one’s
self. 

I think most of the god-bloggers out there, especially in St. Blog’s
parish (the conservative Roman Catholic bloggers), are these
protestants.  They sense a calling to what they do, a vocation, as
it were.  The protestant god-blogger sees him or her self as God’s
agent, put here to do God’s work.  S/he (and in the RC
blogosphere, it’s pretty she-heavy, ironically) engages in a mighty
call to rally the true to the standard of orthodoxy, whether the
content is orthodox or heterodox.  These bloggers are the majority
of the god-bloggers.  They seek to transform the world, or at
least to figure out who is in the community of the redeemed.  And
I’ve noted this taking place whether the blogger is Christian or
not–the Western mindset, based as it is in the protestant worldview,
is might hard to escape.  These people are the agents of God, the
Higher Power, the Buddha, or whatever.  Americans, especially,
like to save people with whatever they were saved by, be it Jesus or
Krishna.

But what’s interesting is how much we don’t see of the mystic
withdraw-ers.  These are the people who seek not to be the agent
(especially in the full, legal sense of that word) of God, but God’s
vessel.  They empty themselves out.  “The creature must be
silent so God can speak.”  Now, I’m not talking about necessarily
seeing blogging of documentation of mystical experience. 
(Although, it seems to me that there’s a place for that.  Blaise Pascal did it in one way,
and I’m surprised we don’t see more like that on the Internet.) 
But it seems reasonable that people might use the Internet just as they
have used drugs, self-abnegation and asceticism, and “automatic”
writing as means of emptying self and filling up with God.  I
would be hard pressed to think of any of these sorts of mystical
experiences of or through the Internet.  God’s agents outnumber
God’s vessels in the electronic ether.

Here, in no particular order or logic, are some interesting and fun God-blogs.
Philocrites
Michael Povey
U2 Sermons Blog
Salty Vicar
Baptized Pagan
AKMA
Hugo Schwyzer

Killing the Buddha

Anybody got any well-written Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist blogs?

From AKMA, a slightly tongue-in-cheek definition of Anglicanism:

That’s part of my puzzlement about the current retrospective “This is true
Anglicanism” impulse in some quarters. I had always thought that true
Anglicanism bore with the potty vicar who was sure that Jesus was
really an astral traveller, or that theological doctrine was a
pointless appendix to the finer points of fox-hunting. Such people
come, they occupy seats of greater or lesser prominence and authority,
then they retire or die, and the church itself doesn’t change much. The
point isn’t that we don’t care about error or try to correct error, but
that the Truth is stronger, lasts longer, and eventually renders error
moot. Truth counteracts error from within the church. (And that also
provides us with the opportunity for learning the ways in the church
may need correction — from within.)

From
AKMA, in a sort-of-tangential comment on the matter of the “Connecticut
Six” (whom you really don’t need to know about to appreciate the
comment).  (It also seems applicable to the situation some of
our Roman Catholic friends find themselves in this week, both
conservatives who think they’ve “won” and liberals who may despair a
bit.)

It would take a lot of persuading — the kind typically associated with
biblical miracles — to convince me that justice in the church should
involve one party prevailing over the other in an unambiguous way.
Under the circumstances, though I know no one will like it and everyone
feel wounded, it looks to me as though the only way that leads closer
to God involves us all enduring for a while in uncorrected injustice,
and having faith that the God in whose grace and love we put our whole
trust will bring a church of frayed-but-bound-together affections to a
fuller understanding of what justice requires of us.

As everyone knows by now, we have a new pope.

The head bishop of the American Church fired a shot across the bow,
saying, “I pray that the Holy Spirit will guide him in his words and
his actions and that he may become a focus of unity and a minister of
reconciliation in a church and a world in which faithfulness and truth
wear many faces.”

That is, Truth is not held solely within the Roman Catholic Church and
the interpretation of that faith that Benedict XVI holds. 
(Benedict has become well-known for his claim that the full Truth of
the
Gospel is found only in Roman Catholic Christianity and that other
forms of Christianity and religion are “deficient.”) Truth belongs to
God, and we are at best imperfect custodians of that Truth, prone to
error even in noting where that truth may lie.

Rowan Cantuar is a bit more hopeful — or politic: “His election is also of great significance
to Christians everywhere. I look forward to meeting him and working
together to build on the legacy
of his predecessor, as we seek to promote shared understanding between
our churches in the service of the Gospel and the goal of Christian unity.”

All the Protestant conservatives who will hold this election of a
conservative pope as a sign of great things need to remember that he
thinks their faith problematic, incomplete, and at least in part, in
Error.   Pause before rejoicing.

During Holy Week, it’s traditional for Christians to pray for the peace
and unity of Jerusalem (at least, it’s been traditional in the last
century).

Who’d have thought we would get it so quickly?  All it too was the threat of thousands of homosexuals in the streets.

International gay leaders are planning a 10-day WorldPride festival
and parade in Jerusalem in August, saying they want to make a statement
about tolerance and diversity in the Holy City, home to three great
religious traditions.

Now major leaders of the three faiths –
Christianity, Judaism and Islam – are making a rare show of unity to
try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city
and convey the erroneous impression that homosexuality is acceptable.

The best part of this is how the alert was spread.  I can’t help but laugh….

The American evangelical leader who helped to galvanize the opposition,
Mr. Giovinetti, is the senior pastor of Mission Valley Christian
Fellowship, an independent church that meets in a hotel in Southern
California….
By all accounts Mr. Giovinetti played a crucial role in spreading the
first alarms among religious leaders about the gay festival.
He said he had first heard about WorldPride from a congregation member
who had told Mr. Giovinetti that he was gay for many years and still
monitored gay Web sites….

So some ex-gay who couldn’t control himself and went cruising
on-line for porn–I mean, taking it upon himself to monitor websites
for items of obscene or poor taste– went tattling after he relieved
the urge, the need, the duty to “monitor.”

What went through the reporters’ minds when they heard that?

I’d try to be outraged, but I’m rolling on the floor.

Apparently, the big media outlets discovered evangelical Christians this week.  The New York Times Magazine ran a long piece on the phenomenon of the exurban megachurch.  Jeff Sharlet over at The Revealer has excellent analysis, and many of his commenters have pretty intelligent stuff to say, too.

This morning, the Boston Globe ran its “Meet the evangelicals” story. 
Although I enjoyed the NYT article and its semi-practice of Weberian
ideal type analysis, today’s Globe story was more interesting. 
It, also, substituted this particular family, the Wilkersons, for a
larger phenomenon, but unlike the Times, Brian MacQuarrie did not shy
away from presenting the contradictions and harshness of the
evangelical worldview.

We learn that the Wilkersons feel bad and even attacked that they are
thought of as narrow-minded and exclusionary people, but we also learn
what they believe.

”Christianity is lived out every hour of every day. I have no hidden
agenda,” Michael says. Thumbing through a Bible, he adds, ”I don’t
know why people hate this story so much.”

To him, the media and entertainment industry have for decades
caricatured devout Christians as narrow-minded, judgmental bumpkins. In
the Wilkersons’ view, Hollywood is out of touch with the mainstream,
instead of the reverse.

”Those people don’t have a clue,” Michael says, shaking his head in disgust….

On the subject of gays, the Wilkersons say they oppose discrimination,
but their view of marriage is a divinely-sanctioned biblical one,
limited to a man and a woman for the purpose of creating a family.
Michael turns to St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, 6:9-11,
which reads in part in the New International version: ”Neither the
sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor
homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor
slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” He
interprets the Scripture to mean gays cannot be admitted to heaven.

”I don’t hate anyone who’s a homosexual,” Michael says. ”But do I hate what they do? Yes.”

[What do we do?  One
wonders if he knows.  And from what he thinks he knows, he might
consider how his subculture, evangelical Christianity, plays out in the
popular imagination before assuming he knows much about gays. -Ed.]

On abortion, the Wilkersons are adamant: ”A life is a life,” MarCee
says, and to her, life begins at conception. The only possible
exception for abortion, MarCee says, is when the life of the mother is
in jeopardy — not for rape, and not for incest.

[If a life is a life, then
wouldn’t taking the life of the embryo or fetus to save another life
still constitute some form of killing?  If it’s an absolute, then
how do we justify that exception? -Ed.]

Like many evangelical congregations, Hope Church is nondenominational.
Its members include former mainstream Protestants as well as one-time
Catholics ”who now are Christians,” Michael says. ”The Catholic
religion? I’m not too sure that Jesus is a big, integral part of that.”

[Have they ever been in a Roman Catholic Church?  Jesus is usually pretty front and center, literally even.  -Ed.]

…”Basically, it comes down to there’s only one God,” Michael says.
”You have to come to that conclusion: There’s one way to that God, and
that’s through Jesus.”

Unfortunately, Wilkerson said sadly, the ”harsh reality” of the Bible precludes salvation for non-Christians.

When asked if that means Gandhi, a Hindu who reached across religious
lines, was denied entry to heaven, Wilkerson dropped his head and
nodded.

It sounds to me like this family (who may or may not actually
represent evangelicals [although my experience leads me to say that
they’re pretty representative], but who are being made to function as
such) has some hatred of gays (the separation of action from identity
in any identity/affinity group is highly problematic), believes Roman
Catholics are probably not Christians (one wonders if they know where
their own religion came from), hasn’t thought through the full
implications of their position on abortion, and may even be ashamed of
the absoluteness of their belief that only their particular form of
Christianity goes to heaven.

One thing that comes up in the Globe article more than that in the
Times is the not just the harsh absoluteness of evangelical life, but
the rule-oriented basis of it.  Don’t listen to the wrong sorts of
music, don’t be gay, don’t have an abortion, don’t, don’t, don’t. 
Rules can be useful, but in this sense, the rules seem to be the ticket
into heaven, which is the real goal of this life. 

Everything that the Wilkersons do orients them to the reward of
heaven. “In the end, two cars, a pickup, a nice home, good jobs, and a
comfortable life in the American heartland are all temporary amenities
to the Wilkersons and the other churchgoers who fill Hope’s sanctuary
with song and prayer each Sunday. They have their eyes on the
hereafter.”

This attention to heaven seems the largest tragedy for a people who have such a focus on
not being like the world.  (In the circles I grew up in, a
favorite Scripture to quote was, “Be in the world but not of the
world.”  There was even a Christian pop song that used this as a
chorus.)  It’s a capitalist, materially oriented way of
approaching their faith.  Faith is a transactional
interaction–it’s like employment in a firm.  God sets out a contract for that which He expects me
to do.  I fulfill those obligations.  I am compensated with
eternal life in heaven.

But the faith of these people, at least in the Globe article,
doesn’t seem to have much to actually do with God.  Rules,
yes.  Regulating other people, yes.  God?

(In the church that my parents go to, which is a member of the same
denomination as the Wilkersons’ [contrary to the Globe reporter’s
assertion, “Evangelical Free” is a denominational marker, even if the
congregation wants to downplay it], they have a group for Adventists
“recovering from legalism.”  I always found this a remarkable
short-sightedness, since Protestant evagelicals are a pretty rule-bound
lot of people.)

For depth on that matter, we have to go to the Times article.

The spiritual sell is also a soft one. There are no crosses, no images
of Jesus or any other form of religious iconography. Bibles are
optional (all biblical quotations are flashed on huge video screens
above the stage). Almost half of each service is given over to live
Christian rock with simple, repetitive lyrics in which Jesus is treated
like a high-school crush: ”Jesus, you are my best friend, and you will
always be. Nothing will ever change that.” Committing your life to
Christ is as easy as checking a box on the communication cards that can
be found on the back of every chair. (Last year, 1,055 people did so.)

This is what bothered me about the Christians portrayed in the Times
article.  There is no challenge, no difficulty, no struggle
involved in their faith.  Faith is the means by which one
overcomes struggle, but it is not a struggle in itself.  But what
both hagiographers and historians seem to tell us is that “saints”,
“religious innovators”, and the like all struggle with their faith and
their faith leads them not out of struggle but into the fray of
it.  Gandhi certainly did not see faith as a way out of trouble
and trial–it led him straight to it.  In light of the Passion
last week and Easter for this week, neither did Jesus.  Neither
did Martin Luther, or Martin Luther King, or Oscar Romero.

Not all evangelicals think this way, as there is some trenchant
criticism out there from within the evangelical movement.  (See,
for example, Ronald Sider’s “The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience”
in Christianity Today.)  And in fact, the Wilkersons seem to be
enacting many of the problematic elements that Sider points out. 
Where’s the talk about materialism and the poor?  All we have is
evidence of material accumlation.  What about racism?  They
seem to be tolerant of other races, as long as those people are also
their sort of Christians.  But are there many non-white people in
their church?  Why or why not?

Until then, the Wilkersons say, their journey is one worth emulating.

”If you want the country to be better, you would want to take a model
of a husband and wife and a family who wants to do the right thing,”
Michael says. ”You would think that would be the model the country
would want to go after.

Absolutely not.  That model neatly ravaged body and soul in my case, and I have seen it do the same to many others.

From Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking:  A Seeker’s ABC:

Sin

The power of sin is centrifugal.  When at
work in a human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery. 
Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left.  Eventually bits and
pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end nothing at all is left.
“The wages of sin is death” is Saint Paul’s way of saying the same thing.

Other people and (if you happen to believe in him) God or
(if you happen not to) the World, Society, Nature– whatever you call the
greater whole of which you’re part– sin is whatever you do, or fail to do, that
pushes them away, that widens the gap between you and them and also the gaps
within your self.

For example, the sin of the Pharisee is
not just (a) his holier-than-thou attitude which pushes other people away, but
(b) his secret suspicion that his own holiness is deficient too, which pushes
part of himself away, and (c) his possibly not-so-subconscious feeling that
anybody who expects him to be all that holy must be a cosmic SOB, which pushes
Guess Who away.

Sex is sinful to the degree that, instead
of drawing you closer to other human beings in their humanness, it unites bodies
but leaves the lives inside them hungrier and more alone than before.

Religion and unreligion are both sinful to the degree
that they widen the gap between you and the people who don’t share your views.

The word charity illustrates the insidiousness of
sin.  From meaning a free and loving gift it has come to mean a
demeaning handout.

“Original Sin” means we all
originate out of a sinful world which taints us from the word go.  We all tend
to make ourselves the center of the universe, pushing away centrifugally from
that center everything that seems to impede its free-wheeling.  More even than
hunger, poverty, or disease, it is what Jesus said he came to save the world
from.

One of BF’s advisers, the atheism guy, gave a speech in Rome this
week.  Father Buckley is fascinating and frightfully intelligent,
and his books have been about how modern atheism and modern religion have given birth to one another, in a sense.

In essence, Buckley argued that by the 19th century, “religion” had
come to mean something very different than it did in the medieval
period for thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas. For Durkheim and Freud,
“religion” was a cluster of beliefs, symbols, and rites, essentially a
subset of the artifacts of human culture. Religion was a genus, of
which the various “religions” — Christianity, Hinduism, and so on —
were species.

From this point of view, “religions” are a little bit like
Pepsi and Coke — specifications of the generic category “soda.” (The
analogy is my own, not Buckley’s). They become separate and mutually
exclusive “brand names.”

For Aquinas, on the other hand, the idea of “a religion”
would have made no sense, Buckley said. Aquinas regarded religion not
as a set of beliefs and practices, but as a moral virtue “by which one
gives God what is due to God, and lives in appropriate relation to
God.” Symbols, hymns, rituals and doctrines are not “religion,” they
are the acts or objects of religion, with God as its ultimate end. This
virtue of religion is universal, even if people and cultures have
different ways of cultivating it.

Buckley argued that the scientific study of religion thus
settled the issue in favor of atheism from its opening move. When one
sees “religion” as instructive not about God but about human culture,
he said, the question of God’s existence is already asked and answered.

“God is either incomprehensibly absolute in his being and in
his goodness and so adored in his self-communication, or God is not at
all,” Buckley said.

It’s an interesting alternative viewpoint to the study of religion
concept.  I often explain to people who ask what BF does that
religious studies approaches religion from outside of any belief
structure while theology is the study of religion from inside a
particualr set of beliefs.

But I have often pondered how the atheism of religious studies is
replicated in other social science disciplines.  Do we political
scientists not believe in politics?  (I think that this may be
often true.)  How does that affect how we study the phenomena?

Some of the news reports that you can read online right now make it sound as such.  One, from the AP, said,

Anglican Church Asks U.S., Canada to
Leave

ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON (AP) –
Leaders of the global Anglican
Communion declared Thursday that they want the U.S. Episcopal Church and the
Anglican Church of Canada to withdraw from the communion’s councils temporarily,
and to explain their attitudes toward gays which have split the
church.

The statement was issued by primates a day earlier than planned,
following their meetings this week at a Roman Catholic retreat in Northern
Ireland.

The U.S. church precipitated the most serious rift in the
communion’s history when it affirmed the election of V. Gene Robinson, who
openly lives with a male partner, as bishop of New Hampshire. Both churches have
been criticized by conservatives for sanctioning blessings of gay
unions.

The statement emerged a day earlier than planned from a meeting
of church primates in Northern Ireland. It called for the U.S. and Canadian
churches to explain their thinking at a meeting in Nottingham, England in
June.

“In the meantime, we ask our fellow primates to use their best
influence to persuade their brothers and sisters to exercise a moratorium on
public rites of blessing for same-sex unions and on the consecration of any
bishop living in a sexual relationship outside Christian marriage,” the
statement said.

A non-Anglican friend of mine was understandably pissed about this, as
it makes it sound like it’s our (LGBTIQ people) fault for the whole
mess.  I responded:

Well, it’s getting interesting, but not for the reasons that
this article indicates. 

Let an Anglican explain
it.

That quote was ensconced in a very long
statement discussing how the Anglican Communion can deal with the crisis.  And
the long statement was in some sense a commentary on a dense theological
document that came out five months ago.  And, on some level, gays are not the
crisis, but the catalyst for a larger crisis for us Anglicans — what does it
mean to be an episcopal (bishop-centered) church without being Roman (i.e.,
hierarchical and top-down)?  If some churches (like the US and Canadian
churches) go ahead and do something that the rest of the Anglican Churches find
wrong, how do we as a larger group of churches address that, without having a
centralized authority (like a pope) to order some people to stop/start doing
something they believe to be right and good?

For
the conservatives, it’s not gays who have split the church, but radical, sinful
Americans and Westerners (because this is very much a North-South,
developed-developing world issue).

The
overwhelming majority of American and Canadian bishops support the consecration
of LGBT people to the episcopacy and the blessing of same-sex covenantal
relationships.  Best guess numbers indicate that it’s only about five percent of
Episcopalians nationwide who align with the conservative position.  Mostly, it’s
several very outspoken American bishops, and bishops of the West Indies,
Nigeria, Kenya, Singapore, and a few other African and Asian nations. 
Archbishop Tutu and his successor, Archbishop Ndungane, have endorsed the cause
of justice for LGBT people.  And nowhere is it as simple as a
liberal-conservative paradigm might indicate, because those are not good labels
in this context.

Yes, it’s about the gays, and no,
it’s not about the gays.  As Anglicans, we have a tough polity, and if it
hadn’t been issues of justice for LGBT issues, it would have been something else
down the road one or two decades from now that would have precipitated this. 
That said, LGBT issues (and the “ick-factor” along with the course of Western
history for the last 1500 years) and our push for full recognition and inclusion
in the Body of Christ have played a significant role in pushing this crisis to
where it is, and this is partially a fight about our rights.  And those of us in
the church can’t and won’t give up that fight.

The
quote in the article was way decontextualized (as it was a single sentence from
a document of several pages of text), in that it’s the same continued request to
the American and Canadian churches to slow down — at least for the present —
and give everyone some time.  They might have cherry-picked this quote (“We also
wish to make it quite clear that in our discussion and assessment of the moral
appropriateness of specific human behaviours, we continue unreservedly to be
committed to the pastoral support and care of homosexual people.  The
victimisation or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be
ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us.  We assure homosexual
people that they are children of God, loved and valued by him, and deserving of
the best we can give of pastoral care and friendship.”) or this one (“We as a
body continue to address the situations which have arisen in North America with
the utmost seriousness.  Whilst there remains a very real question about whether
the North American churches are willing to accept the same teaching on matters
of sexual morality as is generally accepted elsewhere in the Communion, the
underlying reality of our communion in God the Holy Trinity is obscured, and the
effectiveness of our common mission severely hindered.”) Neither makes any real
sense out of context.

Furthermore, the head of the
Episcopal Church (USA) has not yet issued a statement in reaction to this (just
a news bulletin that he’ll issue one soon), but if the past is any
indication, he’ll probably throw lots of support behind LGBT people in the
church and voice his continued support for the consecration of the Bishop of New
Hampshire.  He himself was the chief consecrator at the Bishop of New
Hampshire’s ordination and consecration. 

All
right.  Enough said.  Now you know the beginnings of enough to make sense of
that AP wire story.

I find myself on the slow and gradual side of unity.  Being an
ex-evangelical, I still look for dramatic conversion experiences more
than I look for gradual transformations.  As one of BF’s advisors
is fond of pointing out, “We’ve only been at this for 2000 years; we’ve
hardly begun to figure it out.”  And that’s the operative thing I
tell myself much of the time as we work through this — there’s a good
chance I will not see this resolved in my earthly life.  It’s not
about any of us particularly, no matter what the cost.  It’s about living
together in righteousness and love, and accepting those costs.