Nate Knows Nada

Back about a month ago, Ryan over at SanskritBoy responded to my Episcopal/RC post by talking about the religious pluralism aside, and one of his interlocutors said the following:

“You can call the old-fashioned approach to religious others
‘exclusivism’–others will be excluded from salvation. Its opposite
number is ‘inclusivism’, which comes in two kinds. ‘Closed exclusivim’
holds that adherents of other religions may obtain salvation, but only
in spite of the imperfections of their religion, which offers no
improvements to our own. (For example, Karl Rahner wrote famously of
the “anonymous Christian,” a person outside the Church nonetheless
lived the life of a de facto Christian. Such a person might receive
salvation, but not because the religion she professed had much to
recommend it.) On the other hand, an ‘open inclusivism’ holds that the
other may have something to teach us.”

What I’m holding to in my previous post is probably something more like the open inclusivism mentioned.

But my religious pluralism probably regards the belief in the existence
of something larger as a requisite for discussion (though not for
existence as a fellow religionist).  I realize that I am going to
have a very hard time talking with the people Ryan mentioned:

“There are some types of Buddhists whose views are so incompatible I
just couldn’t imagine them joining an interfaith discussion table where
the common underlying link is assumed to be God. God, after all, is
just another schmuck- subject to eventual fall from heaven once he’s
used up his store of good karma, destined to be reborn as a lowly king
or administrator or even a peasant or (gasp, the horror!) a woman one
day. God probably got to where he is today by doing ascetic practices
for a few aeons, and finally he attained rebirth in a really pimpin’
paradise. But God still doesn’t really get it- and as soon as he does
get it, he will have ceased to exist.”

At least in terms of “God” (expansively defined) as an underlying
concept, we’ll have a difficult time talking to one another.  It’s
a prior that I can’t really get away from.  And the Buddhists that
Ryan mentions probably can’t get away from their prior that
“understanding” leads to non-existence.

But here’s where we might come in together, an approach I learned when
my small faith community was trying to do some intra-faith dialogue a
few years back.  We didn’t start with questions of belief, as
would be a natural approach in Western Christianity and Western
society.  We started experientially, asking what religion and
faith meant in the day to day lived experience of life.  “How does
living your religion help your daily life?”  “How does your
religion hinder your daily life?”  “What about your life compels
you to practice your religion?”

I did this with a group of Episcopalians (ranging from conservative to
liberal) who figured out that we found it easier to talk about faith
with Jews and Buddhists than with other Christians, like Mormons,
evangelicals, and some of the Orthodox.  We spent more time
getting to know the non-Christians than we did the Christians, and our
own understanding of our own faith had some holes, as a result. 
But it’s always hard to get to know and get along with your family,
often harder than with strangers.

And I think process-oriented conversation will likely be more fruitful
in terms of finding common ground.  In talking to a Buddhist,
Muslim, or another Christian, it’s probably just a dead-end to discuss
“belief” (especially since “belief” may not be the most fundamental
requisite of the above in all cases).  But what we do probably provides a lot more range to the conversation.

I’ve heard that the above approach is one that many monks have found
useful when talking to one another.  According to some reports
I’ve heard from interreligious monastic conversations, the monastic
commitment to a life of prayer and contemplation, no matter what the
particular religion, provides an entree into interfaith understanding
that non-monastics have a much harder time accessing.  In other
words, if you spend your days praying and contemplating, you’re already
doing such a lot that’s similar that you’ve got a good place to start
talking, and the discussion of differences leads not to belief but to
how different groups pray and contemplate differently.

And in the end, that may bring us back to the “open inclusivism”
above.  When the discussion centers on action and practice and
process, the “other” may indeed have something to teach us, as the
process of another faith can find a situation in one’s own, becoming a
thing that’s really not the exclusive domain of one or the other but
something that’s a bit of both.

I haven’t written much lately, because the wireless node in my
neighborhood has weakened considerably of late, and so my access is
limited to dial-up right now.  It just myteriously dropped in
strength about a week ago, and it hasn’t come back yet.  I know
where the node is, and I can get access if I go down and sit on my
porch or walk around the street, but that’s inconvenient, to say the
least….

The Times ran an article
yesterday about the switchovers between the Episcopal Church and the
Catholic Church thaqt have occurred in the past year.  Fairly
interesting, and I think I will throw my two cents in….

The gist of the article was that many people are leaving or entering
the Episcopal Church due to the stands on ordaining openly gay bishops,
ordaining women to the priesthood, and its atmosphere of intellectual
humility or pride (depending on whom you talk to).

Typical of the leavers was a quote from a woman in Indiana, who said,
“The advantage of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches is that
there is a central authority that tends to hold the church together,
and unfortunately the Anglican experiment, which was a wonderful
experiment for almost 500 years, lacked that.”

(Actually, she may misunderstand the ecclesiology of the Orthodox
churches, which have a national hierarchy, but no hierarchy like the
Roman Catholic structure on the supra-national level.)

People who entered the ECUSA were pretty typically like this: “‘I don’t
see how and why God would want his church, his worshipers, his
sons and daughters to become carbon copies of each other,’ said Youssef
El-Naggar, a former Catholic in Front Royal, Va., who recently joined
an Episcopal church there.”

But it doesn’t come down simply to a liberal versus conservative,
Episcopal versus Catholic dichotomy.  The governance structures
that each church has say something about what the various peoples
prefer in each.  The Church of Rome governs by a more traditional,
hierarchical, oligarchical structure.  The Episcopal Church has a
more democratic structure, as a reflection of its origins in the
American Revolution.  The Anglican Communion does not govern, as a
reflection of its roots in resisting the Roman church’s attempt in the
early modern period to impose uniformity of practice, theology, and
dogma upon every national church. 

A core tenet for most Anglicans
remains the idea that local churches must have the latitude to practice
in their own ways, search out the meanings of the Revelation of Love in
their own lives and societies.  Just as Henry VIII and the
clergymen of the 16th century resisted the pope, less because of the
king’s desired divorce and more because they did not want to conform the Eucharist to
Roman edict and they wanted the freedom to choose their own bishops
(bet you thought it was just about the divorce, right?  I used
to…  It’s a common myth), modern Anglicans often try to resist
the desire for hierarchical control, even as they sometimes seek to
observe it.

Human beings, at least in the Western tradition and probably throughout
our civilizations, on some level, want to be told what to do — we seem
to seek and often to need to have someone tell us what to do. 
There seems to be a need for us to be controlled, and we seek all sorts
of systems to allow us to have external sources of authority.  We
use religions, Marxism, philosophical activism, and politics to get
this authority structure, and these sytems are often obliging in
providing us the direction we crave.  But each of the systems
contains within itself the seeds for creative diversity, also.

This current conflict is about that, in some small measure.  In
the American context, we are all Puritans, craving authority,
structure, and someone to tell us what to do and how to understand our
relationship to God.  Even Catholics are Puritans in this
respect.  As a British RC theologian of my acquaintance said to me
recently, it’s primarily in America that we see the Roman church
tearing itself apart over what the moral teachings of the church should
be, as it’s primarily in America where people see themselves as bound
by the same.  In other countries, he asserted, people just don’t
pay much attention to what any church has to say, which is why you find
priests with mistresses or common law wives and nobody makes much fuss
about said practice, as long as it isn’t flaunted.

Americans, for all their talk about democracy and democratic impulse,
don’t really want to govern themselves fully, I think.  That kind
of life requires a lot of work, self-awareness, and self-sacrifice that
even the best of us might have trouble with.  It’s even harder in
the spiritual realm than it seems in the political realm.  In some
sense, it may be that we only have so much to give to our lives, and we
are willing to cede control of some or all of what is part of us. 
In our religious lives, I think may of us are more willing to submit
control of our own minds, moral senses, and understandings of God to
external sources of authority, with positive and negative results.

Because the Episcopal Church, as an Anglican church, has minimal
dogmatic and theological requirements, especially when compared to
other Protestants and other Catholics, it’s a confusing church to
belong to.  If you ask an Episcopalian what it is that we believe,
he or she will likely tell you that we pray in a certain way, or that
we use the Book of Common Prayer
in our services.  More sophisticated ones will tell you about the
Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, wherein we affirm that an Anglican believes in
four things (but we leave curiously absent whatever it is that you are
supposed to believe about those
four things).  Others will tell you, “Lex orandi lex
credendi.”  (Rough translation: “The word prayed is the word
believed.”  Diversity and non-specificity are joyfully and
infuriatingly encouraged.  It’s freeing, in that we can search out
our own way and push our own path to God, embraced within a community
that does the same things.  It’s bloody hard and vexing, because
you have to push out your own path to God, embraced (some might say,
straitjacketed) in a community where everyone else works out those same
things in their own way.

This is not to say that what the Roman Catholic Church is doing is
wrong or somehow lesser that what the Anglican Communion is doing, but
the needs of the people in each piece of God’s Church  are
different: some need more guidance and authority, some need more more
latitude.  But the experiment of the Anglican Communion is hardly
over simply because no one can tell the Diocese of New Hampshire not to
ordain and consecrate an openly gay bishop.

What we all seem to forget in all of this is that God hardly faces the
constraints that we human beings do.  As my spiritual director
reminds me over and over, it’s not a matter of me getting to God, of me
or anyone having to chase after God, or working to reach God. 
It’s exactly the reverse — God works to reach us, God chases after us,
God gets to us.  We are all exactly where we need to be right now
for God to do work in and on each of us.  Our job isn’t to run
after God — our job is to remain open so that we can hear the call of
God when it comes.

Religious pluralist that I am, whether you’re Roman or Episcopal
Catholic, Protestant or liturgical, or Christian, Jew, Muslim,
Buddhist, or Zoroastrian, God works in each of these on each of
us.  our job is less to figure out what’s “right” and more to
figure out how to wait and listen for stillnesses that speak whole
lives.

I’m back from Christmas at the monastery.  PRI’s “The World” had a
feature about the place where I stayed this last week, and you can find
it here.

It’s hard to imagine that it can be so quiet in Harvard Square….

“The diocese of Fort Worth, the whole diocese, has voted to bar any
participant in the Robinson consecration from any church activity in
Fort Worth.”  -from an article recently in The American Spectator

Which includes me.  Because I may not have laid hands on Gene
Robinson,but I assented to his ordination, along with 4000 other
Episcopalians. I may not like these people, but I would be willing to
commune with them, I think.  But Bishop Iker doesn’t want me to do
this.  He and his diocese would prefer that I don’t commune with
them at all.  

But in reality, that state of affairs is nothing new.  Here’s the dirty
secret that many conservatives in the Episcopal Church does not want
you to know.  Many of them have been “out of communion” or
whatever phrase you want to use to describe it these days for years now.

When I was at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2000,
we had a daily Eucharist, presided over each day by a different
bishop.  Many days, the delegation from the diocese of Fort Worth
would not come to the common Eucharist service, especially when the
presider was a woman.  They simply stayed in their hotel, had
Eucharist there, and then came to the sessions to participate in the
political aspects of the convention.

But since they wouldn’t observe the most basic sacrament of our life
together, I think it’s fair to question whether they are really part of
our understanding of the Christian faith.  If one can’t come to
the Eucharistic table, the basic source of Christian unity, then what
business does one have in participating in the rest of the life of a
church?

The recent gay debacle in the ECUSA really only provides a legitimating
cover for a group of people who have been pissed off since the 1970s
about a perceived loss of power.  The theological and the
political are nearly synonymous here.  Finally there’s an issue that can polarize
people in and out of the church.  It’s hard to portray the
revision of the Book of Common Prayer as a pressing moral issue. It’s
hard to argue that ordaining women really cuts to the heart of a
“timeless moral code.”  But firing salvos at the faggots wins
votes from the peanut gallery in a way that liturgical renewal and
non-gender discriminating ordination does not.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again.  The political and
the religious cannot be disentangled here, and the group of churches
led by the American Anglican Council appear more interested in power
and property than anything else.  They declare “war” on their
fellow Christians, they refuse to be “tainted” by them, they declare
that they are the only true remnant of the real Anglican faith
left.  They won’t accept or read the message of the Presiding
Bishop of the ECUSA at their secret meetings, but they will read with
approbation messages from Roman Catholic Cardinal Ratzinger (who’s the Vatican’s head theologian).

Maybe their motives are good (I’m not going to attempt to read minds),
but their tactics don’t seem any different than any other political
lobby practicing a scorched earth policy.  Their theology, ecclesiology,
and social stances really appear much more at ease in the Roman
Catholic tradition.  Why not join that tradition?

Again, the power explanation is pretty persuasive to me — becoming RC
would mean a concomitant loss of power for the leaders of this
movement.  Some of their ideas (not just the big social ones that
are getting all the coverage) would also be much more at home in a Baptist
or Calvinist (presbyterian governance) setting.  But again, the
move to that piece of the Christian tradition would engender a loss of
power.  Staying close to the ECUSA maximizes their future power,
whatever the eventual theological and dogmatic ramifications.

(Again, I’m not conducting a theological analysis here, but a power
politics analysis.  And the path that the AAC has taken is exactly
the one that will maximize its future power, no matter what its
relationship to the ECUSA eventually ends up being.)

And nothing that this group is doing is particularly unexpected. 
The human desire toward the will to power is particularly common, and
what we see on this side of the debate (and later, I’ll try to address
the will to power on the “liberal” side of the whole debate) shouldn’t
be surprising.  Any basic background in social theory (read some
Paine, Burke, Marx, and Weber, if you want more info) makes this
entirely predictable.

This “battle” is as much about power as it is about faith, perhaps even
more about power than faith.  And this is entirely human. 
But the stunning arrogance on both sides of this debate is
discouraging.  The Christian New Testament has much more to say
(by orders of magnitude) about money and living in community than it
does about sex.  And the debate, after we peel away the sex-talk
on both sides, often revolves more around money and living together than anything else.

Isn’t Christianity (and other religions, but I speak less
knowledgeably about many of them) supposed to help us find the way to
our full
humanity?  As the mystic Johannes Metz noted, sin and the will to
power are
compromises in the battle against death that God has already
done.  The essence of Christianity is poverty of spirit, an
emptying of ourselves, a full submission to God.  Only then can we
become fully human.  That’s why Christ was even more human than we
are — in refusing to sin, he became the most poor of all, never making
the compromise with death that the rest of us do.  Sin strikes a
compromise, wherein we take the easy way rather than the hard way that
leads to God.

Here’s an article from the online religion journal Killing the Buddha. It’s really good reportage of the consecration, written by someone who’s (by appearance at least) not an insider….

And from the same site, “Cash has died, Cash has risen, will Cash come again?”

Sorry I haven’t posted many of my own thoughts lately, but I’ve been feeling a bit lazy and even uninspired….

People have asked me several times how I felt at the consecration on Sunday — did I feel joyful or happy or hopeful?  What was it like?

I can’t honstly say I felt anything at the time.  It just seemed most important to be there.

It was like an ordination.  It was unusual in some aspects — the objections, for example.  Or the pregnancy of singing “The Church’s One Foundation” (which includes the following words “Though with a scornful wonder, Men see her sore distressed, By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distressed, Yet saints their watch are keeping, Their cry goes up, “How long?”, And soon the night of weeping, shall be the morn of song.“), knowing that schism could occur as the result of misunderstanding what the action there was about.

But the Episcopal Church has always been OK for me, and so I haven’t had the same experience of exclusion that many of my fellow Episcopalians.  Coming from the tradition that I did, the Episcopal Church, especially in the places that I have lived (mostly university towns), has always accepted gays.  An openly gay bishop was only a matter of time, as far as I could tell.  So it was just a fairly normal event to me.  Not only that, but all of this stuff has been playing out in the news for so long, that it’s not like there were surprises.  We knew there would be objections, that the press would be there, that all this would happen about as it did.  I guess it’s one of the advantages of being a liturgical church — one does not have to worry about how events will transpire and how one will react to them.  The liturgy constrains the form of the events, so that one has the freedom to know what’s behind them, to understand, to make preparations for all.

Two of the sets of remarks at Sunday’s consecration played on the theme of center and margins.  Most importantly, they reminded us that when we pull the margins in to the center, bringing those people who are not remembered into the larger fold, we also bring the center to the margins, helping those in the mainstream know what it’s like to live on the edge.  And I think that’s what the Christian message is supposed to be about — uniting center and margins so that each becomes more like the other.

Right.  Done for now.

Openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson smiles after being consecrated as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church in Durham, New Hampshire, November 2, 2003. Some fear that Robinson’s consecration with cause a split in the worldwide Anglican Church. REUTERS/Jim Bourg“>

So, if you’re a regular reader, you’re not surprised that I was in New Hampshire on Sunday to see the Rev. Canon Gene Robinson ordained to the episcopate.  My friends and I were hardly about to miss out on a historic moment in the life of the local and global church.  But first, some background on why this is monumental.

Anglicans, like Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, believe in an episcopal structure (from the Greek word episkopos).  What this means is that we have bishops as overseers and pastors for a collection of priests, deacons, and laypeople in a particular geographic area, called a diocese.  It requires three bishops to lay hands upon another person (for Orthodox, Romans, and many Anglicans in the South and to a much lesser degree in the North, that means men) to consecrate a new bishop.  We believe that there is an unbroken line of laying on of hands from the first bishop (St. Peter) to the most current bishop.  (Is this historically tenable?  I don’t know, but the stress on the unbroken line of succession is less for some sort of magic touch passed down from Peter and more to stress the continuity of the contemporary church with the historic church.  It’s all one church, whether past or present.)

Gene Robinson is by no means the first gay bishop in our church or any church.  He’s simply the first gay bishop who is open and honest about his sexuality at the time of his consecration.  There have been Roman Catholic and Anglican gay bishops before, who, for whatever reason, have not been out of the closet.

For an event such as this one, the protest was muted, at best, and the people who had legitimate grounds on which to protest (i.e., they were actually Anglicans of some sort) were generally polite, made their thoughts known, and then left.  These people below were pretty marginal.

Protestors against the consecration of Reverend Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church gather outside the ceremonies in Durham, New Hampshire on November 2, 2003. Some fear that Robinson’s consecration will cause a split in the worldwide Anglican Church. Photo by Jim Bourg/Reuters“>

There were about twenty of them, total, in two groups.  Not only that, but they’re not Episcopalians or Anglicans.  If they were willing to show up, be part of our church, come to table with us, and try to be one of us, working this out in our peculiar way, then maybe we’d listen to them.  But they seemed to be intentionally fringe players.  Notably, they (and non-Episcopal supporters) were kept in special pens, to keep them separate and to keep them from disrupting the service.  The local supporters, from UNH and New Hampshire, numbered about 200, by my count.  One nice thing about the supporters: at the end of the service, as we walked out of the hockey arena and the white sign guys above were trying to be loud and vocal and yell at us, the supporters made sure they were louder, clapping and cheering for us, making sure they drowned out the yelling of the protestors.  They thanked us for being there, and I thanked them back.

These people are more problematic.

These are evangelical Protestant Christians who are not Episcopalians holding a candlelight vigil to support the dissident Anglicans.  They are not part of our branch of the church.  I think that we should politely listen to their concerns as fellow Christians, talk with them about their concerns, give them a full hearing.  But I don’t think they should have any real weight in our decisions about how to govern our branch of the whole church.  They have made the choice to be different sorts of Christians than we are, and I don’t think that we’re under any real obligation to give them weight in our deliberations about our common life. Their differences with us are more substantial than just whether gays should be in the church in general or not. If they want a voice in our piece of the church, they need to be part of us. Otherwise, I think that a smile and best wishes for working out their own challenges is pretty much all we need give them. They;ve got no significant legitimacy for our polity.

You may have heard about the Anglican objectors.  Overall, their objections were the same ones they have offered since the beginning of this affair.

• This consecration is unbiblical, as Scripture explicitly condemns homosexuality in any form.  A man living in violation of Scripture (as they understand it) does not live the moral life required of a bishop.
  
• This consecration will impair the ECUSA’s relationship with the rest of the Anglican Communion, as there are other national churches that will “break communion” with us.  (Briefly, this means that they will no longer share sacraments with us and regard any of our sacraments as invalid.  Thus, our ordinations, baptisms, and Eucharists will all be considered invalid.)  If that doesn’t happen, then our communion will be “impaired” (which has no technical meaning, as far as I can tell but does indicate that they’re unhappy and suspicious).  (Of course, no one seems to mention that for many of these churches, both in the Third World and the very conservative West, the communion is already impaired over the ordination of women, as most of these churches and people refuse to recognize the validity of women preists and bishops.  Even the Church of England does nto have women bishops yet.  So there’s already problems on this front….)
  
• The consecration is against our church polity.  This is clearly untrue.  Everything that occurred did so “by the book.”  The Episcopal Church has many checks and balances, from the local to the national level.  There are plenty of places that the approval of this ordination could have stopped, at various points.  And the idea that “liberals” foisted this upon the church by below-the-board politics is a hypocritical charge coming from conservatives in the church who are bankrolled by a multi-millionaire, have secret meetings, and engage in underhanded, hurtful tactics against their oppositions.  Furthermore, the idea that people are “just playing politics” and that that means they are not trying to work out God’s will is pretty ridiculous,  Whoever said God couldn’t do what He wants through human politics?
  
• We all should wait until everyone is on the same page.  I think that this demonstrates a fairly non-Anglican understanding of our common life.  Anglicans only require belief in four things: the Scriptures as received historically in the church, the two primary sacraments, the creeds, and the historic episcopate.  We don’t mandate how people read the Scripture, how they are to pray, or what they must believe regarding the four items above.  We’re intentionally not into the grand philosophical system and uniformity of practice in the Roman Catholic Church, nor are we interested in the uniformity of belief that the confessions of the many Protestant churches.  We’re intentionally poetic rather than prosaic.  And our religious history is one of moving for thousands of years between various pieces of Catholic Christianity and then Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.  For us, faith is not about uniformity of belief; we prefer uniformity of practice with lots of room for the local variation.  We pray together, we commune together, but we don’t always believe together.

At the center of the photo below, there’s a woman in teal-colored robes.  That’s Barbara Clementine Harris, the first woman bishop in the Anglican Communion (she’s also black, which is demographically interesting in the Episcopal Church).  Her consecration in 1989 engendered (pun not intended) much of the same reaction worldwide that Gene Robinson’s did.  Some of the churches that declared themselves to be unhappy with Sunday’s occurrences did the same 14 years ago.  And technically, they are still mad about it.  But we’re all still moving along together, as we agreed (in the end) to disagree about this issue.

Bishop Gene Robinson kneels before Bishops in Durham, N.H. Sunday Nov. 2, 2003 during his consecration. Robinson is the Episcopalian’s first openly gay bishop. (AP Photo/Jim Cole) “>

More later….

A quote I read in National Geographic once summed up the problem. 
It came from a Berber Muslim shepherd and referred to people who commit
acts of hate and violence: “Because God is mostly silent, some people
think they can do whatever they want in His name.”

I, of course, think of this in regard to those who would leave the
church over Gene Robinson’s ordination.  Those people probably
think the same of us who gathered in that hockey rink on Sunday to
assent to his election as bishop.  And I’d hope that God’s silence
on the matter pushes us to keep working out our faith in love for one
another.

Try a little loving today, and I’ll try the same.

I was there yesterday, got interviewed by NH public radio about it, and
took plenty of notes so that I can blog about it for you.  More
later….

Here’s a fantastic photo of the consecration….

 This came right before they all laid hands upon him and said the ancient words: “Therefore, Father, make Gene a bishop in your church….”

The full prayer of consecration is here.