The summer ahead promises to be a "hot" one for Episcopalians. As most of us are only too aware, the world-wide Anglican Communion has been engaged in a sometimes furious debate on what it means to be Anglican, and some of "solutions" on offer promise to redefine "Anglican" in totally radical ways.
The uproar, some would say, has been caused by the election and confirmation of the Rt. Rev'd Gene Robinson as Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire. Others might insist that this event was merely the opportunity for 'traditionalists' to push a long-held agenda much larger than attitudes toward homosexuality.
The tumult has been retraced in a widely circulated article in The New Yorker, though this piece has itself been criticized (cf. Andrew Brown here). Whatever its flaws, the value of The New Yorker article is that it has placed the main issues of our internecine struggle squarely in the conversation of ordinary Episcopalians. The effects of whatever resolution comes out of this quagmire of threats and counterthreats will most assuredly be local. It is high time that the debate itself become just as local.
To this end, Exploring the Connections will start up its Sunday morning schedule again on June 4th, and spend at least part of the summer exploring, and facing up to, the issues confronting the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church, the Diocese of Texas AND Christ Church Cathedral. And there may be no more local place to start the process than to read a couple of articles that appeared in the Lent issue of Nevertheless: A Texas Church Review.
'The Body of Christ' has ever been the symbol of the Church for Anglicans. John Worrell, editor and publisher of Nevertheless, takes this image and - in his evocative piece, "Phantom Limbs" - wonders what happens when parts of that Body are hacked off. He proposes that one way of seeing our present predicament is as
"…the collision of two understandings of the ecclesial reality…a divergence between the church as a collection of people around a set of ideas and the church as a community constituted by sacrament and the act of God. Now it is more glorious to talk about the church in the second way, but the church usually behaves according to the first way. We talk the unshakeable bonds of baptism, but we live divisionally, subdividing the community by ideas, prejudices, secular ties, temperament. The list is endless.
But, Worrell goes on, we live in a fantasy if we think of the Church's nature as one or the other of these views; as separable; as demanding a choice between them. And so he ends:
"When we begin to detach the one from the other, we amputate. Having freed ourselves of the burden of the other, we awake with the phantom pain of the separated part. And when we try to walk ..."
The other article, to which I draw your attention, is James Stockton's "Diocesan Council and the Bishop's Address". Reading this may spoil your day, but my advice is to 'gird up now thy loins' and take the plunge! It IS a disquieting article but, we all need to be clear about where we are at this point. Deep breath, now! The "Diocesan Council" in the title is OUR diocesan council; the Bishop in question is OUR Bishop. What the Bishop said in his address was:
If the General Convention of the Episcopal Church decides, in the words of the Windsor Report, to walk apart from the rest of the communion, it is my intention not to do so. We are a communion diocese with deep and abiding ties to our Anglican brothers and sisters. I will continue to work with those people and dioceses that believe this is the way forward.
What James Stockton said in reply to this is:
"Here he declares his predetermination to disobey the decisions of the next General Convention if he does not agree with them. Arguably, through Council's agreement with the bishop, the Diocese of Texas has ceased to operate as a diocese, and is now, functionally, its own church."
And on it goes from there. I was upset by Stockton's piece, but not because I was hearing something I didn't already know. It's just that, after several months of grappling with the big picture, I was suddenly and forcefully reminded of what might be just around the corner for US, HERE, NOW!
I will post more on this topic. But for now - CONSIDER THE CONVERSATION BEGUN!
