May 10, 2006

Oxymoron

I have a hard time equating being faithful with being orthodox, ie, with my faith measuring up all that well with “The Faith.” Maybe that’s a sign of my unfaith, maybe it just reaffirms that faith is something of a risk, anyway, and so it always has room for doubt. Faith seems to me inevitably and irretrievably to be pretty subjective. Such a notion as the faith has often left me more than puzzled.

Whatever, that old oxymoron “Anglican orthodoxy” keeps rearing its miter in all sorts and conditions these days. And it’s no wonder. If bishops want to hang on to their purple shirts, they can’t get around having to vow to “guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church.” Whether they know much about any of these things or not, they have at least to act like they do. As it is, their guarding sometimes leads less to unity than division, and their undisciplined traipsing across other bishops’ diocesan boundaries can get altogether reckless.

Andrew Greeley, novelist and Roman Catholic loose cannon, offers excellent counsel for all those of us so anxious to purify the Anglican communion. “Search for the perfect church if you will,” he said, “when you find it, join it, and realize that, on that day, it becomes something less than perfect.”

Jesus summed up the Beatitudes with reflections on the Decalogue and something like what jazz players call a “turnaround” and others might call a “zinger.” He said that in the last analysis, all we need do is be perfect like God is perfect (Mt 5.48). On the face of it, that’s something of a challenge to most and a good enough excuse for some not even to try.

Greeley’s point is well-taken. But it was a dark and stormy night when “perfect” came to mean “without flaw” and not something more like making and keeping one’s commitments, like maybe “to follow through” and, as some say, to “walk the talk.” Such is not easy, of course, but it’s not impossible, and it strikes me as rather Anglican on the face of it.

He also wrote, “The question is not whether the Catholic leadership is enlightened, but whether Catholicism is true. A whole College of Cardinals filled with psychopathic tyrants provides no answer one way or another to that question.” Greeley said it, not I.

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