June 15, 2006
GC 06
Incidental Intelligence — The House of Bishops was debating yesterday over whether to use in a resolution the word “compel” or the word “urge.” What they were compelling or urging escapes me, but the image of their deep concern and leadership remains.
I learned about this not at the House, but at the debriefing of things like the Houses do. It took a discerning reporter not given to intimidation like some of us who kept pushing as to what it was the bishops really wanted to say. Finally, the Bishop of Maine, one of our debriefers for the morning, delivered herself thusly: “The language of a resolution should not give the sense of more power than the resolution actually has.”
Wishing I had said something like that, I was struck by what good counsel it is for all of us. Though it seems rarely followed, especially by those of us who assume more power than actually we have, it set me to thinking again about why we so often confuse power with authority, the one, manipulation, the other, leadership.
And I don’t want you to miss a local headline I saw somewhere: “Why doesn’t my code get its own movie?” — Samuel F B Morse
Upward of a thousand of us gathered in a huge hall last evening to hear commentary on what on earth we’ll eventually decide about the Windsor Report. Nobody knows, of course, but the four resolutions concerning our answer are to be discussed and voted on tomorrow or Saturday. Among the speakers were, almost in tandem, the Bishop of Pittsburgh himself, momentarily head of the Anglican Communion Network, and the Bishop of New Hampshire, thought by some to be the inspirer of same. God and God’s church, heavy into the kind of irony these gatherings so often produce.