June 18, 2006
GC 09
Katharine Jefferts Schori, bp of Nevada, has been elected by the House of Bishops on the fifth ballot the 26th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. The House of Deputies concurred in a vote by orders, lay 94 dioceses to 15, clergy 98 dioceses to 13, then rose to their feet with an overwhelming roaring burst of lengthy applause. She is the first woman ever nominated to this office. An Associated Press reporter told me they’d been planning simply to report this election in the usual way, but on learning of Bishop Jefferts Schori’s election had been alerted to elevate the story to their absolute highest priority.
Bishop Jefferts Schori, 51, speaks over five languages, holds her PhD in oceanography from Oregon State University, an MDiv from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and is an active instrument-rated pilot with more than 500 hours logged. She has written numerous books and articles. Her husband Richard is a theoretical mathematician (topologist). Their only child Katharine Johanna is a second lieutenant and pilot in the U S Air Force.
This place is alive with joy.
June 18, 2006
GC 08
The jazz band backing up the Eucharist this morning flew in from Houston, TX*, last night, but their instruments didn’t. Trumpet, sax, trombone, drums, keyboard, bass were all purloined from some already closed music store in time for the big Sunday morning celebration. Ya gotta have muscle. A lot of Beethoven, Bach, and come-to-Jesus jazz moved the churchers ever so much as did the PB’s sermon. Actually more, if you count visually. [*Ed. bias: Rather inordinately proud this was a Texas band.]
Yesterday, had the honor to speak to the Geranium Farm-Out of Nowhere noon brunch at the Hyatt [speech follows]. Met the head knocker of Church Publishing, Inc, told him he has a manuscript CPI had requested of me, and I’d submitted. He said, “What’s it about?” I said, “Irony and Imagination.” He said, “Aren’t they all?” I was encouraged. Another Great American novel idea down the shute.
The House of Bishops is meeting this morning to elect the Episcopal Church’s 26th presiding bishop from one of their seven nominees who include the first woman ever to be so nominated. Once that’s done, they’ll announce their choice to the House of Deputies and ask for their concurrence and the to the world. There’s a resolution lurking around somewhere that would change all this and give the House of Deputies equal authority in this periodic election. It’s time. The PB’s no longer merely just the chairman of the board.
My seminary constitution and canons prof might have been proud that I got to explain to my press colleagues [The Covenant Journal and OoN never had it so good] how voting by orders works in the House of Deputies. The Director of Communications for the Episcopal Church in the US&A had deferred.
A thousand or so attended the Integrity Eucharist night before last at Trinity Church and heard a pastorally prophetic sermon preached by the Bishop of New Hampshire whom, the night before, you may have seen on Larry King. He didn’t seem at all to be the “abomination” his fellow priest David Anderson thinks him to be. When asked by Larry King why he stays in TEC, Anderson says it’s because he “loves a good fight.” +New Hampshire says “love your enemies, anyway.”
A spokesperson for Integrity said of their mission: “Our deepest desire is to testify to this church and to this communion what we know of the saving grace of God in Christ Jesus present in our lives, our vocations and our relationships.”
As a whole, this Big Fat Anglican Wedding is a pretty good show for a much better cause.
GC08 is more than likely the last post from comedy central Columbus. We’re off on the yellow brick road to Gnashville, TN, in the early bright tomorrow, mixing our metaphors as we go.
**************
Writing as a Means of Grace
an address at a brunch
by Lane Denson
A story is told that one of the older nuns in a community was suffering from chronic confusion and loss of memory. From time to time, she would wander through the convent emptying people’s mailboxes, striking up strange, but pleasant conversations, collecting items from sisters’ bedrooms and giving them to others.
The community sponsored a school. One day, one of the teachers was called to the phone and left her mid-term exams and grade book on a table in the community room. When she returned, they were gone. A frantic two-day search began, notes left on the bulletin board, pleas made on the public address system.
Finally, somebody thought of the wandering collector. There, buried under her laundry, were the grade books and the tests, all studied and corrected. Everyone had got an A.
Nowadays, they say, when sister wanders the halls, passersby bow inwardly to her. Through her seemingly foolish actions, wandering and reminding all by her presence not to fear the final judgment, they discovered a new sense of themselves, that there are, finally, no record books, and everyone makes an A. “There is no end to the birth of God,” wrote D H Lawrence.
Perhaps, what appears most senseless can often seem most meaningful of all. Life fills to overflowing with opportunities to make the senseless meaningful to an irrationally rational world. We might but grasp the moment.
Sometimes we are senselessly poetic, and the world is charged with a moment of beauty. Sometimes we are senselessly tender, and hardened hearts begin to melt. Sometimes we are senselessly nonjudgmental, and we see through a glass darkly into the nature of life.
What if we became senselessly vulnerable and reduced the defense budget? Might the world know less fear? What if we were senselessly forgiving and abolished the death penalty? Would children then understand respect for life? What if we were senselessly generous and created a new welfare system that gave the poor a fighting chance? Might our own hearts be softened?
When Jesus forgave the adulterer, a senseless kindness brought the self-righteous to self-knowledge, a senseless grace embraced both accusers and accused and changed lives, a senseless justice confronted an oppressively sexist system and challenged all to do likewise. We are surrounded by the seemingly senseless: the mystics, the poets, the clowns, the so-called irrational and impractical, those who are “different.” They are all there, writing something in the sand.
I’m not altogether sure why this parable intrigues me so, save it affirms for me in a rather indirect way the senselessness, the nonsensicalness of faith as a response to grace. The writing of the Out of Nowhere series has become for me a way of expressing that through irony and imagination, the very ways, I believe, that God creates. So, I ceased looking for the rational a while ago. It was too frustrating, and I found myself inevitably pandering. Hence, writing as a means of grace, as a means of welcoming grace.
Obviously, writing not only uses, but also develops language facility. Writer Toni Morrison claims that language makes us human. Writer John Evangelist said the Word became flesh. I think he not only meant what we call incarnation. I think he also meant that the Word enhances and suits, adorns and embellishes flesh. For example, when we discovered DNA, we discovered something like God’s autograph. DNA is the language that informs, that gives shape and function to human being. It was there all the while, of course. Its discovery is one of grace’s markers.
Then comes the real pleasure. If we’ll let it and trust it, together with DNA, imagination moves in. Imagination is wishful thinking implementing faith and welcoming God, embodying the mind of Christ, affirming commitment, daring to be vulnerable, and just as DNA shapes us, imagination shapes our world. When we speak of being created in the image of God, we’re saying that the Word is God’s private system for imagining human being. For to be created in the image of God means, at least, to be imagined into being by God, to be the creature of God’s imagination, to be told into being, to be God’s “once upon a time.”
By virtue of God’s creating us, we are spiritual beings, breathed, inspired into being as was Adam. Our vocation in response to this gift is not so much to become more spiritual. Our vocation is to become more human, to fulfill God’s desire for us, God’s imagination for us that as our Catechism says, we be set free to choose: to create, to love, to reason, and to live in harmony with all of creation and with God. Our vocation is to embrace that freedom ex nihilo, Out of Nowhere.
The profound irony of our faith as Christians makes considerable demands on our imagination. As our imagination is the very instrument, the implement of our faith, it leads and opens the way for faith to reach out and see through Paul’s glass, Paul’s icon darkly. It serves our imaginations well. We are, indeed, ourselves, icons.
This becoming human, this fulfilling God’s image for us, is, of course, and as well, a spiritual quest. It is a quest for meaning, integrity, memory; a quest to understand the mystery of vocation and to communicate it in a way that others will, if not understand, will at least respect or forgive. It may be sudden, as in a conversion, or it may merely be gradual, even gentle with a mild shock here and there. But the quest is incarnate. God created humanity, but a humanity free enough even to defy the divine will. God woos us and therefore takes her chances on winning or losing and will finally prefer to let someone be lost rather than to interfere with the sacredness of the human person.
Jaroslav Pelikan* puts it this way. In the beginning was the word. The very first act of God in the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible is to speak, and in the Greek tradition, the word for “word” and the word for “reason” are the same — this declaration affirms that the act of communication is at the very center not only of human existence and its origins but of the mystery of the Divine Being itself.
He continues. Human beings, being created, according to that first chapter of the first book of the Bible, in the divine image of a God who has no face, participate through the divine image in the mystery of the Divine Being by themselves reflecting those capacities of the Divine Being that lie at the center of self-revelation through their own imagination analogous to God’s creative imagining. And those capacities are two, but finally they are one: the capacity to love and the capacity to communicate. For in the beginning was the word.
I need to say this again for my sake if not for yours. We are not human beings whose vocation is to be or to become more spiritual; we are spiritual beings whose vocation is to be or to become more human. This is God’s wish for us. It became for me an understanding not only of our vocation but of the church’s, as well, as the community to enable and facilitate that vocation. It also clarified how religion as that corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable can actually compromise that vocation by affecting the environment, the instrument, that is, the church, God gives us to bring it about.
In a 12-step meeting, a nun was talking about how difficult it had been for her in her recovery to take the third step, to turn her will and her life over to the care of God as she understood God. It was not until she realized that she was trying to make this commitment to her limited understanding of God rather than to the unlimited God who transcends her understanding. We do not often realize how our insistence on orthodoxy is such a stifling barrier for a person whose faith is pressing around the edges of her growth to fulfill God’s image for her, to recover and to fulfill her humanity.
Another marker for me has been Reinhold Niebuhr’s so-called Serenity Prayer which is not a prayer about serenity, but a prayer about change and about choice, two more of the markers in our spiritual growth toward humanity. How well we cope with and incorporate change and choice and the courage and wisdom with which we engage them is a significant measure of our maturity. The 12-step program is thus a paradigm for anyone’s life of faith leading toward spiritual awakening, it is a paradigm for the process of becoming fully human which, of course, is the goal of what is called recovery. It is a way of describing the Way.
The Baptismal Covenant is the church’s five step program, the model of what it means to be a Christian, to incarnate the Christian life, to be a pilgrim on he Way. It is a spiritual quest.
One of my true joys is playing jazz. Our band was playing that grand old standard “Out of Nowhere” one night. When I got home, I sat down and started writing.
*Jaroslav Pelikan, “Writing as a Means of Grace,” in Spiritual Quests: the art and craft of religious writing, ed William Zinser, Houghton Mifflin, pp 85-101, 1988.
June 16, 2006
GC 07
GC 07 16vi06
Gathering around Jesus’s table making eucharist with one’s Host and awaiting marching orders in his Kingdom is hardly the place one would expect to be cautioned. Yet it’s precisely that same table writ large over here in Ohio, and everybody’s asking just that, that we exercise caution.
That Windsor Report that’s making us so antsy not only asks us to proceed with caution, it asks for “extreme caution.” I’m not altogether clear about what they mean — maybe some of the kind of caution Jesus used riding the purloined jackass on Palm Sunday and the kind he used in knocking over the moneychangers and in the stare-down with Pontius Pilate and especially the care he used not to step on anybody’s toes while dragging the cross bleeding all the way up to Golgotha.
Jesus’s justice contained and clarified and fulfilled the law, but we’re still being asked at best to shoehorn justice into resolutions and canons and codicils, our own version of the law he fulfilled. Love God and neighbor, Jesus said, but be cautious about it, it’s damned risky, and you night get hurt.
This Convention might get closer to its commission as a church if it would just throw caution to the winds. Maybe starting with knocking the wind out of Windsor?
PS. A reader writes, “I’ve been following your reportage. My glasses are bad, and I misread General Convention as Geneva Convention.” Don’t I wish? Triage, here we come.
PS2 Sorry to miss the preachment this week. Mustard trees aren’t all that big, and Jesus knew that just as well as we do. But the Kingdom is out there waiting for us just to figure out how to cut the mustard (Mark 4:26-34).
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.
June 14, 2006
GC 05
Beloved:
The daily 0930 press briefing is concurrent with the daily Convention Eucharist around the corner and down the hall. As a concession to those who may find that conflicting, the briefing has now been designated by the moderator as the Liturgy of the Word.
Famed homiletics maven Barbara Brown Taylor was reported in the press yesterday as renouncing her priesthood to attend to more preaching or something or other. Quite apart from that interesting concept, today’s report is that she’s not done that at all, but only has left the parish ministry. Now, she’ll be spared vestry meetings and able to engage the work which is her heart’s desire and for which she may have become more appreciated.
The Special Committee on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion is meeting and holding hearings and will make a report tonight on how we’ll go about taking the Wind out of the Windsor Report. Well, not exactly, but something like that. Only the big grown-up reporters will be allowed to attend, so you know where that leaves Covenant, the Wonder Journal, and its errant progeny Out of Nowhere (cf www.covpubs.org). We’ll report as best we can with our usual secondhand scoops.
Each diocese elects four clergy and four lay deputies to the House of Deputies plus four alternates in each order, as well. This is to provide for a full voting complement and diocesan representation at all times. This year, Diocese of Tennessee alternates were neither assisted financially (as are deputies) nor notified of pre-convention meetings of the deputies nor were their names entered with the appropriate officials in the House. Our deputies this year and our bishop are either AAC/Network members or sympathizing fellow travelers. Our first alternates are not. Go figure.
June 14, 2006
GC 04
Beloved:
Columbus, Ohio, seems like a clean town, what I’ve seen of it, anyway. It’s enough to make a city proud. GC 2006 being in town is enough to make a city smile what with all the money that’s getting spent.
There’s not much to report tonight, mostly because today was what I think is called pro forma sort of like Tiger Woods’s swing.
Rumors fly, of course, mostly about who’s going to be the next Presiding Bishop, not so much about who’s best qualified as about how the nominees voted in 2003 over in Minneapolis. Here’s a world in flames with all the sick and dying and roadside bombing and damn fool warring, and we’re still up to the whazoo over sex. We act as if we think Jesus can just wait like he has been for all these centuries. We forget that it was way back further that old Isaiah said “seek ye the Lord while he wills to be found” (Is 55.6; emphasis mine).
Nobody around here ever seems to entertain the idea that there may come a time when God and Jesus (whatever your theology, it’s theirs that matters) have had it with us and all our puffery. But then, it occurs to me that I’m being too hard on all these deputies and bishops. The least I can do is presume that they mean well and want to do good work.
At least, I can say that we’re a staying-in-touch people if we’re anything. There are almost as many lap tops as there are laps and some even for folk who couldn’t come up with much of a lap to top if they had to. The first obvious thing that struck me is how many cell phones there are, some that clip around like Ernestine so that you can walk along freehanded, talking into the thin air and not seeming all that present. I’m confident enough that we’re keeping in touch and skeptical enough to wonder if the Dark Side is not always better organized and ready to boogie.
Be well. Do good work. And keep in touch.
June 13, 2006
GC 03
GC 03 13vi06
Beloved:
An avid reader all excited about GC 2006 writes, “Two things I most remember about Columbus are — the city cops pulling the plug on Frank Zappa during his concert because they thought he was obscene and Larry Flynt, of Hustler magazine fame, buying a huge mansion in the wealthiest neighborhood in Columbus almost across the street from the most exclusive girl’s school in town.”
It’s culture, is Columbus. James Thurber was born here.
Wandering through and grabbing a snack in the Hall of Exhibits has its moments. Some guy keeps playing “Amazing Grace” on an alto sax polished to a fare-thee-well, but very much out of tune. Tennessee (as in diocese-that-can’t-elect-a-bishop) is well-known for its electile dysfunction. My press badge reveals my origin so I get stopped a lot. Never for an autograph, but always for What’s the matter with us we can’t make decisions? I always tell the wrong people what’s really wrong and one of them took me in hand and prayed practically the same prayer we’ve been praying for the last six months. Nobody seems to wonder if maybe the answer is “Bishop Shmishop.”
The House of Deputies “first legislative day” (that’s today) is being spent mostly on organization and certification and greetings and adoptions of special orders. They got so exhausted they took four hours for lunch. The House of Bishops has a resolution supporting “Biblical Literacy” proposed by the Diocese of Vermont and linked with three commemorations — the UK’s abolition of slave trade bicentenary (1807-2007), the 230th anniversary (1777-2007) of Vermont’s (first in the nation) abolition of slavery, and the 175th anniversary of the election of Vermont’s first bishop, John Henry Hopkins, who wrote about the biblical basis for supporting slavery. Slavery (and a lot of other malaprops) are the result of biblical illiteracy, hence the obvious connection. Got it? Next thing you know a couple of hundred years from now we’ll figure out something about gays and lesbians and the Bible. Go for it, Vermont.
In ran into Canon P D Quirk down the hall looking at the lace cotta exhibit. He asked Why are they passing all those resolutions about slavery and vermouth. He seemed to be shaken more than stirred. We stepped aside into the Convention Chapel for a calming exercise exorcism.
June 13, 2006
GC 02
At TEC General Convention 2006
Beloved…
[My fellow reporter Pepper Marts from New Mexico, begins his dailies, “Beloved.” Although it may strike you as out of character, I thought I might as well do the same thing, wondering if maybe you’d see it as a move toward a more compassionate affect.]
When the Plano, TX, meeting of the American Anglican Council met in Dallas a few years ago, their conferees were admonished not to talk to “outsiders” nor even to each other, for that matter, for their attention to the agenda was more important. Just to keep them mindful of the gravity of the situation, six uniformed and armed Dallas police officers surrounded the room and barred the doors.
This morning’s press briefing sans cops is not nearly so somber, but grave enough. The church is proud of its electronic sophistication with all these ethernet and wireless possibilities, but the briefers had to work without microphones. There are four of them, two from the House of Deputies and two from the House of Bishops, plus a moderator.
The hot topic this morning is, of all things, about sex. One of the seven nominees for the new Presiding Bishop is a woman. The bishop-briefers were asked what they thought her chances of being elected PB are and, if she is, how that might affect the rest of the Anglican Communion which has a dim-enough view of us already. They demurred. They’re both males.
We were informed that there’ll be seating priorities at the press conferences. The big guns — AP, CNN, NPR, NYTimes, WSJ, etc, national and international media will get the best seats. Plain old newspapers next, then us shotgun alternates will be down at the end of the line. I don’t see anybody here from Time magazine, but then, I’m told, they don’t usually show up until there’s going to be blood. Mad magazine doesn’t appear to be here here, either. Whether they’re still in print, I don’t know, but nevertheless, OoN will keep up their tradition that “All The News That Fits, We’ll Print.”
Be well. Do good work. Keep in touch.
June 13, 2006
GC 01
The weather holds in Ohio. The sudden regimen of walking everywhere at length makes me mindful of all those good intentions viz a viz my stationary Schwinn by which I paved the way here. Quadriceps and shins have not yet complained, but I suspect they’re taking notice. And TBTG for New Balance’s innovative attention to geriatric feet.
Last evening had the good pleasure of dining with a gang of EWC (Episcopal Women’s Caucus) volunteers at some brewery/restaurant that also, if reluctantly, offers splendid club soda and lime + a monster salmon salad. Not entirely by coincidence, yesterday was also the end of the twenty-seventh year chasing Bill (the sober W) and the first day-at-a-time of number twenty-eight.
First press conference is today at 9.30 am where I’ll be embedded along with BBC and NYTimes guys and a lot of other heavies. When I discover what that’s all about, I’ll for sure let you know.
Meanwhile, Like Garrison says, Be well, Do good work, and Keep in touch.
June 11, 2006
Parables
Jesus’ parables puzzled the disciples. Maybe it would have been better for them had he been more straightforward. How come you use those things, they asked, they’re all riddles to us. His answer wasn’t much help.
Here they were, charged to go out and baptise everybody who turned to them because they were so winsome and irresistible. And he answers that he used the riddles exactly so that nobody would figure them out and then expect to hit the jackpot because they had (Mt 13.10-17 more or less). Then he goes on to say that it’s not that the parables will charm you into heaven, but that unless you take the risk of opening your ears and listening for God’s sake, you’ll never get there. Music never charms the savage beast until the savage beast lets go of its savagery long enough to pay attention, or something like that which is not always all that likely.
Church conventions at their best are like parables. Of course, they’re rarely at their best, but when they are, they’re like a story with a point, not a Walt Disney allegory, but an unreasonable and altogether irrational act that doesn’t let the grace grow under its feet.
General Convention 2006 — about which the world or most Episcopalians for that matter probably couldn’t care less — has already started up in one way or another today. I’m not there yet, but will be tomorrow. I’m still recovering from all the churcher tears this morning sending off our priest of seventeen years to another cure. (The ushers handed out pocket tissue packages with the alms basons.)
Even so, GC 2006 looms for me. Maybe it’ll be a parable, even a narrative about a narrative, so we can all rejoice. Maybe it won’t. I’ll do my best to try to see it and report it that way. But it won’t make you have more faith or understanding. I’ll guarantee that. However, if you lay on it a lot of faith yourself — and prayer — this next week, you could rare back with God and help pass a miracle.