July 7, 2006

Warden

Canon Ted Weddell was Warden of the College of Preachers (now aka the Cathedral College) during WWII. Every week in those days, a group of twenty-five clergy were cycled through their curriculum requiring not only quarters, but also three squares a day. The wartime food rationing in effect presented enough of a problem that the College had to appeal to the Ration Board for relief. On so doing, its name somewhat puzzled the officials.

Finally, when they asked Weddell about his title “warden,” they found a solution. On their forms, they simply renamed the College “Ecclesiastical Penitentiary,” thus finding an entirely new category to satisfy their guidelines.

Prison environments present little choice for the inmates day-in and day-out. This is hardly the sort of thing God seemed to have in mind when creating us humans for whom bearing her image means rather singularly the freedom to choose. Anglicanism, thanks to Elizabeth’s settlement, uniquely among churches makes every effort to embody precisely such gospel freedom, such an environment where being — and becoming — human can not only be encouraged, but can flourish.

Such a notion is not only rare among the world’s religions, but ironically so among the churches commissioned by the very gospel that makes that claim about God. A church without any such moral wiggle room seems to us no church at all. Any move away would be subject to considerable suspicion.

Ironic, then, it is that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself through his Windsor Report seems to be proposing just such a move. Such a church defined by his notion of a covenant seems on the face of it inherently contrary to anything common to the tradition which created his office in the first place. The Episcopal Church in the USA, with its multifaceted democratic polity, remains altogether consistent with an Anglicanism that understands moral choice as a struggle rather than a checklist. It offers an arena for such human struggle and eschews any move to provide a settlement of such a critical manifestation of our vocation from on high.

People who don’t want to continue in this grand tradition of Hooker and Elizabeth should not do so. People who cannot abide this kinds of ordered freedom are strongly advised merely to run elsewhere for their comfort. And then we simply need just to leave one another alone. On the other hand, perhaps Canterbury’s penchant for such a covenant as the Windsor Report suggests is only a veiled attempt to allow him to claim old Canon Weddell’s title as one of his own.

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