June 27, 2007
Provocation
Time comes now and then and usually unsolicited when the continuing news about the destructive miasma worming its way around and through this Anglican Communion of ours reminds me harshly how very much I love this church and how very much I am embarrassed by it.
There are times when we come together as clergy that I cannot avoid the presence of an unexpressed, but no less nourishing and almost palpable connection across all our smugly self-styled orders, some of which we presumptuously call “holy” as if we were all that unique. We have together with all a common ministry of reconciliation, do we. The selfish divisions we work so hard to justify merely and only fly in the face of it, an insult to God.
I hope I am not so long in tooth as not to know how naive I can be about this sort of thing. Naiveté, once in earlier days a mortification for me, inevitably surges now in my later life and suddenly feels far more like a blessing than a curse. For if one is to be faithful, must not one also embrace this kind of wary unawareness as an essential vulnerability to remaining open to come what may?
Frankly, I am mad as hell over the shallow and destructive fear that permeates our beloved Communion. Are we so blind as not to realize how this surely provokes God, the one who creatively imagines our humanity and wants us to express it fully however clumsily?
At a celebration of the Burial Office the other day, I was reminded as we interred a “sinner of God’s own redeeming” that to paraphrase Pogo “we has met that sinner and they is us.” There seemed implied there for anybody yet breathing, “then if so, listen up and get a life while one’s still handy.” All this self-righteous hooliganism in which we are so mired these days seems so utterly tacky and so thoroughly unbecoming to whatever it is God has in mind for us — and we’re pretty sure what that is.
I realized that same evening when our jazz band took the stand for its weekly performance that the first tune we played was that old war horse, “Lady Be Good.” Maybe when I called it I was unintentionally praying to Herself of Magnificat Fame that for heaven’s sake, get us out of this mess.
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