August 25, 2007
Mode
Terry Holmes puts it well and helpfully when he says that Anglicanism is a mode of making sense of the experience of God… or that it is a particular approach to the construction of reality or to the building of a world. Maybe he means it’s an icon, a window, an experience of God as disclosed in the person of Jesus, the Christ. (Holmes, “What is Anglicanism,” Morehouse, 1982, p 1)
The third step in Twelve-Step programs reads, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him(sic).” It’s not an easy one, but neither, to put it mildly, are the Steps, themselves, all that downhill. It’s a lot clearer when one takes the Third, I’ve found, to get our understanding of God out of the way and to turn our attention to the God of our understanding. When I realize there’s a lot more to God than even I could possibly let on and whatismore understand then I might get that straight and become a follower and not an impediment.
So with Anglicanism and with any of us who claim its kin. Jesus is the Way and the Truth and the Life, or, at least, he said he was, and it’s a good place to start on whatever way we might have in mind and hold dear. Anglicanism, Christianity, for that matter, is a way to the Way, not the Way in itself. We could do a lot worse than somehow to incorporate the Third Step into our Anglican manners and let God… so we could have some better footprints to follow than we’ve somehow been able currently to come up with. Then maybe it’ll not be so scary and contentious out there, and maybe we’ll start serving God and not some orthodoxy, no matter how catholic.
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