Over at The Lead Jim Naughton quotes the Bishop of Central Florida's comments on Monday at the Lambeth Conference. This excerpt from Bishop Howe struck me:
I remind myself of the Archbishop's comment that, "A failure in leadership is a failure to hope in Christ."
An hour long gathering of the American Bishops in mid-afternoon was equally disappointing. Presiding Bishop Schori (sic) called us together "just to check in with each other and share any concerns." Fully two-thirds of our time was spent discussing Gene Robinson's sadness - and the injustice! - over his not being allowed to be part even of this meeting of "his own House."
(Conference organizers responded to objections that: "This is NOT a meeting of the House of Bishops; it is a gathering of American Bishops at a meeting of the Lambeth Conference, and only those invited to the Conference can be part of the gathering.")
There have been several failures of leadership -- most striking is Archbishop Rowan's treatment of the Bishop of New Hampshire.
Bishop Robinson is being shunned and banned, not for something he has done, but for something he is. That is simply wrong. And the responsibility lies not with "comference organizers" but with Rowan Williams.
This morning I woke up at 5 AM with a heavy heart. Yesterday evening I had seen this post by Bishop Gene about his heavy heart as his Sunday started near, but not at, the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury. As it turned out, later on Sunday his spirits were lifted at the outdoor Eucharist sponsored by Integrity\Changing Attitudes.
I wanted to write something about it earlier, but I had to drive to New York ,this morning, and I haven't had a chance to get to the computer until now.
When I read Bishop Gene's Sunday morning post, I remembered hearing him say that he thinks we are witnessing the beginning of the end of patriarchy. His exclusion from Lambeth, and from the meeting of the Episcopal Church (USA) bishops is an instance of the kind of "power over" that characterizes patriarchy.
Bishop Gene has taken on a great responsibility -- he is bearing witness on behalf of all LGBTQ chrisitans, but especially LGBTQ Anglicans. And he is being vilified for it. Of course it is hard to bear sometimes. But, God love him, he gets up and keeps on going.
Well, Lambeth '08 began yesterday, so I decided to find out about "The Lambeth Walk." Here is a clip of the song as performed in New York at the Tony Awards in 1987.
For those few readers who don't know, Lambeth '08 refers to the decennial meeting of bishops in the Anglican communion -- named after Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The conference this year is actually being held at Canterbury and not in Lambeth. Nonetheless, it is called the Lambeth Conference. A quick Goodsearch reveals a few references to the Lambeth Walk by bloggers and journalists in connection with Archbishop Rowan or the Lambeth Conference, but I haven't spotted anyone who noted that some of the lyrics of the song seem strangely appropriate to the Anglican Circus.
Lambeth you've never seen, The skies ain't blue, the grass ain't green. It hasn't got the Mayfair touch, But that don't matter very much. We play in a different way, Not like you but a bit more gay And when we have a bit of fun Oh, Boy.
Ev'ry little Lambeth gal With her little Lambeth pal, You'll find 'em all doin' the Lambeth walk. Oi!
Miguel Escobar is a member of St, Mary's and is also on the Presiding Bishop's staff. He is leaving tomorrow for the Lambeth Conference where he will be working. A Google search on his full name turned up a letter he wrote to blogger Lee Davenport on behalf of Bishop Katharine. Thing is, Miguel addressed Lee, who is male, as Ms. Davenport. Here is a picture of Miguel from last year:
Here's a verse and chorus for Miguel:
Ev'rything's free and easy, Do as you darn well pleasey, Why don't you make your way there, Go there, stay there,
Once you get down Lambeth way, Ev'ry evening, ev'ry day, You'll find yourself doin' the Lambeth walk. Oi!
Liz and I have just had quite a week. We went home to New York for five nights starting last Friday -- first Liz had a vestry retreat Friday evening and during the day on Saturday. Liz was also pressed into service to play the piano for the principal Eucharist on Sunday morning at St. Mary's -- which took practice time both on Friday afternoon and Saturday evening. On Sunday afternoon we took a tour of three of the window bays at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In the fifty years since I first went to the Cathedral, I had never climbed to the clerestory level -- in fact, I had never been on a tour at all. On Monday we joined Liz's cousin Oliver and his wife Pat, who were here from put of town, for a visit to the American Museum of Natural History. We hadn't been there in a long time. On Tuesday, Liz joined three of her high school classmates for lunch in Greenwich, Connecticut. I did the laundry, some shopping, and began loading the car for our return to Heart Lake Wednesday morning. We returned here yesterday, Wednesday, basically for the remainder of the summer.
That was an exceptionally busy five days for us -- especially for Liz. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Liz developed a cough and squeezed in a doctor's visit Monday afternoon in case it was a treatable infection. It has now developed into a cold -- which I hope I do not catch.
Now that I'm back at Heart Lake, I hope to be able to turn back to blogging a bit more regularly -- and maybe I'll even be able to get some readers.
Last week my aunt Edith went in hospice. Aunt Edith is my father's sister, about 4 1/2 years younger. I have spoken to two of her children, but not in a week, so I have to check for an update tomorrow. I have also been in touch with two of my cousins, children of my father's older half brother, and I have sent an email to my Aunt Joyce, Edie's younger sister. I'm waiting to hear back from Joyce.
Just as I was typing the last sentence an email arrived from Aunt Joyce that Edie died at 3 pm today. So I'll call my cousin Vicki tomorrow.
Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Edith Ellen. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive her into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.
May her soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
There seems to be a limit to the number of different things I can keep going at the same time. The White Queen told Alice that in her youth, by practicing for half-an-hour a day, she could sometimes believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Now I am neither in my youth nor is believing things – impossible or otherwise – the difficulty I face, but still ...
This morning I made a list of the things I am working on and it is fairly daunting.
My major volunteer interest is as a director at Morningside Gardens.
I have named four current intellectual interests:
Pope’s Dunciad Genealogy Blogging Literature (i.e., current reading)
But the taxonomy is idiosyncratically arbitrary. Blogging, for example, includes my current theological and biblical field reading – for example, Richard Hooker and Dominic Crossan – as well as my leftish political interests. Blogging also includes the blogs I read. I try to keep up with developments in Anglican land and with some, but not all, of the progressive Anglican blogs.
The Dunciad category shares with Blogging my current reading of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, inspired by a recent non-wedding in Smithfield, not to mention my currently inactive Dunciad blog. Literature currently consists of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.
Then there are recreational pursuits. Here I chiefly name music and light fiction.
These are some of the things I do by myself -- they don't include my share of household tasks or much of my joint life with Liz. It's no wonder I make such slow progress.
On Sunday of this week, I posted It’s about Time – and never got to say as much about time as I had planned because I ran out of time.
As I have mentioned, I was recently reelected to the Board of Directors of my housing cooperative – Morningside Gardens in New York City. I won’t go into the politics of it, but I am currently the first Vice President and it fell to me to preside over the monthly board meeting last week. The main business of the meeting was on a topic of great interest to many of our cooperators and I found the technical and the psychological preparation for the meeting to be both demanding and time-consuming.
These days I feel pulled in several directions – in New York, I am trying to bring order to my study – a long-standing project. Then here at Heart Lake Liz and I have a project of organizing things in our cottage. When we bought the cottage in 1987 from a cousin, it was filled with the possessions of my great aunt Esther, including some family memorabilia and items of genealogical interst. Then in 1988, we were basically wiped out by a fire and so we had to start over (fortunately, most of the genealogically important material survived.) We rebuilt at a very low cost, and have gradually been making improvements. Each set of improvements has caused disruption, as things were moved around.
For example, this spring we had a lot of finishing work, including our kitchen, done by a marvelous contractor named Brad Hall. In order to do the work in the kitchen, Brad had to move everything, So now we have an improved work space with new cabinets – and we have to put everything away – in fact, we have to establish a new system of organization.– sort of like after moving.
We still haven’t recovered from the disruption made by earlier improvements – not to mention the stuff we moved here from cleaning out my mother’s house. So it’s possible we will spend a lot of time organizing while we re here to enjoy relaxing, being away from the city, and generally letting down.
I am also pulled in other directions – towards this blog, for example, and towards trying to keep up with other blogs, especially in the progressive Anglican blogosphere. Then there is my literary side – I have more or less stalled on the Alexander Pope project, though it hasn’t gone away. My reflections using the lens of Dominic Crossan’s writings have slowed down also.
People in our building in New York use several shelves in the laundry room as an informal book exchange. Recently Liz found the second and fourth movements of Anthony’ Powell’s A Dance to the Music Of Time. Each of the four movements consists of three of the twelve novels that make up the entire work. I first began reading Dance over forty years ago and read the last few novels as they first appeared in US paperback editions. I am now reading it again. The action takes place over a period of about fifty years as the narrator, Nick, goes from schooldays to early old age. Flashbacks and recollections extend the time covered to more than sixty years. It's a marvelous work and seems to fit my current mood.
That’s all for now. Next time, I'll still be on the topice of time.
I began my last post, Bartholomew Fair, four days before I finally felt it was in condition to post. In part that’s because I am quite particular in my editing of my own writing and in part because I was also doing several other things. In fact, I do a lot of multitasking. But for a number of reasons, I have not been reading blogs with my usual assiduity in the past few weeks.
The tag at the head of this blog says these are the “thoughts of a progressive Episcopalian,” And indeed that is a good description of where I am coming from, and I write fairly often on churchy topics. By the time I turned back to this blog today, it was Sunday again – LGBT Pride Sunday in New York. A few weeks ago, I thought I would march in the parade, but then Liz and I came to the conclusion that it would really be too much. A few people from St. Mary’s went – we were hit by heavy rains a couple of times this afternoon and I hope they didn’t get drenched, but I suspect they did.
The primary reason I didn’t march today is that Liz and I are going to leave for Heart Lake tomorrow morning – in fact, we would have left today, but we couldn’t get ready in time.
This past week there was something called GAFCON going on in Jerusalem. GAFCON was a meeting of a peculiar group including neo-puritans who want to refight some of the battles that took place within the Church of England after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 and culminated with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, but mostly characterized by syncretism - they want to raise their cultural aversion to same-sex sex to the level of Christian doctrine. Tobias has the best comment on them that I have seen. (Well, actually Jim Naughton’s comment at Jake's place quoted from The Lead at Episcopal Cafe -- is a winner.)
I have to stop now, because I’m going to watch Inspector Lewis.
I'm a retired math teacher with a keen interest in English Literature. I have been active at my local Episcopal church for almost half a century. My current project is to publish on the web a version of my Masters Essay on The Dunciad.
