Thoughts after the Third Sunday in Lent

There are certain advantages to keeping a blog that no one (except the occasional spammer) comments on. One advantage is that I don't know whether or not anyone reads what I write.

This past Sunday at St. Mary's the preacher was Chris Ferguson. I alwats enjoy Chris's sermons -- he preaches from the text and has his eye on the truly radical meaning of the gospel. This week the gospel was Luke 13:1-9. Chris focused on the first half, verses 1-5. Twice Jesus says: "Unless you repent, you will perish just as they did."

Chris quoted The Future by Leonard Cohen: "When they said Repent, Repent I wonder what they meant." I'm not sure what Leonard Cohen has to do with it, or what his conclusion about repentance is, but is is clear that to Chris Ferguson, and to most of those in the congregation at St. Mary's on Sunday, repentance has nothing to do with being sorry for and turning away from personal sins.

Pilate had caused some Galileans to be slain while they sacrificed in the Temple, so that their blood mingled with that of the animals being sacrificed. Jesus clearly says that this didn't happen to them as a punishment for their sins. They were no more sinful than any other Galileans. The tower of Siloam in Jerusalem had collapsed, killing eighteen people. Jesus clearly says they were not worse sinners (he actually said "debtors") than any one else in Jerusalem. The clear message is that the bad things that happen to people are not a punishment from God.

Before I go further, a word about the "debtors" in verse 4. In the Greek and in the Vulgate the word is clearly "debtors." In the 14th century John Wycliffe translated it directly from the Latin as "debtors." By the 1th century, William Tyndale translated the word as "sinners." Chris Ferguson told us that being in debt was considered in New Testament times as a punishment for sins, so that a debtor was necessarily a sinner. I'm not enough of a scholar to comment on that. Also, I do not know whether the Tyndale bible or the Great Bible or the Geneva Bible which were based on it included any marginal alternative translations. The 1611 King James bible, however, does include in the margin the word "debtors" as an alternative to the word "sinners" in the main text. (It is a pity that few are aware that the original King James bible even had marginal variants.) It is beyond my purpose in this post to pursue further the matter except to say (following a lead of Chris Ferguson's) that it seems to me to be part of a consistent tendency to spiritualize economic references in scripture.

According to Chris, in this passage we are called on to repent the way of the world -- which is to accept as normal social structures which are built on injustice, inequality and exploitation. If we do not repent, we will perish. Of course, (and Chris did not say this,) if we do repent we may well perish anyway, because just as bad things are not God's punishment for sin, God does not reward us for doing the right thing by protecting us from bad things.

-----

In article at The Lead at Episcopal Cafe, Ann Fontaine asks "Did you know Justice Breyer's daughter is an Episcopal priest?" Well, yes, I did and do know that. In fact, I know the Rev. Chloe Breyer -- she is an associate at St. Mary's and celebrated the Eucharist this past Sunday.

Enough for now.

Lurking

I follow a great many blogs in Anglican land and spend a fair amount of time looking at them. I am also on the ENS and ACNS mailing list as well as a lurker on HOBD. As a result, I am generally pretty much up to date on what’s going on in the Episcopal and Anglican worlds. However I mostly lurk and I haven’t posted on any of the hot topics for a while.

Mark Harris recently pointed to a review in The Living Church by Ephraim Radner of Tobias Haller’s book, Reasonable and Holy: Engaging Same-Sexuality. (I have to confess that I do not follow The Living Church, Stand Firm, or other right wing publications or blogs and depend on others to point me to them. Rev. Ivan Ackeroff is particularly good at that.)

In reading Ephraim Radner’s review I was struck by two things. Consider this sentence from Radner: “Because the arguments are not actually founded on comparative research, however, they will never convince those who are not already persuaded.” This provides an insight into where Radner is coming from – as Richard Helmer points out in the comments at Mark Harris’s blog, Radner and his ilk base their approach on “top-down” theology. Radner’s statement is also, to my mind, disingenuous. His own arguments, at least in this polemical review, “will never convince those who are not already persuaded.”

As Bill Morehead points out also in the comments at Mark’s blog, there is an excellent (and favorable) review by Charles Hefling of Reasonable and Holy in the current (Winter 2010) issue of the Anglican Theological Review. As Hefling says, Tobias’s method is very much that of Hooker. His project is similar to Hooker’s, too -- “that of answering and controverting a stated position, strongly held, on matters of practical import for the church as a whole.” Tobias’ approach is largely biblical, explicitly taking the bible as we have received it. Radner complains that he does not also take the “coherent meaning and authority of the text,” persumably as defined by Radner and his party.

Which brings me to the second thing I was struck by. I recently read a piece by Elizabeth Kaeton in which she said that often in discussions in the church of same sexuality the discussants shift the ground to say it is really about biblical authority and that this is a form of avoidance of the real issue. (I know I’m not doing justice to her point, and I don’t feel up to tracking down what she actually said.) I would assert that next to the ick factor the question of authority (the authority of the hierarchy, the authority of scripture, the authority of tradition, the authority of reason, and the authority of experience) is precisely at the heart of the dispute over same sexuality.

To state it baldly, for some of us who call ourselves Christians, experience and reason trump tradition, hierarchy, and scripture. That is to say, we interpret scripture and the tradition using the lens of experience and reason.

I wrote the above a few days ago. Since then, Tobias has posted on the topic and one comment especially, by Fr. Gregory, pointed out the necessary (but unacknowledged) hypocrisy implicit in Radner's review. Fr. Gregory refers to "the question of whether any scholar, committed de facto to a set of pre-existing truths which he cannot question and does not declare, can serious[ly] and objectively review a work which basically questions those pre-existing truths." His implied answer is of course "No." But this raises for me the question of those of us who know from our own experience that we must reject any interpretation of scripture that condemns all same sex behavior out of hand. Can we listen to the other side with any more openness than they can listen to us?

Reading "Reading Jesus"

I have just finished reading Mary Gordon's new book Reading Jesus. As Mary Gordon describes it, her book is the result of a realization that while she had been hearing passages from the gospels in church all her life, she had not actually read the four gospels straight through.

The first section of her book takes up ten readings which she quotes from one or more gospels. The tenth reading is the the beatitudes from Matthew 5: 3-10. When I read Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, I expected to turn the page and read Luke's version, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God, but no, Mary Gordon does not give us Luke in this case.

She writes

For many days, I write and rewrite these words [the whole passage, Matt. 5:3-20] by hand and then I am paralyzed. Struck dumb. Afraid to write. Silenced by the depth of my attachment to them, silenced at the example of sheer moral greatness and the sense that after these wrods there is, perhaps should be, nothing to say.

What kind of life, what kind of living is suggested by the Beatitudes? Perhps equally important, what virtues are not mentioned...elided, simply left out?

Most striking: the bourgeois virtues. There is nothing about onesty. keeping your word, paying your debts, placing yourself in the right place in relation to authority or hierarchy. Mercy, peacemaking, poverty of spirit, purity of heart (the body is not metioned here). The sexually well-behaved are not given a place.

And a little later:

When I complained to a wise friend that it was impossible to live up to all the Beatitudes -- how can you be both meek and hungering for justice -- she told me no one was meant to live up to all of them, that was the glory of them.

I myself don't take the Beatitudes as a list of virtues to live up to. Rather they are are a list of priorities. And they are paradoxical, taken in the complete context of the gospel. Blessed are the poor, but we are called to relieve their poverty. Blessed are the hungry, but we are called to feed them.

To return to "Blessed are the poor...," in The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan gives two other versions besides those cited above from Matthew 5:3 and Luke 6:20: Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven. [Gospel of Thomas 54] Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? [James 2:5]

Crossan writes:

The basic problem is not just Matthew's gloss "in spirit," although that certainly diverts attention and interpretation from material to spiritual, from economic to religious poverty. Even when that is left aside as a Matthean addition, there is still a serious problem with the word poor itself.

Crossan then goes on for three more pages to demonstrate that the Greek word ptochoi means "not the poor but the destitute, not poverty but beggary."

In The Essential Jesus, Crossan renders this saying as "Only the destitute are innocent."

Mary Gordon grapples honestly with the text of the gospels -- but she grapples with the texts only as they are translated, even to the point of prefering one translation to another not for the accuracy of the translation but for its resonances. And she grapples with the text without a glance at question of when or how the gospels were written -- especially the synoptics.

Mary Gordon's treatment is not fully satisfying to me. Many parts of her book, however, do resonate with me. For example, she asks the question (page 176) "What is lost if we give up the idea that Jesus is God incarnate?" Part of her answer is "If the experience of birth, friendship, suffering, and death was shared by the divine, a relationship of intimacy, and a refusal of dualism, is necessitated. And this, to me, is a pearl of great price."

Autumn in New York (but posted in Winter)

Here's an incomplete post from October 15th.

Two days ago, Liz and I shut up our cottage and returned to New York, two weeks earlier than last year. In the past few weeks, I have been pondering how I want to spend my time.

A good deal of my time is taken up with Morningside Gardens affairs. Another large chunk is time that Liz and I spend together. It's the rest of the time I am thinking about -- what I might call my intellectual projects.

This fall I returned to the study of Chinese -- there is a free Chinese class here at Morningside Gardens. When I was teaching at Seward Park High School, I took a Chinese class for several years, but since it was 1993 when I left Seward Park, that was over 15 years ago. I have a lot of reviewing to do to bring me back to where I was in the past.

I am also determined to spend some time seriously pursuing genealogy -- with the particular aim of having something concrete to pass on to my cousins and my neices and nephews.

A third topic is the Dunciad. I need to find time to get down to the NYPL and read a dissertation before I proceed.

This blog post puts me in mind of a topic I have been thinking about -- what exactly is a blog for? Today I am using this blog as a kind of online journal -- but without the depth of a real journal.

Highs and Lows

Here's another unfinished post -- this on from December 6th.

One of the reasons I have been posting infrequently is that I actually have other things to do with my time (believe it or not!) There's lots been going on in the wider world recently and today I am goingto take the time to note some things that have particularly struck me.

Most recent was the election of two women, one a lesbian, as suffragan bishops in the Diocese of Los Angeles. Susan Russell has an initial reflection on the election and Elizabeth Kaeton rejoices as herstory is made. Rowan Williams issued a predictable if disappointing statement.

Everything free and easy, do as you damn well pleasy

Here's another unfinished post -- this one from last December 18th.

The lines in the title of this post are from The Lambeth Walk, a song from the 1938 musical Me and My Girl. To my mind they are in an ironic sense doubly appropriate to the situation we in the Episcopal Church find ourselves in.

In case you don't know, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has elected two women as suffragan bishops. One of them happens to be a partnered lesbian. Judging by some of the reactions you would thiink the sky had fallen.

On the one hand, the Diocese of Los Angeles has acted in accordance with the canons of our church and the clear intent of resolutions at our most recent General Convention. The fact that a person is a lesbian (partnered or not) is irrevelant to considering her as a candidate for any of the Holy Orders. On the other hand, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the ill-named Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order and the newly jumped up Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion have all issued statements urging the bishops and standing committees of our church to exercise "gracious restraint" and withhold consent to the election of

The draft breaks off in mid sentence. I don't remember, but I was probably searching for a phrase, or maybe a quote. But what they were saying was that The Episcopal Church should not consecrate Mary Glasspool a bishop.

I posted the the song The Lambeth Walk in 2008 at the beginning of the most recent Lambeth Conference. YouTube took that video down, but here it is again:

[I have also fixed the older post.]
To paraphrase the intro to the song, "You can no more walk the US way than we can walk the UK way." We have General Convention, you have General Synod, Parliament, the Archbishiops, and the Government, and the Monarch. We elect bishops, you appoint them. But most important, since the 1979 revision of the Prayer Book, we promise, with God's help, to

strive for justice and peace among all peop;e, and respect the dignity of every human being.

And we repeat that promise regularly.
It isn't really true that everything's free and east in TEC, nor that we can do as we damn well please -- but it is true that we are bound by different constraints than our sisters and brothers in other parts of the Anglican Communion.

A New Year: Conflict and Concord

Here is a fragment that I wrote on January 1st, New Year's Day.

The current issue of Anglican & Episcopal History arrived this week. I have just read a paper by C. K. Robertson, Canon to the Presiding Bishop, entitled "The Challenge of Definition: Concord and Conflict in Anglicanism." Canon Robertson provides a useful look at the development of the concept of Anglicanism, starting from Richard Hooker: "Hooker's example of letting go of one's own supposed infallibility of opinion in order to learn from and be open to others would become his lasting gift to Anglicanism ... and its defining mark."

That's all I wrote that time. Now I add this line from Marilynne Robertson's Gilead:

Doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief.

This is the second in my series of posts that I started earlier.

Breaking Silence

I began writing this on Friday, January 15, 2010 -- the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. at 9:30 in the evening here in New York. Just over three days earlier, an earthquake devastated the city of Port-Au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, as well as many other parts of the country.

Earlier that week, I finished reading Gilead, a novel by Marilynne Robinson. The narrator, John Ames, is a minister in Iowa, whose grandfather fought for abolition in Kansas. Towards the end of the book I spotted this: "doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief." I almost wrote a post beginning with that quote.

I've been trying to get something posted for a few weeks now. Early this month, the journal Anglican and Episcopal History arrived. I was attracted to and immediately read three articles. The first two, "Anglican history in the 21st Century: Remembering All the Baptized," by Jane Shaw and "Anglican History in the 21st Century: Remembering All the Baptized: How Then Shall We Teach?" by Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatoski were presented at the annual meeting of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church which took place in Anaheim in July, in conjunction with General Convention. My principal takeaway from the first article is a reminder that it was the "British conservative evangelicals" who were opposed to the early Lambeth Conferences producing any binding resolutions and now "it is the conservative and evangelical bishops, not only in England but all around the globe, who are pushing for Lambeth decisions to be binding."

The second article brought to my attention the early Christian community in China, evangelized in the seventh century by the Church of the East. There are Chinese writings called Jesus Sutras which date from the seventh and eighth centuries. I am interested in this partly because of my renewed interest in learning Chinese and partly for its own sake. The Jesus Sutras reportedly use language drawn from Taoism -- this interests me and I want to find out more about it, to see if it offers any insights that might be helpful in meditative spiritual practice.

Around the beginning of November, Liz and I began going to morning prayer at the Lampman Chapel in nearby Union Theological Seminary. This service was started by our rector at St. Mary's, Earl Kooperkamp, and takes place Monday through Friday at 8:30 a.m. I call it morning prayer without the capital letters because we do not use the prayer book rite -- instead we use a form from Iona. There's a lot of silence in it, and I am beginning to get used to that. We read two lessons from the Daily Office lectionary, but no psalm, no canticles and no gospel. My interest in the Jesus Sutras is partly so I can use them to briefly meditate on in this morning prayer time.

The third article that grabbed my attention the current issue of Anglican and Episcopal History is "The Challenge of Definition: Conflict and Concord in Anglicanism," by C. K. Robertson, Canon to the Presiding Bishop. It's an important article, but here I will focus on a what is almost a side issue. Canon Robertson refers to the concept of "a spiral of unmanaged conflict" discussed by Susan Carpenter and William Kennedy in their 1988 book Managing Public Disputes. "Their premise," he writes, "is that any given divisive issue left unresolved will reappear again and again in slightly different guises, so that the passage of time, far from bringing healing, instead creates an ever-increasing intensity of opposition." I had never heard of the spiral of unmanaged conflict and was particularly struck by the idea, not for its applicability to the conflict in the Anglican Communion over sexuality but for its applicability to conflicts in the housing cooperative where I live and am a board member.

Note: This is first of a series of posts that I began in the past. I have rounded off the last paragraph that I wrote earlier and leaving it at that

Spam

This blog gets a small amount of spam in the comments -- as do most Blogger blogs, I suspect.

This morning I got the following email from Blogger:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Finite Time":

Hello everyone! Who knows where to upload the film Avatar?I even bought the film Avatar for a SMS to a Russian URL, the link was, but download fails, the system will boot quite strange cocoa something.Men, advise where to normal as quickly download film avatar?

I have substituted "a Russian URL for the link, which was of course the whole purpose of the spam, but otherwise the comment as shown above is verbatim.

It's a found poem:

Hello everyone!
Who knows where to upload the film Avatar?
I even bought the film Avatar for a SMS to
a Russian URL, the link was,
but download fails,
the system will boot quite strange cocoa something.
Men, advise where to normal as quickly download film avatar?

"The system will boot quite strange cocoa something."

Last Wednesday my computer sytem booted quite strange -- or rather it wouldn't boot at all. And I hadn't even sent an SMS to a Russian URL. (I had to use Goodsearch to learn that SMS is a common term for texting -- in fact it stands for Short Message Service -- a name that describes an essential part of the underlying technology for texting.)

Pizza and Higher Power

On Wednesday evening, January 20, several members of St. Mary's gathered with the current interns who are living at St. Mary's. There were about a dozen of us from St. Mary's, predominantly from the choir. This post is a continuation of what I wrote about this gathering in my previous post.

Each of us spoke to the questions "What do you do to connect with your Higher Power?" and "What do you do to express your creativity?" My immediate reaction when I saw the words "Higher Power" was a negative one. After all, this is a church, not an AA meeting. As it turned out, however, it was ok. The first two who spoke were Charles and Rhonda -- both members of the St. Mary's choir and both people who live or have lived on the margins, sometimes in the grips of addiction and sometimes homeless. Both spoke of prayer and praise as important to them.

I spoke after several others had spoken. The first thing I said was that my experience was more like the interns than like several of the choir members who had spoken -- I have never experienced real hardship. I didn't say it, but I am the beneficiary of both white privilege and male privilege.

During my sophomore, junior and senior years in college, while I was pondering the implications of being gay, I was also seeking a satisfying relationship to church. We had Sunday evening chapel at Hamilton in those days -- i don't remember anything about the order of service except that we said the General Thanksgiving, which at the time I did not know came from the Book of Common Prayer. When I was at home, I went with my mother to the Community Baptist Church in Port Dickinson (a suburb of Binghamton, New York,) which was the church she grew up in and in which my grandparents were leaders. In the summer, if I was at my grandparents' cottage at Heart Lake, I went to the Heart Lake Methodist Church. Each of these places had a different flavor, but none truly grabbed me. I knew I was a Christian, or at least I thought I did, but I wasn't sure what brand of Christian I was. In the fall of 1955, when I was 19, my grandparents brought me to New York to see a production of Ruddigore by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Before we went home, we went to Riverside Church and I heard Dr. Robert James McCracken preach. I don't remember what he said, but I remember that it left me with more questions than answers.

I started graduate school at Columbia University in September, 1958. I was 22 years old. At about 3:15 in the morning of November 5, I met Rex Slauson in a gay dancing bar called the "415" at 415 Amsterdam Avenue. Rex and I immediately clicked, and we were together for the next fourteen years and a little over, until Rex died of a heart attack on February 13, 1973. Rex took me first to an Evensong at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and then to St. Mary's. I immediately found that I liked the Prayer Book liturgy and I have been at St. Mary's ever since.
For a few years, probably five or six, Rex and I read Morning and Evening Prayer daily, week in and week out. So my spiritual practce consisted of fixed forms of prayer, either at Sunday worship, the Daily Office at home, or grace before meals. I should also mention hymns. I sang in the choir at St. Mary's for many years. I used to know the names and tune names of many of the hymns in the 1940 Hymnal by number. I can't associate the numbers with hymns in the 1982 Hymnal. The words and music of many of the traditional hymns are an important part of my spiritual life.

Liz and I have from time to time had a practice of reading psalms, scripture, and prayers as well as singing hymns in the morning and sometimes we have done compline in the evening. In recent years we have done this more at Heart Lake where the pace of life is a little more relaxed than it is here at home in New York.

About three months ago, shortly after we came back from Heart Lake for the season, we began going to the Morning Prayer service sponsored by St. Mary's weekday mornings at 8:30 in the Lampman Chapel at Union Theological Seminary. This is not a Prayer Book service, rather it uses an order of service from the Iona Community that uses daily themes from iona and short Celtic prayers. We use the Old and New Testament readings for the day from the 1979 Prayer Book Daily Office Lectionary. The service has a lot of silence, which I am beginning to find useful, especially since from where I sit I can gaze at a large Eastern Cross with a chi-rho in the center; or I can turn my head and look at a Christos Pantokrator ikon. I do miss the psalms, the canticles, the fixed prayers, and the gospel readings.

I answered the question about how I express my creativity by mentioning this blog.

The preceding is a revision and expansion of what I said Wednesday evening. What follows are some relsated additional thoughts.

I am currently reading Mary Gordon's Reading Jesus. I find it a maddening book in many ways, but I keep reading. I keep reading because I am looking for something -- I'm looking for an answer to an important question -- not the answer, but an answer. To put it in Anglican terms, the question is: How can we use reason to reframe our understanding of scripture and tradtion and still remain in continuity with the communion of saints through the ages? I doubt Mary Gordon would come up with those words, but I suspect that is the question she is also exploring.

Sigh! and Hi!

For weeks I have been trying to write a post for this blog. I have lots of drafts, but none of them have seen the light of day. But yesterday evening I mentioned the blog and someone said she would like to see it and I gave her the url.

Blog is short for weblog. The web part is the world wide web, that is, the internet. The log part originally was sort of like a journal, or the way some folks use Facebook or Twitter. So I'll use this post as a sort of journal tonight.

Yesterday morning my computer died. It's still under warranty and today I took it to the shop -- that's easy to do since I live in New York. They said they have a five business day turnaround, which is fine (though inconvenient) because I can use Liz's laptop as a replacement.

Yesterday evening at St. Mary's we had a pizza gathering with the interns. Click on the link to learn more -- to understand what I am saying all you need to know is that there are five interns living in an apartment at St. Mary's, it's an AmeriCorps program and the interns work in social service agencies. Most of the St. Mary's people there are in the choir, since the pizza gathering came right after choir rehearsal.

There were somewhere between 16 and 20 of us there and over the course of about an hour and a half each of us spoke to the questions "What do you do to connect with your Higher Power?" and "What do you do to express your creativity?"

I'll give you my (revised and extended) remarks tomorrow.

Silence

Anyone who has been trying to read Morningsider in the past several months knows that I have been posting rarely and not particularly commenting on events of any kind. For example, my most recent post, on November 15th, was about Chinese characters in a photograph on the front page of the New York Times. Before that,

• On November 12, completely unnoticed by the blog world, I broke the story of the response of the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church to the Apostolic Constitution.


• On November 10 I commented on the pejorative use of the term "unequivocal love" by an ex-Episcopalian in Fort Worth.


• On September 28, I reported cryptically on the meeting of the North American Academy of Ecumenists and referred to a conversation with Alyson Barnett-Cowan.


• On September 11, I posted a very personal account of a week and included this paragraph:

  As for me, I'm in the process of discernment about how I want to spend my time -- when I have time. I may turn back to genealogy for a while -- or I may go back to The Dunciad. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to try to blog assiduously about things Episcopal (or Anglican) or political. But who knows?

  As an update, I'll report that a free class in Chinese here at Morningside Gardens has captured my attention.


• On September 7th I posted about a Labor Day gathering, some old chairs, and an old canoe.


• On August 29 I posted about the Anglican roots of the Faith and Order movement and on the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order.


• On August 28, I posted about an article by Adrian Worsfold at the Daily Episcopalian in which he said things that I thought, and still think, show an appalling ignorance of the relationship of Anglicanism, Christian Unity, and Faith and Order.

Here, in reverse order, are a few things I have not posted about:

• Elections of bishops
• A court ruling against the use of eminent domain in my neighborhood
• Defeat of marriage equality in the New York state Senate
• Sending more troops to Afghanistan
• Uganda

The list could be longer, but that will do for now.

Help wanted

On the front page of this morning's New York Times, above the fold, is a photograph with the caption "A Beijing store is selling notebooks with an image of President Obama, who arrives in China for a three-day visit on Sunday." Most prominent in the photograph is a handwritten sign in Chinese -- and since I am once again studying Chinese (in a very relaxed way) I was curious as to what the sign said. Here is an image of the sign:

There are three characters on the top line and a single character in parentheses below. I should have recognized two of the characters, but the only one I recognized was the one at the bottom in parentheses: 女 (nǚ) which means female or woman.

To find what the other three are I went to YellowBridge and drew the characters into the handwriting recognizer. I learned that the three characters were 招店員 (zhāo diàn yuán) and mean, roughly, "seeking a shop assistant", so the sign means "female shop assistant wanted." I was surprised that the character 員 was the "traditional" form and not the modern "simplified" form, which is 员. The other three characters are the same in both traditional and simplified.

Another (Roman Catholic) Response to the Apostolic Constitution

In April, I mentioned attending a gala for the 80th birthday of Leonard Swidler, who is editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Leonard is also Co-Founder and President of the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC). Yesterday Leonard sent out, on behalf of ARCC, an open letter to Anglicans.Episcopalians thinking about coming over to Rome. The full text of the letter is here.

Completely without irony, the letter lists a number of things that might make someone think twice before making the move. Here is the text except for the footnoteswhich can be found at the link cited above.

We, the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC), wish to extend a warm welcome to our brothers and sisters of the Anglican/Episcopal communion who are clergy and spouses, as well as laity, discerning the call to become members of the Roman Catholic Church under the recently announced Apostolic Constitution.

As committed and enthusiastic Catholics working for the renewal of the Church in the spirit of the Second Council of the Vatican (Vatican II), we recognize the primacy of an informed conscience in making your discernment and decision, To that end, we wish to offer the following observations, that you may be informed of the realities in the Roman Catholic Church of which you may choose to become a part.

You bring an experience of collegiality and subsidiarity at the parish and diocesan levels which, provided you are allowed to retain its practice, will bring a strong complement, even as it stands in polar opposition, to the top-down authority structure of the Roman Catholic Church, where collegiality and subsidiarity function only haphazardly, and almost exclusively at the international level.

You will find yourself members of a Church rich in the liturgy that flowed from the authentic conciliar tradition of Vatican II.

You will find yourself in a Church where at least 39% of marriages now take place across denominational lines, and where truly interchurch couples (who continue to worship together as much as possible in both their Christian traditions) offer an imperfect but real preview of the anticipated unity for which Christ prayed.

If you are a priest, you will find yourself a member of a Church where your Anglican/Episcopal priesthood, exercised with fidelity over the years, is considered “absolutely null and utterly void.” You will be required to question the validity of your earlier ordination and then seek re-ordination within the Roman Catholic Church.

If you are a priest, you will find yourself in a Church where, if your wife dies, you will be called to be celibate, and forgo for the rest of your life the joy and solace of a loving spousal relationship.

You will find yourself members of a Church where at least 60% of its members are in favor of married clergy and the ordination of women, and 45% are welcoming of gay and lesbian unions.

You will find yourself likewise in a Church which defines homosexuality as an objective disorder, yet where some 20-30% of the clergy (bishops, priests and deacons) have that orientation.

You will find yourself in a Church with a rich variety of theologies and practices, some of which you will be in agreement with, while others will be difficult for you to accept, yet all of which are held under the banner of the Roman Catholic Church.

Should you accept all these things, and in conscience believe that the offer of priestly ordination within the Roman Catholic Church is from God, then we will warmly welcome you, for you will have accepted the Church as it is, rather than the sentimental or imagined Church of integrity which some would have you believe.

Sincerely,
Leonard Swidler.

"Equivocal Love"

I haven't blogged for well over a month -- no reason, except a host of other things have been occupying my time.

Here's a quote from The Wall Street Journal, via The Lead at Episcopal Cafe, in an article about the Diocese of Fort Worth:

Mr. Chaffe (part of the breakaway group) said he is no longer distracted by church politics or upset by issues such as the blessing of gay unions. He need not put up with what he sees as a flawed message of "unequivocal love" for all; instead, he can focus on bringing those he believes to be sinners toward repentance. His church, he says, is again his -- and that uplifts him.

The opposite of "unequivocal love" is "equivocal love," which doesn't sound very attractive to me.

NAAE

Liz and I have just returned from the annual gathering of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, held this year at the Washington Theological Union in Washington, DC. The thene was The Ethical Horizon from and Ecumenical Perspective. As readers of this blog and those I link to and follow are already aware, the ethical question that dominates today relates to human sexuality.

There were five major papers presented at the conference. They will be published, perhaps by next fall, in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. One, by Dr. Timothy Sedgewick of Virginia Theological Seminary, dealy directly with human sexuality. The others ranged from a survey of those ecumenical discussions which had touched on matters of ethics to relflections on the Roman Catholic - Mennonite dialogue which in 2004 produced a report entitled Called to be Peacemakers.

As is often the case at conferences, informal conversations were as interesting and informative as the formal presentations. I was especially interested in conversations I had with Alyson Barnett-Cowan and Christopher Agnew.

Down Days

This past Tuesday I drove home from our cottage to our partment in New York, in the full expectation or going to the dental school for another Wednesday appointment and then returning Wednesday afternoon and watching Obama's address to congress with Liz. The plan was that while I was at the dentist, my car would be at the garage.

The plan fell apart in several ways. First, shortly after I got home there was a call from the dentist that the work hadn't come back from the lab, so I didn't go to the dentist ater all. Then the work on the car took all day instead of half a day so I didn't drive back until very early Thursday morning.

I did watch Obama' speech, alone. It was a great speech. But it didn't excite me. My friend Christina sent Liz a link to an interview with Dennis Kucinich about the speech and I passed the link on to Grandmère Mimi who posted the video.

As for me, I'm in the process of discernment about how I want to spend my time -- when I have time. I may turn back to genealogy for a while -- or I may go back to The Dunciad. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to try to blog assiduously about things Episcopal (or Anglican) or political. But who knows?

To review this week:
Sunday -- we had a family gathering here at the lake
Monday -- we were here but I don't remember doing anything in particular
Tuesday -- in the afternoon I drove to New York
Wednesday -- I mostly read all day while the car was being worked on
Thursday -- I drove back early in the morning, then lazed out for most of the day
Friday -- I've mostly puttered all day
Saturday -- tomorrow, we drive to New York. Sunday will be our first day back at St. Mary's in many weeks. We'll return here on Thursday.

Our time in the country is winding down. My commitments at Morningside Gardens are heating up.

Finally, I have begun reading The Church-Idea by William Reed Huntington, first published in 1870. I'll report on it as I get into it.

Chairs and a Canoe

On Labor Day Sunday, September 6, we had what is becoming an annual family gathering at Heart Lake. The picture above shows my cousin Jenny, my nice Michelle and her husband Dan, Liz (my wife,) my Uncle Chuck and my cousin David. Chuck and David are sitting in spring steel lawn chairs that have been on that lawn for more than fifty years.
Here's a picture of the chairs by themselves.It's easy to see that they are in need of paint. Here they are from the back.None of us have ever seen anything like these spring steel chairs anywhere else. Here they asre from the side. In the background are two metal chairs with solid seats and backs, which are more common -- in fact you can find contemporary versions made of much thinner gauge steel. By the way, the reason the grass is so thin or eve nmissing is that the lawn was dug up several times last fall and this summer in the course of installing a new sewer system.

On the same day Uncle Allen took Caitlin and Aidan out in the canoe.
Thanks to my niece Tina for the pictures with people in them.

Christian Unity & Faith and Order

The Office of Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations of the Episcopal Church has issued a Handbook for Ecumenism, most recently revised in 2007. It states, on page 8, that "the story of the Episcopal Church in the ecumenical movement has yet to be written," and goes on to say that the story may be said to begin in the 19th century with the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.

In 1870, an Episcopal priest, William Reed Huntington, published The Church Idea -- An Essay Towards Unity in which he proposed what later became the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. Most of the 1886 resolution adopted by the House of Bishops in Chicago is printed on pages 876-877 of the 1979 Prayer Book. In paragraph 4 the bishops declare

That this Church does not seek to absorb other Communions, but rather, co-operating with them on the basis of a common Faith and Order, to discountenance schism, to heal the wounds of the Body of Christ, and to promote the charity which is the chief of Christian graces and the visible manifestation of Christ to the world.

At General Convention in 1910, Charles Brent, Missionary Bishop of the Phillipines, suggested a world conference on faith and order and a motion by the rector of Trinity Church in New York City, William T. Manning, was became the first formal proposal for a World Conference on Faith and Order. The first conference was held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1927, and Bishop Brent was elected its President.

The first North American Conference on Faith and Order was held at Oberlin, Ohio in 1957. In October, 2005, the National Council of Churches Commission on Faith and Order issued a Faith and Order Commission Handbook which contains a brief history of Faith and Order written by Sr. Lorelei F. Fuchs, SA. She writes:

To date Faith and Order is the most comprehensive theological forum gathering together representatives of Christian churches to work towards the visible unity of the one church of Jesus Christ. It embraces more Christians and churches than the World Council of Churches. Serving this movement at the global level is the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. Similar structures exist on other levels – national, regional and local. This world commission describes its meaning and purpose in its by-laws:

to proclaim the oneness of the Church of Jesus Christ, to call the churches to the goal of visible unity in one faith and one eucharistic fellowship, expressed in worship and in common life in Christ, in order that the world may believe

Oneness of the church of Jesus Christ... visible unity in faith and eucharistic fellowship... worship... common life... so that the world may believe... These concerns are the heart of this unity movement, which identifies two spheres that frame their consideration.

“Faith” is the first of two spheres that expresses the goal of Christian unity in the Faith and Order movement. Behind the “faith” sphere is the desire for visible unity in the essentials of Christian faith, life and witness that inspired the churches to come together in a conciliar structure at the turn of the twentieth century. Regarding “faith,” the purpose of the Faith and Order movement is to unearth the common ground that is at the root which binds Christian creed and confession.

“Order” is the second sphere that expresses the goal of Christian unity in the Faith and Order movement. At the centre of the “order” sphere is the ecclesial praxis of the Christian way of life. Concerning “order,” Faith and Order’s purpose is to discern the ways to mutual recognition and reconciliation of Christian spiritual and sacramental life, Christian mission and ministry.

Together, “faith” and “order” unite in a “movement” enabling the churches to enter into the theological dialogue and reflection necessary to discern and transcend the differences that are church dividing and to recognize and articulate the bonds that are uniting. The dimension of “faith,” then, focuses on doctrinal matters of faith, sacraments, mission and ministry. The dimension of “order” focuses on the form or polity or discipline of these matters. That Faith and Order is a “movement” means that it is not a static entity but a journey towards unity with a direction that is
charted and followed by diverse routes. Rather than a mapped-out blueprint, the movement’s goal of the visible unity of the church is understood as gift and call – a gift from God revealed in the response to a call to fellowship, communion, koinonia. Various structures support this movement.

Sustaining the world movement of faith and order is the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. This commission consists of a secretariat, programmes of studies and world conferences. These latter, the world conferences, are the peaks of ongoing theological work and prayer that is carried out in the valleys and plains of everyday life lived as an ecumenical Christian. Parallel structures exist on national, regional and local levels.

This coming October, the Faith and Order Plenary Commission of the World Council of Churcvhes will meet in Crete. Among the items on the agenda are:

• Sources of authority

By looking at how churches use sources of authority, the commission will take a new approach to the old debate around "Scripture versus Tradition", moving it from a theoretical discussion towards a sharing of experiences.

• Moral discernment

Through the examination of case studies – some of them on controversial issues like proselytism, homosexuality and stem-cell research – the commission will critically look at how churches arrive at their positions on moral issues. The goal is to begin the process of developing an ecumenically recognized set of steps for the churches' moral discernment.

These seem to me to be important questions -- and like many of the issues that Fiath and Order has taken up in the past, they are not easy.

The current WCC director of Faith and Order is Canadian Anglican theologian Canon Dr John Gibaut.

Let me reiterate that I think that someone at the Anglican Communion Office or the Anglican Consultative Council blundered when they put together the title "Unity, Faith and Order." My wife Liz points out that the names of the two previos commissions -- the Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations and the Theological and Doctrinal Commission -- were clear and communicated what the commissions were about. The name of the Commission for Unity, Faith and Order is unclear, unless you realize that "Unity" and "Faith and Order" are technical terms that have ecumenical reference. The name is also unfortunate in that it lends itself to a risible acronym, which has been used by Adrian Worsfold not just once or twice on his own blog, but also at the Daily Episcopalian. Sad to say, Grandmère Mimi picked it up here and here.

Now that I've said all that, it's only fair to point out a few facts.

On The Anglican Communion Official Website is this page:

Ecumenical Affairs - Commissions IASCUFO

IASCUFO - Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order

IASCUFO’s mandate was approved by the Joint Standing Committee in November 2008.

The Standing Commission shall have responsibility:

• to promote the deepening of Communion between the Churches of the Anglican Communion, and between those Churches and the other churches and traditions of the Christian oikumene
• to advise the Provinces and the Instruments of Communion on all questions of ecumenical engagement, proposals for national, regional or international ecumenical agreement or schemes of co-operation and unity, as well as on questions touching Anglican Faith and Order
• to review developments in the areas of faith, order or unity in the Anglican Communion and among ecumenical partners, and to give advice to the Churches of the Anglican Communion or to the Instruments of Communion upon them, with the intention to promote common understanding, consistency, and convergence both in Anglican Communion affairs, and in ecumenical engagement
• to assist any Province with the assessment of new proposals in the areas of Unity, Faith and Order as requested.

The first meeting of IASCUFO will be in Canterbury in December 2009.

Note that the Commission's mandate was approved the Joint Standing Committee in November 2008.

The Windsor Continuation Group Report to the Archbishop of Canterbury, dated 17 December 2008, refers to the IASCUFO. I have been unable to find any reference to the IASCUFO before May, 2009, although there is discussion of the report the Windsor Continuation Group starting about February.

Two resolutions of the May 2009 meeting of the Anglican Conultative Council (ACC-14) refer to IASCUFO. In section g of Resolution 14.09, the ACC

asks the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order to undertake a study of the role and responsibilities in the Communion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting; the ecclesiological rationale of each, and the relationships between them, in line with the Windsor Continuation Group Report, and to report back to ACC-15;

and Resolution 14.10 reads

The Anglican Consultative Council, in the light of the Resolution 14.08 of ACC-14 on the WCG Report, asks that the report of the study undertaken by IASCUFO includes a study of the existing papers developed within our Communion and of current best practices in governance for multi-layered complex organizations, and makes recommendations to ACC-15 on ways in which the effectiveness of the Instruments of Communion may be enhanced.

The reference to 14.08 is a mistake -- they meant section g of 14.09 quoted above.

There's plenty there to brood on, but I don't think it's necessarily ominous. The questions they are asked to study are profound ones. I'm going to leave it there for now.

NOTE TO READERS, IF I HAVE ANY: I'll have very limited time on the internet from now until next Thursday, September 3.

Adrian Squeaks

At Daily Episcopalian Adrian Worsfold has written a piece called "Anglican no longer." That title is intended to signify that he, Adrian, is no longer an Anglican or a Christian, which is fair enough. Adrian is a clever guy, and on his blog, Pluralist Speaks, has written several clever commentaries on things Anglican, especially taking on Archbishop Rowan Williams and Bishop Tom Wright. He has also had cogent things to say about the proposed covenant and about the apparent drive for uniformity within the Anglican Communion. But in the end, he does not know enough and so he sometimes talks (or squeaks) through his hat.

I refer especially to this statement: The latest development is still worthy of comment: having an office for Unity, Faith and Order - a UFO very alien to Anglicanism. In fact, the office for Unity, Faith and Order is not, as Adrian thinks, part of a "drive towards unity of process" in the Anglican Communion. In the first place, it is not new -- it is the result of the consolidation of two long standing Inter-Anglican Commissions. In the second place, Unity and Faith and Order are both terms that refer to aspects of the ecumenical movement -- aspects indeed that have deep Anglican roots. Two minutes or less on Google, or my favorite, Goodsearch, would have brought these facts to light.

To be sure, the average Anglican layperson, and even clergy, are not very well informed about the ecumenical movement and thus might be forgiven for missing the significance of the rather unfortunately named position, Director of Unity, Faith and Order. It is also true that the August 14 post by the Anglican Communion News Services Appointment of new Director for Unity, Faith and Order is not terribly informative. For example, it does not refer to the July 1 post Inter-Anglican Standing Committee for Unity, Faith and Order - IASCUFO in which two important points are made -- first, that the new commission replaces two earlier commissions, The Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations and the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, and second, that the Secretary for the Commission will be the Director for Unity, Faith and Order, Anglican Communion Office.

It was at the third meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in Trinidad in 1976 that the idea was conceived of a representative commission to consider theological and doctrinal questions which concern the Anglican Communion as a whole. The proposal was endorsed by the 1978 Lambeth Conference, and the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission was subsequently established. -- For the Sake of the Kingdom - 1986

Following Lambeth 1988, the second Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission was formed and in 1997 produced the Virginia Report. Following Lambeth 1998, the third Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission was formed and in 2008 issued the report "Communion, Conflict and Hope."

The Inter-Anglican Commission on Ecumenical Affairs is relatively recent. It was established following Lambeth 1998. Before that was something called the Ecumenical Advisory Group of the Anglican Communion which issued the Agros Report to the Anglican Consultative Council at ACC-1o in 1996 and then to the Lambeth Conference.

It is true that both of these commissions have dealt with issues which touch on coherence within Anglicanism, but these are old issues and there is really nothing new here.

In part II, I shall discuss the Anglican and Episcopal roots of the terms Faith and Order and Unity.

Note: I inadvertently posted an incomplete version of this on Thursday, August 27.