Are we sick?
31 May 2008 - 27 אייר 5768 by Huw
Bishop Alan writes of hopelessness as sickness in the Body of Christ.
Some kind of internal distraction process seems to be pulling the wagons off the trail, dragging them into a defensive, inward looking circle. To change the metaphor, perhaps the body of Christ is subject to the kind of illness in which the body’s immune system turns on the body itself, producing illness, despair and frustration.
He notes a series of dichotomies, saying “If these both/ands become either/ors, they are symptoms of sickness…”
He wonders about the wagon: are we moving forward or are we circling them. And he draws this into a discussion of cliques.
Human groups have a way of degenerating into self-serving cliques. One of God’s mechanisms for preventing this is to send along a healthy crop of alternative people to leaven and enliven them. Really strong cliques, however, have a way of making it pretty obvious up with what they will put in others. They can pray as hard as they want for growth. No responsible deity, however, would put more people into their sausage machine, until they grow up and become joinable.
I see Bp Alan’s words as a critique of strong parties on many sides of the current Anglican Canyon: anyone who seems to press an agenda at the cost of the Church’s being herself. I’m with James: I’m no longer threatened by those who believe differently than I, only by those who insist I must believe as they do - and who seek through trickery to change my beliefs to suit them.
But I see the post as a critique of many others as well: emergent to staunchly institutional, traditionalist and revisionist, liturgist and evangelist, Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox… whomever seems to be drawing the wagons into a circle rather than opening out into the world.
It seems to me, though, that the conservative mind tends towards a uniformity of thought and action. I think this is why there aren’t too many more conservatives left in the Episcopal Church, and those that are left are considering their options. It’s a nice idea to have a multiplicity of ideas under one church roof, but I wonder how practical it is…