My Grandfather - Ken Richardson - raised me from the time I was one until I was six. In August of 1970 I went to live with my Mom, newly remarried. None of us suspected that she was married to a child abuser who, on October 31 of that year, at about 7:30 pm, threw a glass bowl full of candy at my face… I remember decades in that house. Centuries. The marriage only lasted from July to October. We were out of there the next morning: into a newly rented house, filled with all our stuff. Mom married again, five years later, to the man I have called “Dad” for the last 30 odd years. But my Grandfather was, really, my father: it was his name I took, after all, on 11 September 2000, when the Superior Court in San Francisco granted my request for a name change. Richardson is the name of my father.
And tonight some memories stick with me, coming to me out of the darkness of time and making me weepy as I watched a video of Frederick Buechner, speaking at the Trinity Institute in 1990.
We believe that it should be possible for women to be consecrated as bishops, but not at any price. The price of legal “safeguards” for those opposed is simply too high, diminishing not just the women concerned, but the catholicity, integrity and mission of the episcopate and of the Church as a whole. We cannot countenance any proposal that would, once again, enshrine and formalise discrimination against women in legislation. With great regret, we would be prepared to wait longer, rather than see further damage done to the Church of England by passing discriminatory laws. In this, we support the recent principled stand taken by the Archbishop and Bishops of the Church in Wales.
The Catholicity (wholeness) of the Church is about building relations, building trust, building communion. It can, as my friend Ana used to say, “Shatter the resonances” if we push too hard, too fast. The women clergy write, After 21 years of ordained ministry and 14 years of priesthood, many of us have much experience of building trustful relationships with those unable to accept the priestly ministry of women. If you’ve watched The Vicar of Dibley, you’ve seen this process in action. Gay presbyters, too, have seen this. But a Bishop is something different. To bring in “other bishops” for those who question “the bishop’s” presence and Authority is not an accommodation, per se, but rather a denial of the catholicity of the Bishops. It is the creation of a deonomination within the denomination. What is a denomination difference, at root, but a denial of one understanding episokope by a group of people? If I can not accept the ministry of my local bishop, I am in a different denomination of Church.
Again, as the women say, Strong relationships have been forged on the anvil of profound disagreement and there is ample testimony to the richness of these encounters, to set alongside those situations which have proved painful. As the broken body of Christ on earth, the Church’s internal relationships should rest on trust, forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation, rather than on protection and an over-anxious reliance on the letter of the law. It is the process of working out this thing that is important: it is the process, the work, that makes us Church. Running rough-shod over someone is not the action of a Christian.
We long to see the consecration of women bishops in the Church of England, and believe it is right both in principle and in timing. But because we love the Church, we are not willing to assent to a further fracture in our communion and threat to our unity. If it is to be episcopacy for women qualified by legal arrangements to “protect” others from our oversight, then our answer, respectfully, is thank you, but no.
I would that gay clergy would take the same stance…
The Bp remembered my name without being prompted. The Bp seems to remember *everyone’s* name. He also remembered every detail of our initial conversation back in Lent. That amazed me. I felt like I’d made a friend -as well as getting a new Bishop.
Then he links to a cool source for a ring tone of the same noise. In other words: you can leave your cellphone on in class, because that old windbag of a teacher can’t hear it. I took the test: I can hear the “39 and younger” tone. But I can’t hear the “30 and younger” tone.
A friend of mine laments relying on his clergy job for money to survive. I’d love to be in his position (even after all the horror stories he’s told me - and those that I’ve heard from others).
As I start to settle in to Buffalo - finding a permanent job, a place to live, a parish home (etc) I’m aware of how it *feels* this time. I’m aware of every choice I make giving up freedom - the freedom to do nothing, the freedom to do something else, etc. Had a long talk last night that included the line “yes, but we don’t own a home yet” and I realised that, unlike most of my friends, I’ve never ever once been more than 20K in debt - let alone 50K or 100K or more.
I wonder how much freedom loss that feels like.
I realise this goes back to my question about the car. I am, more and more, certain that a lot of folks are walking around with suppressed or sublimated fears for their amassed possessions. But I agree with the comment that indicated it was the attachment to them that caused the problem.
Give a listen to Lama Surya Das talk about American Materialism in the context of Buddhism. The first thing a Buddhist must do is renounce the world. But for most Americans, wanting religion without all the bother, most of us are happy with just learning how to sit silently for a while - and continue buying our cars and houses.
The first thing a Buddhist must do is renounce the world, so also with Christians. But most of us are happy to write off our ownership of “Stuff” as “just what you need to get along”… Most of us - owning multiple sets of clothes and shoes, too much petroleum for one planet and enough debt for an entire nation are unaware of how much all of this weighs on us.
And how much our souls cry out just to drop everything and walk away from it all.
I received a very wonderful phone call asking about my conversion to Judaism. Specifically wondering, “Where are you?” It was a wonderful phone call because it resulted in 2 hours of chat and a new friendship. But if a stranger can ask that question - open invite to ID yourself, btw - what must my friends be wondering? Todd probably knows best, so, open comment invite.
Most days, I’m on my 3rd Shift Schedule. At home, I’ve been praying out of a Siddur in the morning and struggling to learn the Hebrew for the heart of the service - the Blessings before the Sh’ma, the Sh’ma itself, the Blessings after the Sh’ma and the the Amidah. As the Hebrew gets easier/comes back to me, this gets a little faster.
This praying in Hebrew means nothing, though: the very heart of the Synagogue Liturgy is exactly where Christian and Jewish Prayer overlap. I can think of nothing in the service itself that an Orthodox or Roman Christian - and most Protestants - could not say.
At night, I sit in silence before my prayer corner, the Ner Tamid burning silently and me simply waiting to feel the touch of the Holy One reaching in. Then I go to work.
I work two shifts on Friday. I’m not going to get to a Friday Evening Service or go Shomer Shabbat right here and now. Just ain’t gonna happen even if I wanted to. Given the lack of a Jewish community, I keep going to Church on Sunday.
On Sunday I’m sitting in a pew debating with Fr Brent during the sermon. Father preaches a decently orthodox sermon for an Episcopalian, and he preaches a rather meaty sermon as well, so there’s a lot to argue with. It’s all in my head, of course, silently. It’s not like St Gregory of Nyssa Parish, where you can offer your feedback from the floor in the context of liturgy. But then I stand up and say the Creed with everyone else (minus the filioque - which a few Episcopalians skip). Then, when the time to lift up our hearts comes, I generally stick in “God” where the text says “him” - and “Blessed be ‘God’s’ Kingdom” etc.
This has been wonderful in other ways: for a few months ago I thought I wanted to pop right off the Christian spectrum. Sitting on Sundays an listening to Fr Brent has shown me was I still like about the Christian system, and what I would miss if I went beyond the pale. Mind you, I still like the idea of Praxis Buffalo. Just now, I may explore it differently - think Minyan.
And that’s where I am. I’m still involved in the idea of an incarnational God. I wonder how a totally transcendent deity can be involved at all. This I do not understand. By the same token I wonder how we move from a totally transcendent deity to an incarnational one. How is it possible for one even to evolve into the other? But that’s on a personal level - assuming God-as-Person. Once we step away from that, I’m far more in tune with Reconstructionist ideas. And if we broach God as “the sum of natural powers or processes that allows mankind to gain self-fulfillment and moral improvement” suddenly we’re in a place where I spent most my life. I don’t know how I feel about it. The primary claim of Christianity: That God is a Person who Loves us - is one that it is hard to define in any other way. Yet, I lived outside of that claim for much of my adult life.
Currently my plan is to keep exploring. As I said to my caller, if the claim of Judaism is that one needn’t convert at all, then why bother? Or, more to the point, why rush? I wrote to another comment poster yesterday that I’ve noticed a pattern whereby I rush in and get burned. I need to move slower. Right now I can see myself exploring Praxis Buffalo, as well as going to either the Conservative or Reconstructionist synagogues in town - and/or maybe both for a time and just sit in silence, simply waiting to feel the touch of the Holy One reaching in. Then I go to work.
I think I’ve finally realised why I like working in bookstores (as much as I enjoy technology) and why I have fantasies not about running a multimillion dollar website, or my own computer shop, but rather about owning a bookstore/cafe where I can serve tuna salad and sell arcane texts and dawdle with customers over coffee.
All of my tech support jobs (gay.com, CIIS and Bellsouth) for all that they paid me more money than my age… as well as my current job… and also my job at the Episcopal Church Center (to the extent that it was about doing off-the-book tech support, graphic design and hardware issue-resolution) leave me with a paycheque in exchange for critiquing people and repeatedly resolving for them problems which, if they but paid attention, would not have arisen more than once. To explain: my current job involves a night, weekly and final audit of every client’s paperwork during which I get to write reports about all of my colleagues’ ability - or lack of same - to live up to standards of medical charting.
All of these jobs eventually find me sitting with other persons who do my job making fun of the people we work with. At Gay.com, we’d sit and read the profiles of customers who wrote to us to complain about something and we’d laugh at them. At CIIS, we’d make fun of this professor or that professor. At Bell South we’d get off the phone screaming in anger. And currently I can sit and whine with my third shift coworkers about so-and-so who never does his paperwork right. All of these jobs play to my cynical side by playing to my naturally critical side.
Thing is: that’s a side of me I loath. It’s the side that makes me bitter and cranky. It’s my perfectionist side. My OCD side. It’s the side my Ex used to refer to as “pointy ears”. (Imagine a very cross rabbit glaring at you with his ears pointing straight up.) It’s the side I try to keep hidden from new folks as long as possible. It’s the side that embarrasses and angers me about myself. I’m ashamed of this side of me. The side my roommate has to swat around for a while to make it go away.
In all of these jobs I reach a point where I realise “No one is doing this work except me. No one is doing it to my standards except me. And I’m getting paid for them to shit on me.”
I never had these experiences working in a bookstore. I had a dream once, when I first moved to SF, of standing on the Second Floor of Borders Books in Union Square, just in front of the stairs. I was laughing so hard in the dream that I woke my self up laughing in bed.
Who dreams of work and laughs?
Perhaps, ultimately, this is why I’ve managed to avoid ordination in any traditional sense of that word. I have been ordained in two different traditions where the Priest is not seen as a corrective, preaching moralistic sermons. The Priest is a liturgist and a channel, but that’s all. Christianity - at least as practised now in a majority of places outside of the Emergent movements - seems to require a religious tech support agent resolving problems and writing critical reports. Eventually he would kick back with a beer and sit around making jokes. I’ve heard those jokes cracked in three different Christian traditions by clergy and seminarians. I see them now as part of the same pattern. The rare few - near saints - who didn’t fit into that pattern were clearly not of the same cloth as the vast majority.
I love liturgy. I love religious debate and conversation and praying and preaching and no… I think I would totally turn into a cynical bastard (yet again) cracking jokes to other clergy (or the “in crowd” on the vestry) about superstition or the public foibles of my congregation or my bishop. And I’d go home to my exasperated spouse who, if he had any sense, would quickly become an Atheist.
I think I’ve just had a major breakthrough.
I need to dream of work and laugh again. But where can I do it for 30+ a year?
I have trouble finding a creative tension between two things:
The idea that the human supposed to pay attention to the “immortal things” because the flesh passes away.
and
The idea that the human was created to be a Body-Spirit synergy that, while currently broken because of, is restored in Christ.
The former seems very Gnostic. The latter seems, somehow, more Christian.
The former leads to all kinds of ascetic wooji-wooji. The latter is the reason the best worship rites involve all the senses - singing, visual beauty…
The former is the reason that some services come close but stop short of involving real humans. The latter is why some rites involve laughter (not the charismatic “holy laughter”, thanks) and tears and dancing and drums and children making a lot of noise.
The former, while certainly “scriptural”, seems to have been more solidly woven into Christian theology from sometime after monasticism took over (ie the “imposition of the monastic typikon” as Schmemann says). The latter seems to have been the louder voice earlier.
This is the self-ruled blog of an Christian attempting to follow God in the Way of Jesus... sometimes. I most identify with the Anglican and Liberal Catholic flavours.
«If someone should say that true faith is the correct holding and confession of correct dogmas, he would be telling the truth, for a believer absolutely needs the Orthodox holding and confession of dogmas. But this knowledge and confession by itself does not make a man a faithful and true Christian. The keeping and confession of Orthodox dogmas is always to be found in true faith in Christ, but the true faith of Christ is not always to be found in the confession of Orthodoxy... The knowledge of correct dogmas is in the mind, and it is often fruitless, arrogant, and proud... The true faith in Christ is in the heart, and it is fruitful, humble, patient, loving, merciful, compassionate, hungering and thirsting for righteousness; it withdraws from worldly lusts and clings to God alone, strives and seeks always for what is heavenly and eternal, struggles against every sin, and constantly seeks and begs help from God for this.» St. Tikhon,Gospel and Faith
I who have written this story, or rather this fable, give no credence to the various incidents related in it. For some things in it are the deceptions of demons, other poetic figments; some are probable, others improbable; while still others are intended for the delectation of foolish men. (Closing lines of the Táin Bó Cúalnge)
