An Addendum

Curiousities and/or insufficiencies in the way I write necessitate an addendum to December's last post. At the least, some explanation regarding a post that took too many days to draft & still was lacking...

I am, and have been, and will remain supportive of the new Province, although, as noted many times, I do not at present attend a church and have been chided over the matter by a friend or two, especially in regard to thinking I can post on matters of the Anglican Communion at large, given my lack of participation. I will return to this matter in a moment.

With the new Province, it is merely that I am slightly uneasy about it, some portion of which I attempted to muse through in the post finally readied and put up. I have enormous respect for the men out there on the firing line of this new venture. I will return to this also.

In regard to my quiet corner of the world, I left the Church in 2001 or 2002 over a personal matter and never quite made it back. Again, several have wondered along the way - particularly since I began blogging - how I think I can consider myself a part of a Church (i.e, 'argue' about what it is doing) when I have no affiliation (other than, as I claim, 'membership' at a particular parish - wherein I am 'inactive') with said Church.

What is the Church? Far more than a building, a congregation or a denomination. The Church can be many things, depending on what robe it is wearing at the juncture at which it is met. The Church militant, as an example, operates under somewhat different necessities than the everyday, let's go to church sort of endeavor.

Different governing rules, if I may, but only by virtue of extremity. But again, the Church Militant is only one of many robes...

The Church universal covers all who are called of Christ - both the quick & the dead. It is at present the Church to which I belong, although I still regard that membership in a particular church building with a particular congregation in a particular diocese in a particular province in a particular denomination which represents a worldwide Communion of believers and belongs to the larger Church universal...mine. I just am not participating in the life of that particular group of people at present for reasons which are many and - some good, some bad - but each one (more or less) valid.

The Church is not merely a physical plant or collection of ill-assorted (or otherwise) individuals with ideas about how things should be. Insofar as my not following through on any of the basics needful to be a part of a local Body, 'one day' must for the present remain my plea on the matter.

I find schism as abhorrent as the next. However, I do not see any movement other than schism if things do not resolve - and I do not think they will resolve. To be in communion with those who favour this new defining of holiness - this new defining of the work of Christ - this new Christ - makes us one with them. Being one with views which are set so violently against all that has been known as holy is not safe.

The concept of 'oneness' is both simple & profound, easy to conceptualize and made of things which should be considered at length. I will merely remind of some of them - our oneness with God, our oneness with each other, sexual union (which makes one), marriage, marriage of Christ & the Church...against the reality that we cannot fully understand what being yoked with those who are promoting unsound doctrines means.

I don't think we have the concepts necessary to comprehend what might be happening. I get kinda scared there - back away from what it could mean, though I have suggested it at another blog. And will - and must - leave it there.

But as noted in December, we cannot be in communion with others and not be in communion with them at the same time. Communion is not a matter of opinion and/or commitment to an ideology - theological or otherwise.

I have thought over the years that sometimes it does not matter whether we get it 'right' or not. Too much has been lost.

Many things, to be sure, must be right.

For the rest of them, I think sometimes that it is whether or not we follow our conscience on a matter that will make a difference. Scripture seems to support that possibility - with the necessary caveat that some will have their consciences so seared that following conscience is impossible.

Which is to say.

Better put a lot of thought into the matter before you sail out into the night.

My thoughts, then, regarding schism are not supportive of it. I just tend to prefer a thought that somewhere, something might show the seriousness of the matter and thus far, nothing has. GAFCON met in many corners - and still does - with ridicule.

The new Province likewise.

Which is why numbers matter so very much.

And so sadly.

My heart goes out to those on the firing line now. Father Matt Kennedy & his congregation at Church of the Good Shepherd are especially in my thoughts now and I hope all who are on that line will forgive my image of a young toddler tugging his daddy's robe: our Lord Himself used the image of children often. I am sufficiently old to see even those of more years than I have lived as young children - it is a prevailing image & one of gentle sorrow: I am a mother; I have been a child.

All of us in this together. Enough said.

I spoke in that last post of that need to choose sides - or that inability now to linger in that place where I can remain 'open-minded.' Borrowing St. Paul's image of 'all things to all people' merely underscored his lament that we cannot be so.

We cannot be what our time wants us to consider open-minded (but, as noted in December, is not).

We must choose sides. My small life is peopled with highly-educated professional people who tend to be liberal. While my basic thrust is conservative, the reason I posit it as 'with an edge' is that I have spent a couple of decades now watching the way different denominations take hold of the Truth - it might be said that I did so from the time I was a wee thing, visiting my grandfather's Baptist congregations, where he was a minister.

It is a point of ready fact that, as a young mother, I wanted my children to 'have a foot in both churches' so that they would gain the same sensibility regarding Truth. I believe some sense of the old fable regarding the three blind men & the elephant plays out in the Church Universal: each has held some portion of Truth - the only portion they can understand...

What happens when you are too respectful of the reality that each of us can only see as much as we can see, however, is - not open-minded - but incapable of taking a stand. The Archbishop of Canterbury, I think sometimes, might know that well. His situation, to be sure, is vastly more complicated - my point is merely that when you see even some small validity in the views of others, you are less likely to criticize, more likely to listen.

But the final result of such is you end up unable to take a stand.

We have to take a stand. I have not wanted to politicize this blog - as faithful readers will note, passeres has not had a list of other blogs whose views might match mine, as most bloggers tend to place in their sidebar: the reality that I might inadvertently marginalize my own views in such is of great concern to me.

Perhaps too great, as I begin to concede now. Passeres, in any case, is and will remain an 'all-purpose' blog that peruses many things; it only occasionally veers over into political or theological considerations.

As noted in that last post, however, part of that failing to take a theological/political stand is a journalistic sensibility - my father was in radio, back in the day when radio was it - and we had writers on the maternal side of my family: one might posit that, even had I not briefly studied journalism in college, some degree of 'journalistic integrity' - old school, to be sure - once encouraged presenting facts rather than opinion.

Such is no longer the way of it. Blogging is an interesting medium for communication. It both presupposes & mandates opinion, which presupposes identity, which mandates (most of us allow) transparency. While one of many motifs (for I do write, and writers tend to wander about in a land where all the roadsigns are actually not signs at all but rather, this thing called 'motif') here at passeres plays with that notion (i.e., Wren is a fictional character) (we are actually all fictional characters), I have noted of late this tendency in all of us to 'say' who we are along the way preparatory to saying what it is we think/believe/proffer on a matter.

As if who we are makes a difference in the truth we say. Opinion will be marginalizing the facts from here out, I am afraid. The problem with truth these days is we have cornered it into a very small box - and ourselves - so very much that we don't have converse easily with those who oppose what we understand as truth.

It's okay. Which is not to say that it's okay. It's just understandable. Watching the way the world is turning now requires those with far more steel for gut than this wee bird can manage. Or as my UK friend & I have commented along the way in private emails, if you stare into the Abyss too long....

Perhaps transparency on the Web is the hope that in saying who we are, we alert people so that they are for or against us from the get-go: cultures are defined by particulars that separate them from others and in this wide-open world, our old defining points are not present. I find often now, in my journeys to particular sites, that the iconography of each set often prevents understanding: clear 'guidelines' to who & what you are allow some sense to how to read what is said...dryness, as an example - how do you read when a writer is merely being witty.

We have to have some way of knowing who is in our herd. That great multitude of this & that in the many sites on the Web I read - that wide range of theological and political views: I know perhaps too well how difficult it is to read tone - is someone being facetious, witty or downright knife-to-the-gut; I wince when I see things misread - things taken out of context - things twisted.

That inability to know whether a writer is presenting authentic doctrine, with which I would certainly agree - or ridiculing error - begins to be the landscape for all of us.

In that sense, the framing points 'transparency' provides are indeed needful. Tone is everything. And that tone is not always easy to discern, any course in literature would prove; knowing the iconography of a speaker's community - their language - is requisite.

But in this multi-cultural world in which we now live & move & have our being, the road signs of each culture remain its own.

In the meanwhile, a particular shared reality most of us know as Christian morals/theology/worldview once governed polite society (if I may) and the mainstream media spoke in the language & expectation of that shared reality.

If you do not believe me, pull up some of the newspapers and books from an older day and see for yourself. The mainstream media began to turn away from that view. What blogging and the Internet in general have done and will continue to do to news & journalism remains a matter of much interest to me.

I believe that we have returned to a world very much like the one of the first centuries of the faith. It is far easier to 'win souls to Christ' when you are in the respected seat of community regard: Victorian literature often inadvertently preserves that sensibility - those who were sinners knew it - both the opinion of society & the faith cast them into their mire.

They knew better, and eventually came to repentance and the tale was done.

Not so now. We have a different framing, and to proclaim what has been handed down lands one in a different pot of soup: the faith handed down is not respected now; respect goes to those 'open-minded, inclusive' sorts who embrace all & say God does likewise.

As I noted in that last post, but perhaps failed to elaborate, that necessity to belong - to do right - to follow herd instincts is the necessity of raising a child to maturity - we are taught to fit in, to be ordered, obedient, good citizenry...

Which leaves us wide-open when it comes to a society that is no longer amenable to the teachings of our Lord - that, more so, is reframing them and claiming it a new revelation.

To have the courage necessary to continue the good fight in the midst of such requires something we will not see until Heaven...I allude to that, though imperfectly, in my comments regarding John the Baptist in the afore-mentioned post.

Even John the Baptist lost that sense of what he had been given.

Or, as St. Paul said, what we know, we know in part. When we know it, such sublimity mandates confidence. But the dark nights will come, and we are alone then, holding on to both a faith & a knowledge that has deserted us. The adversary against whom we are fighting is cunning past what we could know in the mereness of our small lives - he has the centuries we can only peruse in history lessons & literature - we are holding the swords of angels when we are not even the size of humans - we are mere hobbits, as I like to remind! - and doing battle on the side of a mountain in a deep & early morning fog...

And God knows that.

And I see a great many on that firing line wondering privately if they have been deserted - or if they have got it wrong, after all. Our adversary has planned his assault well. Self-doubt is our walking place...because the opposite of self-doubt is hubris...

One last point. In the years that I still attended Church, I changed parishes several times, trying to find one that both had a correct theology and was one wherein I could sense His Spirit at work.

We are not always able to sense His Spirit in a congregation. I think, however, that reality often merely means that the congregations where we cannot sense His Spirit represent places where we do not belong, not because His Spirit is not there...

But because we cannot sense it there.

I have tried to word that several ways and that is the best I can do. His Spirit may indeed be operating at a particular congregation in a vital way in spite of our inability to know His Spirit is there.

The only other possibility would be that a great many congregations wherein many hear His Spirit are deluded in that hearing.

And I do not think that is the case. My own personal view, in spite of everything I know regarding communion and oneness, is that I am a part of a communion with voting rights at Lambeth...that reality hampers my ability to engage in this new Province.

So I consider any 'take' I might have on the matter with that grain of salt...

Nonetheless, the 'numbers' thing noted in the previous post remains. May God move, and mightily, because a mass exodus from TEC would weight the matter greatly. I believe two congregations have jumped, since the Province has been set up. That is what is needful: more congregations making that jump now that a place is readied, and waiting.

In the meanwhile, again, God be with us. All of us. Those actively participating in the life of the Church at large - and those of us trying to keep warm on the sidelines, stamping our feet now in the cold...