He Said It Better Than I could

Richard, in his blog Caught by the Light, writes:

Again, I will not argue prejudicial treatment has not occurred against conservatives and evangelicals in The Episcopal Church. Nor do I sanction it. But let's be clear: they still, by virtue of their beliefs and practices, have a leg up in the broader society, in the Anglican Communion, and in the world. They retain many privileges LGBT Christians still cannot have, even in some of the most liberal dioceses of The Episcopal Church.

For this reason, cries of generalized oppression here ring a little hollow to me, particularly as applied to over a quarter of the membership in this Province, and lend little of substance to the conversation. Meanwhile, LGBT people around the world are dying every day and being turned away from Christian community simply because of who they are.

Read the whole post here.

Peace,
Jeffri

Meanwhile, Back in The Real World…

The Primates of the Anglican Communion, and what seems like most of the world press, have gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The spin meisters—especially the conservatives at this stage (my informal, unscientific survey shows that "conservative" reports outnumber "moderate" and "liberal" ones by at least 2 to 1)—release “news reports” nearly hourly , and the blogosphere abounds with opinions. Meanwhile, here in the greater New York City metropolitan area our biggest concern today has been getting to and from work safely—if we left the house at all.

Do not misunderstand me, I am interested in what happens in Dar es Salaam, but all the pre-meeting spin and clamoring is just silly. The Anglican Communion will fall apart, or it will stay together. The Episcopal Church will continue living with tensions. Some folks will leave the denomination, as they have during past controversies. And eventually, we will all learn that the church is NOT the Primates.

In the meantime, my attention has been on icy roads and sidewalks and whether or not the heat in my apartment building is going to stay on tonight. AIDS orphans in Tanzania need food, clothing and exercise books so they can attend school. Darfur descends into genocide. Car bombs explode in Jordan, Baghdad, and places about which we never hear. Our climate is going haywire.

Quite frankly, the Primates have better things to do than argue over sexuality, the role of women in the church, and who is in charge. And I have better things to do than read every scrap of spin that comes out of Dar es Salaam over the next few days.

Peace,
Jeffri

A Moment with Katharine

I stayed late at work yesterday because Katharine was doing a book signing in the Episcopal Church Center's soon-to-be-opened new bookstore. I took three copies of A Wing And A Prayer, her new book--one for me, one for my new boss who arrives on Monday, and one for Mom. I stood in line with a couple of my friends from work, and as we waited, it quickly became clear that Katharine was taking a moment to have a conversation with each person.

When I reached the table for my turn, I handed her each book in turn--each one with a yellow post-it on it so that I would remember which was whose. When I handed her Mom's and said it was for my mother, she smiled and asked if she should make it out the way I had it on the post-it, which, of course, said "Mom." No, I replied, her name is Barbara. She also remembered that my first name is not spelled in one of the usual ways and asked how it was spelled to make sure she wrote it correctly when she signed my copy.

As I left, I thanked her and wished her luck for next week. She smiled and said thank you--I did not need to add "at the Primates' meeting."

Katharine smiles a lot, and it is not one of those "this is my public smile that I've pasted on because I'm supposed to look happy" smiles. It is a genuine "I'm glad to see you" smile. And she listens. You feel that you have her complete attention while you are with her.

Later this evening, among the day's Episcopal News Service releases in my email in box, was the latest of Katharine's occasional short reflections. I have included it below, because I feel it is worth sharing.

Peace,
Jeffri

In this season: Christ in the stranger's guise
A reflection from the Presiding Bishop
Wednesday, February 07, 2007

[Episcopal News Service] Note to readers: With this posting, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori continues a series of occasional reflections for the people of the Episcopal Church. The reflections are also available on the Presiding Bishop's web pages at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/pb.

For the People of the Episcopal Church

As the primates of the Anglican Communion prepare to gather next week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I ask your prayers for all of us, and for our time together. I especially ask you to remember the mission that is our reason for being as the Anglican Communion--God's mission to heal this broken world. The primates gather for fellowship, study, and conversation at these meetings, begun less than thirty years ago. The ability to know each other and understand our various contexts is the foundation of shared mission. We cannot easily be partners with strangers.

That meeting ends just as Lent begins, and as we approach this season, I would suggest three particularly appropriate attitudes. Traditionally the season has been one in which candidates prepared for baptism through prayer, fasting, and acts of mercy. This year, we might all constructively pray for greater awareness and understanding of the strangers around us, particularly those strangers whom we are not yet ready or able to call friends. That awareness can only come with our own greater investment in discovering the image of God in those strangers. It will require an attitude of humility, recognizing that we can not possibly know the fullness of God if we are unable to recognize his hand at work in unlikely persons or contexts. We might constructively fast from a desire to make assumptions about the motives of those strangers not yet become friends. And finally, we might constructively focus our passions on those in whom Christ is most evident--the suffering, those on the margins, the forgotten, ignored, and overlooked of our world. And as we seek to serve that suffering servant made evident in our midst, we might reflect on what Jesus himself called us--friends (John 15:15).

Celtic Rune of Hospitality
I saw a stranger yesterday;
I put food in the eating place,
drink in the drinking place,
music in the listening place;
and in the sacred name of the Triune God
he blessed myself and my house,
my cattle and my dear ones,
and the lark said in her song:
Oft, Oft, Oft,
goes Christ in the stranger's guise.

Shalom,
Katharine

Some Commentary on Blogs

Over at the Stand Firm web site Greg Griffith posted a commentary on a short essay by Giles Fraser that appeared recently in The Church Times of England. He also noted Mark Harris’ analysis of Giles’ essay. What follows is my take on all of this, but I highly recommend that you go read Greg’s commentary in its entirety.

It seems that Giles was bemoaning the tone of many posts in the blogosphere:

In reality, intemperate bloggers are poisoning the wells of open debate, not enhancing it. Many of those outside the blogsphere are put off by the sheer unpleasantness of internet debate. So it is abandoned to people with thick skins and short tempers. And that is hardly the open forum that many bloggers claim they are protecting.

Mark basically agreed with Giles, but his overall conclusion was:

Giles Fraser has done us a service in publishing this article. We need to take it to heart. At the same time it is also interesting to note the number of occasions where bloggers have brought important questions to the attention of the wider church community and the newshounds of that community.

There is work to be done and we all have a part.

However, Greg really hit the nail on the head:

The blogosphere is predominantly an American medium. Go down the list of the 200 most highly-trafficked sites in the world, and it is dominated by Americans. Brits have always complained that Americans are scruffy, ill-mannered urchins, so it's hardly news to find that yet another Brit is dismayed at what he finds on blogs.

It is a mistake to assume that the "correct" role of the blogosphere is to mirror the kind of debate that's found elsewhere in society; and further, to assume that the kind of debate found elsewhere in society resembles some idyll of English drawing-room conversation (something that barely exists even in England anymore, so I'm told). Blogs belong to a medium that is different from the drawing room; different from the floor of parliament; different from coffee or tea in the parish hall; and different from radio and television.

Greg went on to say that blogs have opened up the flow of information in the church and across the Communion and prevent the “revisionists” from controlling “information the way they were used to.” For him, and for many conservatives, this is a good thing because it helps preserve the "orthodox” Anglican Church in the face of “revisionist liberalization”—and they are hoping for an Anglican Church as opposed to a Communion. However, I think that Greg's analysis can be taken a step further. Just as Giles--as an Englishman--does not, and cannot, fully and truly understand our “American” (and by “American,” I assume he means North American, and in particular of the United States) culture, neither can the Primates of the Communion, including the moderate and liberal ones--as English, Indian, Nigerian, etc.--fully understand the peculiarly “American” nature of the Episcopal Church.

Not only has the proliferation of Episcopal and Anglican blogs increased the flow of information and opportunities for communication, it also shows just how diverse our church is—and not just the Episcopal Church, but the whole Anglican Communion. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer folks on either end of the spectrum want to live with that diversity. If the Anglican Communion starts to come apart, it may well continue to disintegrate until it becomes a loose affiliation of individual parishes.

Can you spell “congregationalism?”

Peace,
Jeffri

Admiral Byrd and Party

As cold grips most of the northern part of the continent, I find myself thankful that I am in Connecticut where the lows have been above 0 and not in Minnesota where they have been well below--and that's without the windchill factor!

I spent my freshman year of college at Moorhead State University--now Minnesota State University-Moorhead--on the banks of the Red River. Some of my thoughts and impressions of that time are recorded in my journals. I have kept a journal off and on since I was 10. I did not write very often during my college years, although there are more entries from my freshman year than from the following three. However, even without those journal entries, I have a pretty good record of that first year of college. In the back of one of my file drawers is a worn manila envelope. In that envelope are not only letters from my parents that I saved, but the letters I wrote to my parents that Mom saved.

The envelopes, which Mom also saved, are as telling as the letters. The return address on a letter written in the midst of winter reads "Admiral Byrd and Party." While not the coldest place in Minnesota, winter along the banks of the Red River can be bitter. The winter of 1978-79 was particularly so, in part because the usual "January thaw" did not happen. I was ready to believe the local joke, "There are four seasons in Minnesota, Early Winter, Mid Winter, Late Winter, and Next Winter." Spring came, but the winter weather dragged on. At one point I swore that if it snowed one more time, I would be on the next plane to New York, final exams be damned. Fortunately, the German Club was on a trip to Minneapolis the April weekend when the last snowfall happened.

Seasonal Affective Disorder had not yet become something people thought about, but I was depressed that winter. It was not just the weather and the darkness. Moorhead State was a commuter school. Major social functions took place on Thursday nights. I lived in a dorm complex of approximately 500, and one Saturday morning at about 2 a.m. there was a fire in one of the utility closets--quickly extinguished, but we still had to evacuate the buildings. Of 500 residents, 10 came out of the building into the winter cold. Nor did I like the program in which I was enrolled.

When spring finally did come, flood control and sandbagging dominated the community's life. I've always wondered who in their right mind builds not one (Moorhead, MN), not two (Moorhead and Fargo, ND), not three (Moorhead, Fargo, and Grand Forks, ND), but FOUR (Moorhead, Fargo, Grand Forks and Winnipeg, Manitoba) major cities on the flood plain of the only river on the continent that flows NORTH!

And so, I became one of those students the dean always talks about at orientation. "Look at the person next to you. There's a 50% chance she or he will not be here next year." I boarded the plane for Chicago with appointments to visit three colleges on my way home. The following fall found me at Rockford College in Illinois.

Every year winter rolls around, and every year I am reminded of my time in Minnesota. And some years, though not every year, I pull out the envelope of letters and visit the college freshman on the banks of the Red River.

Peace,
Jeffri

Rewriting History

While skimming through the Stand Firm (Traditional Anglicanism in America) website—I do that occasionally, because even though I may not agree with these folks, I sometimes learn things from them—I stumbled across “A Timeline of the Path of the Episcopal Church: A New Online ‘Wiki.’” In her January 30th post on the Stand Firm site, Susan Hey writes:

Many Episcopalians ask me and others how they can communicate to Beloved Moderates about the serious challenges facing the Episcopal church. This timeline, developed by Andy Figueroa, is very helpful in chronicling ECUSA's path over the past 40 years, and includes links to original sources.

It is an awesome resource.

Better still, it functions as an online "Wiki", allowing registered users to contribute by editing pages, or submitting more content by creating new pages.

Check out the timeline here. Then print and pass it on to friends! And if you're interested, register to add more helpful content.

(The post and comments can be found at http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/article/1991/.)

So I went to take a look at “Walking Apart” (found at http://hopeanglican.us/walkingapart/tiki-index.php?page=Walking+Apart), and read the introduction, which begins:

Liturgical Innovation and Prayerbook Revision - sowing he seeds of corruption

In 1943, General Convention approved a new lectionary for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer of the 1928 BCP. It replaced the orginal lectionary published from 1928 until 1942. The 1943 revisions took out many sciptures which taught angainst homosexuality, such as Romans 1:22-27 (For example, see lectionary for Evening Prayer on the Seventh Sunday after Trinity in newer 1928 BCPs.), prophetically setting the stage for the 1960s and 1970s.

None of the references listed in this information section document the 1943 changes in terms of removing readings “which taught angainst [sic] homosexuality.” They do provide a reasonable overview of why many conservatives feel that the current Book of Common prayer is not a true Book of Common Prayer.

Come on, folks, the issue of homosexuality probably was not even on the radar screen for the upper class white men gathered for General Convention 1943. And even if they were aware of the issue, they almost certainly would not have been removing from the lectionary anything that condemned it. So far I have found nothing to back up Andy Figueroa's assertion that passages were removed from the lectionary because they condemned homosexual behavior. I will probably take a trip to the library to see if I can get Bayard Hale Jones' The American Lectionary, published in 1944, through interlibrary loan. Jones was one of the primary authors of the 1943 Lectionary revision. I may also email the Archives of the Episcopal Church and see what they can find for me on the 1943 change.

In the meantime, take a look for yourself.

Peace,
Jeffri

Note: All the web pages referenced in this entry were available as of February 2, 2007. The spelling and grammar of the italicized selections are as I found them on the original sites.

St. Bridget and the Groundhog

The Feast of St. Bridget of Ireland and Candlemas are just two of the many examples of how older religious traditions and customs became an integral part of Christianity and also survive in current folklore.

Imbolc is a festival of Celtic origin marking the halfway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. Many of our so-called pagan friends celebrate it today. It is also called “An Fhéill Bhride,” the festival of Brigid, an Irish goddess of hearth and home. Rather than the bonfires of the other Celtic fire festivals, Imbolc involved the rekindling and blessing of hearth fires.

As Christianity spread through Ireland, rather than stamp out non-Christian practices and festivals, the church adopted many of them and transformed them. Thus Imbolc became the Feast Day of St. Bridget. Traditionally the founder of a double monastery (a community of both women and men) in Kildare, Bridget is also known as the only female bishop in Ireland, and her successors held the equivalent power and authority until the Synod of Kells in 1152. A legend arose later to explain this anomaly of a woman with such status in the church. The elderly bishop Mel (St. Patrick’s nephew), as he was blessing her during the ceremony where she and the first nuns took the veil, inadvertently read the Rite of Consecration of a Bishop which could not be rescinded under any circumstances.

If the Christian Bridget truly existed, her story became intertwined with that of the ancient goddess Brigid. All the information we have about Bridget comes from early biographies, some of the earliest Lives of Saints written, and from legends and folk tales collected after the 17th century, primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of which can be traced to the early biographies.

While Bridget’s feast day is February 1st, the fire associations of the Celtic Brigid continue in the celebration of Candlemas on February 2nd. Also called the Purification of the Blessed Virgin and Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Candlemas is the day on which candles and incense for the coming church year are blessed. Another ancient, pre-Christian tradition also survives at Candlemas. People believed that Candlemas predicted the weather would be for the second half of Winter. An old poem, believed to have originated in Scotland, preserves the tradition.

As the light grows longer
The cold grows stronger
If Candlemas be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight
If Candlemas be cloud and rain
Winter will be gone and not come again
A farmer should on Candlemas day
Have half his corn and half his hay
On Candlemas day if thorns hang a drop
You can be sure of a good pea crop

And so we come to Groundhog day here in the United States. Actually, this folk tradition also predates Christianity. Ancient European cultures believed that if hibernating animals left their dens too early and saw their shadow, they were frightened back in for another six weeks. The Romans called it Hedgehog Day.

Here are two short prayers in honor of St. Bridget. The first is from Lesser Feasts and Fasts of the Episcopal Church, and the second from the Northumbria Community’s Celtic Daily Prayer.

Everliving God, we rejoice today in the fellowship of your blessed servant Brigid, and we give you thanks for her life of devoted service. Inspire us with life and light, and give us perseverance to serve you all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, world without end.

There is a door to which you have the key,
and you are the sole keeper.
There is a latch no hand can lift save yours.
No ruler, nor warrior, writer, thinker:
but only you.
O heart, hurry now and welcome your King
to sit by the warmth of your fire.

The St Bridget's cross is placed in the eaves on February 1 to ward off fire and storms from affecting the house. It is traditionally made of rushes, but other materials can be used. Here is a link to instructions for making one: http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/1Kids/MakingBrigdXs.html

Peace,
Jeffri