You Can't Get Theah From Heeah

There is an old story about someone lost in New England--usually Maine or New Hampshire. When s/he stops to ask directions from a local, there follows a lot of discussion, which is ended when the local finally declares, usually in an exaggerated Maine or New Hampshire accent, "You can't get theah from heeah."

I am reminded of that story nightly in this corner of Connecticut. Northeast Utilities is upgrading the transmission system, including "the installation of new overhead and underground lines and the reconstruction of some existing lines along a 69-mile route through 18 cities and towns." They are digging trenches in many of the main roads through these 18 towns, including Norwalk. The construction takes place during the night, and steel plates cover the trenches during the day. What that means is that after 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening local traffic patterns become a maze. For the past couple of weeks I have not been able to turn into my driveway from the eastbound lane of Connecticut Avenue. Where the road work is, people have to make sometimes lengthy detours to get to their homes. It also doubles, triples, and quadruples the amount of time it takes to drive from Point A to Point B in town.

This evening driving home from doing some errands, I planned my route along back roads, thus saving myself at least 15 minutes of traffic snarls. Given today's news from New Orleans--or the lack of it--I found myself pondering "You can't get theah from heeah," not only in relation to the local traffic, but also in terms of the bishops' meeting in New Orleans.

As you have seen, I have kept myself out of the spin cycle over the past few days, at least in terms of my blog. Instead, I have posted a prayer for the bishops and their meeting each day. That does not mean I have not read other blogs and news reports. Today's were, for the most part, especially dull and useless. They remind me of days when there is some big news event and television stations cancel everything to provide continual coverage by their news departments. Sometimes there are no new developments, but news coverage there must be. So the talking heads repeat stuff we just heard less than two minutes ago, start discussing related items of little or no substance and trying to make "real news" out of it, or they bring in the pundits to do commentaries and make prognostications. Why is it everyone feels they have to say something important when nothing is going on?

But I digress.

Reading the reports and prognostications over the past couple of days it occurs to me that we "can't get theah from heeah" in the Anglican Communion because:

1. We do not agree on where "heeah" is.
2. We do not agree on where "theah" is.
3. Heck, we can't even listen to each other long enough to see if we can create a new "heeah" so that we can even begin a journey together that might just lead us to the as yet unknown "theah" in the fullness of God's time.

Of course, there's also the problem of who is and is not allowed to journey with us, which is what started this mess in the first place...

Peace,
Jeffri