Captain Yips Secret Journal

Beach Blanket Bingo

I wouldn't touch the Alberto Cutie story with a ten meter cattle prod.  Of course he's becoming an Episcopalian.  I'm waiting for Obama, myself.  Born Episcopalian, that man, just doesn't know it yet.   And Fr Frankie Alberto had to want to be caught; well known guy, out on the beach, canoodling.  But I was amused by this line from the news report.

The Episcopal Church allows its priests to marry and date.

What, at the same time?  Or is it first one, then the other?  Do tell. 

For those who want to know, the strangely anonymous Episcopalian Bish in the scene was probably Leo Frade, who seems to have powerfully irritated Archbishop Favarola, who seems to have been sandbagged here.  Didn't see that one coming at all, poor man.

Madness

Many are the threats to sanity that stalk this world.  The Chicago Cubs - why?  The government of North Korea - an entire country led by the sort of people who seem to dominate MMORPGs - only for them it's not a game! The world financial "system."  Of these threats, one of the most pernicious is the effort to understand why Rowan Williams does things.  Fortunately for world sanity, those affected are few in number, even among the world's Anglicans.

But for those who are afflicted by Rowanomania, each "Rowan event," as they're called, elicits cries of "now he's really shown his true colors (or colours, if writing from the evangelical CoE point of view)."  Puzzlement is understandable.  Consider:  here we have an acute scholar, yet he turns a blind eye to the theological bankruptcy of The Litigation Church.  He is himself opposed to abortion, as a rule, but he takes no note of Katie Rags' theory of sacramental abortion.  An intelligent man, he sacrifices the chance of real Anglican unity for the sake of the demographically imploding western establishment.  He is a firm British Lefty (by American standards, very left indeed), yet he cannot seem to grasp that a contributing factor to the Anglican miseries is a degree of post colonial feeling among the younger Anglican Churches, especially in Africa, who quite rightly feel left out of the Anglican power structures.

And so we come to the new Anglican Covenant Working Group, announced today.  3 liberal westerners, 1 moderate conservative from South East Asia.  The three like minded liberals will vote together, and will ensure that whatever the Anglican Covenant eventually may contain, it will certainly contain nothing enforceable.  It won't matter at all.  It will change nothing, if it doesn't simply come to naught.  And next week, or the week after, or the week after that, another Rowan event will bumble along that makes conservatives say, "well, he's not so bad."

Well, dude has power only because we give him power.  Anglican macrostructures don't work?  Build better ones.  Archbishop havers?  Ignore him.  Stop paying attention to the bearded man behind the curtain.  He's not doing anything.

 

2009 Flowers of the Week - III

Lilacs!

2009 Flowers of the Week - II

Daffs, of course.  Tulips I avoid, because the rabbits and squirrels feast on them.  Daffs rarely disappoint.

Melancholia

I am better disposed to ++Rowan’s closing speech at ACC 14 than are some.  I think the opening reflects a man seeking a little desperately for something good to say about a shipwreck.  The meeting didn’t go well, he knows it didn’t go well, he’s not too sure why it didn’t go well, but he’s not going to go out on a sour note, by gum.  Also, ++Rowan has an rhetorical tick of sometimes assuming the persona of one or more sides in the Great Anglican Family Feud, not always being clear that he is speaking to typify a side of the debate rather than in his own voice.  Thus the passage

Now, who are the people who bear the deepest costs in our conflicts in the Anglican Communion? . . . There are some who bear the cost in this way: they will say that Christian credibility is shattered by the sense of rejection and scapegoating which they experience, and that includes a great many of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ. The cost they feel is often they cannot commend the Christianity that they long to believe in because they feel that they are bound up in a system and a community where scapegoating and rejection are very deeply engrained.

is intended to summarize the stated feelings of one side of the discussion, not to validate or authorize their position: it is parallel to the immediately following passage

And then there are those for whom the credibility of Christianity is at stake in another way, those for whom the cost is felt like this: that the decisions that others have made in other parts of the world have put them in a position where they cannot commend the Christianity they long to share with their neighbours with any ease or confidence because they feel that fellow Christians have somehow undermined their witness.

I don’t think that either summary is especially concise or accurate, but let’s assume he’s painting broad strokes here rather than taking sides.

He goes on to forecast a more federal, less consistent Anglicanism, “an agglomeration of more strongly bonded and less strongly bonded Provinces or constituent parts.”  If the Anglican future is more chaotic rather than less, he wonders, how will the various Provinces continue to do things that they do agree on?  Lets say, education, or relief work, or the like.  He pleads for civility: “because we are nine times out of ten a great deal more polite about other Christians than we are about each other in the Communion these days!”

I think we find here is ++Rowan’s description of the stresses within the Anglican Communion.  Whether his description is accurate can and should be debated.  He seems resigned to a future of a different shape and color, a different polity, and is asking how a more fragmented Communion might work.  At a meeting of the ACC, it’s not out of line to wonder what the future holds for the various Instruments of Unity and in what way they might serve a more fragmented Communion.

It’s really a pretty sad, slightly grieving speech, I think.

Addendum:  I wonder if this speech doesn't give us a clue to ++Rowan's elusive approach to these disagreements.  It seems that we might infer from this speech, from his actions, and from other speeches and writings, that for ++Rowan the locus of the Church is not in ideology or theology, but in worship ("praying together") and acting together.  This might be considered very Anglican.  Differences of opinion are glazed over with common worship and common action.  Differences of opinion are intractable, but common ground can be found in worship and in action.  The unanswered question is whether this difference of opinion has reached the point of being inevitably divisive.

2009 Flowers of the Week - I

This year's flowers of the week may be a little odd.  In my micro-clime, May and October are the essential garden months when most of the essential labor gets done.  Last May, my wife developed a detached retina.  She's fine, due to prompt attention and a good surgeon, but that brought gardening to a halt for the while.  Then in October I was sick, for me sick anyway, with some nasty intestinal bug that left me tired and weak.  Then January's weather was the worst of combinations,  wet followed by intense cold.  So this year will be a rebuilding year, concentrating on soil amendment and infrastructure, then massive bulb planting come fall. 

We'll begin, reasonably enough, with a medley of violets. 

Rum Go

It took the special genius of the Anglican Communion to have a meeting at which everyone is sure something important happened, but no one is sure what it was or how it happened.  Opinions abound about what has been happening at the ACC meeting in Jamaica, and what the Archbishop of Canterbury's role may have been.  People who follow this stuff know where to look.  I'm not sure why matters much, and the what is fairly simple.

What:  The EO crew dodges the bullet of being reminded that suing folks is not especially Christian, and gets to punt consideration of the latest draft of Anglican Covenant into the next county.  It seems that at the moment there isn't even a draft that conservative dioceses could adopt regardless of General Convention action - or inaction. 

Why:  Once again, traditional Anglicans were outmanoevered, with or without ++Rowan's collusion.   By now they should have expected chicanery and rule bending from the 815 crowd, but again they were not prepared for it.  They need their own parliamentarian, expert in the rules of order, to avoid traps of this kind.  The rules of order are there for the sake of clarity and orderly process.  And they're available on line!  For easy reference!  Good grief, Robert's Rules were developed as the result of a chaotic church meeting.  Get yourselves a parliamentarian. 

What next:  The drawback for the 815 crew is at least twofold, I think.  A vacuum exists in the absence of any developing Covenant, and the new North American province can grow into that.  The ACC doesn't appear to be about to make any statement about ACNA at all, which is probably good.  So we should just keep on keeping on.  The second good thing is that each thuggish display by 815 frays tolerance further.  But we'll have to see how that one develops. 

Dharma Counter - Initiative

Kevin Thew Forrester has provided us with an Apologia pro fide mea, and very interesting it is.  Others will no doubt work it over closely, but a few things stick out. 

1) There’s remarkably little mention of the Bible.  He cites St. Paul and St. John’s Gospel indirectly, but otherwise his supporting citations come from an assortment of mystics and early theologians, provided none were named St. Augustine.  He seems to wish us to see him as the successor of the Cappadocian Fathers, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart.  He has good reason to avoid the Bible, I think, especially those parts of the New Testament that lead in the inconvenient directions. 

2) Anyone with even a slight understanding of the complicated power politics that lay behind the First Crusade should bridle at his surreal simplification of those events. 

3) Thew Forrester’s presentation and interpretation of atonement is so inaccurate as to make one wonder how deliberate he is.  It’s a straw doctrine, distorted and absurd.

4) He says (page 8), “I believe we live in a world in which every manifestation of truth, beauty, and goodness comes from God and leads to God and is thus sacred and holy.” One scarcely knows what to make of this statement.  What is the ground for determining what is true, beautiful, and good?  He seems quite unaware of the long, long discussion about the limits of natural theology, of Barth’s thorough rejection of it, or of the painstaking work of such Anglican scientist-theologians as McGrath and Polkinghorne in exploring the relationship of Creator and creation.  I am an amateur, with a very long list of known unknowns, and many, many folks are better and more widely read, more knowledgeable, and wiser than I. But even I know how hazardous this single sentence is. 

5) Thew Forrester’s mask slips in the next paragraph.  “We must guard as sacred the many different paths into God, the Font of all life.  We need hearts as ready to hear the good news from God’s people of faiths, as we are to proclaim the Gospel.  We are called to become those who heal false divisions, celebrate our diversity, and pursue our common mission. (Aside.  What common mission?)” No wonder he avoids the New Testament.  No doubt whatever Jesus meant when he said, “No one comes to the Father but through me,” and “For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few,” was complicated, but he meant something.  Perhaps Thew Forrester hopes that Jesus mis spoke there.

6) He repeatedly writes of “upholding the BCP,” while making it clear he wants to change it completely as soon as possible.  In today’s TEC, changing the Prayer Book is the route to changing theology. 

This stuff gets shoddier the more you push at it.  But it sort of useful in giving a chance at outlining some real differences in position - not terrible compatible or reconcilable, but useful outlines nonetheless.

For example:

Can God be discovered?  Or, must we depend on God’s revelation of himself?  If the latter, is the Bible the chief record of that revelation?

Are we lost in a howling wilderness, depending on a path clearly and distinctly marked, to bring us out?  Or are we wandering in a wonderful garden, maybe a little lost but who cares?  It’s full of lovely flowers.  Let’s picnic.

What is the place of reason?

Whatever else this Apologia may do, it clearly places Thew Forrester well outside what we may as well call the Jewell-Hooker stream of Anglicanism.  But, then, so is pretty much the entirety of TEC.