Ten personal holy non-covenant communion principles:

All the goings on about an Anglican Covenant, the requests/ demands of Windsor, etc, and Dar Es Salaam, all the strange ecclesiastical snottyness of trying to decide who is in communion with whom and why, leads to confusion. Dave Walker, wonderful cartoonist sums it up this way: (See right)

So I have been thinking about a personal-holy- non-covenant - with- anybody - manifesto of communion principles. Here they are. Please note: These do not depend on a covenant, a compact, a letter of agreement, articles of faith, properly ordered eucharist, right creeds or right church. These are about my being in actual communion with others, they are not about how churches do it (assuming they can do it at all.)

• I will have supper, last or not, with anyone who invites me, subject to personal whim.

• I refuse to tell the host who to invite and who not to invite.

• I will invite others to supper with me under the same conditions.

• I am glad to have any seat at all in the gathering.

• I will invoke God's blessing on people with abandon believing that God's blessings are indeed most wonderfully spread about. I will invoke God's blessing sometimes on really important things, like daily bread. I will not ever claim to bless personally, believing that people wanted God and Jesus, not me.
  

• I give thanks to God for all sorts of people, places, things seen and unseen and this will be quite personal and perhaps self revealing.
  

• I will be present wherever and whenever I am fed and will be present for and with others, hopefully being a blessing to them.

• I am open to the presence of the Holy Spirit in community and communion.

• I will work at doing justice and loving mercy, and live with my mistakes and get over it.

• I will live for others, now, knowing perfectly well that I will not be good at it, which is of course why I will sometimes not be invited to supper, holy or not.

I refuse to sign on to these. It is enough to try to live them. If told this is the wrong list, I will happily agree. It is my list. I may revise it next week. Get your own list.