One of these days....

Tonight, in an evening of quiet after a week of travel, too much church, barely enough Jesus and no rock and roll, we sat and watched a Neil Young concert. Tonight too I got word of the death of a beloved parishioner, heard from an old friend in Texas who thought I was doing more or less good things, from a neighbor too long away from Lewes. Earlier today I thought of Jim who I miss (we've been wandering about these past few years), and remembered Robert who has gone a wandering down a path I would not take, and so many more.


And I received this blog comment,


"Could it be you think it a bad idea to be accountable to anybody outside the Episcopal Church? If so why not just walk away from those relationships including the Anglican Communion? I mean what is a relationship if there is no accountability?"


Dear friend: I am mostly accountable to people outside the Episcopal Church. You have no idea.


My heart is with a friend in Haiti, and the sweat of hot nights without fans is close on my arms and cheeks. I am at the holy table with the people at Resurrection Parish on the edge of Manila. I am wrapped in the arms of people who love well, but who love beyond the silliness of church.


I am accountable to Christ Jesus who is the Source of everything I am, and who would wonder that in any wise the institutional churches were confused for the people who are the living presence of himself, and would wonder why any accountability to those institutions would suffice even in the slightest for the accountability that is love.


I am feeling that accountability this night, and there is a deep death and resurrection in place.


Neil in that concert tonight sang this, one of his less known songs,


"One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down
and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
And I'm gonna try
And thank them all
for the good times together.
Though so apart we've grown.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down
and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days,
one of these days,
one of these days,
And it won't be long,
it won't be long.

And I'm gonna thank,
That old country fiddler
And all those rough boys
Who play that rock 'n' roll
I never tried to burn any bridges
Though I know I let some
good things go."


In spite of friends absent and present, I'm a bit filled to overflowing with a sense of blessing. Somehow there's the little boy still here, wanting nothing more than a place at the table. Anne (aka the sainted mother) is still here. She lived through the winter and next week, God willing, she will be 91. Meanwhile I've still looking to have a place at the table, and still having to learn to let some good things go. In the picture to the right Anne is 26 and I am 4. We did not freeze in time, but the two of us there are here as well.


Here on Preludium I am plugging along trying, in spite of the one who commented, attempting to be accountable enought to sundry folk to be invited to various tables where it is possible to encounter the Lord's people. But I must confess an agenda that has very little to do with the safety of The Episcopal Church, The Anglican Communion, or any other mechanism of the outward and visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace we call the Body of Christ.


In the first place I have every confidence that should The Episcopal Church either succeed or fail, nothing finally about the Body of Christ will have been diminished or made more secure. And that confidence is only exceeded when I think of the Anglican Communion. Churches and Communions are organic things, and they come into existence and they will pass away. The object in considering TEC, the Anglican Communion, its several offices, the other Churches of the Anglican Communion, the many churches that have sprung from Anglicanism along the way, the new so called orthodox Anglican Churches, etc, is to secure a place of safety for people, not for the Churches.


It is folly and a great sin to be concerned for the safety of churches, with the propriety and prudence of its members for the church's life as the basis for our actions as or in these churches. The obsession with being wise as serpents has overcome us, and the serpent lifted on the pole has become an idol, as has the wisdom of the prudent.


Further, I have learned a bit in the sixty-five years since that picture was taken - not much but something. I have learned that piety is no help at all, as if it would connect our outward and visible churchliness with the inward and spiritual Body of Christ.


So I am not much help for those who want to talk about accountability to this or that church, or the Anglican Communion or any visibly right way of being church that would match the Body. The Body of Christ is too visceral, too much alive, too unseemly to be held by anything as starched and petty and pious, as propitious and prudent as the several churches. The Body of Christ is, in other words, too alive to be associated in too great convergence with the death which is most institutional church.


So the question is not the one the comment raised. It is not to ask if I am, or we should be, accountable to The Episcopal Church, this one or the Churches of the Anglican Communion together or separately. The question is, does our accountability to the Risen Christ engage us with the several churches - the one we belong to and others - working to find in them a place of safety, not for the churches themselves, but for the poor, the lost, the frozen out, the condemned, the joyous, the mad, the puzzled, the confused - in short for the whole people of God?


Here on Preludium I have been writing these several years to do several things: (i) to speak out for a more inclusive church and against those who would shut down such talk as being unorthodox or heterodox or unchristian. (ii) To deny the easy capture of Anglicanism - as a way of being one of those "outward signs" - by those who would either toss out its classic reliance on scripture, sacrament, creed and episcopacy or those who would turn those into a tyranny for exclusion. (iii) To speak for a confidence in action and contemplation both - listening actively and with some vigor, conteplating what others say, what we say, and acting as we are called - so that we can better find Christ, who is after all not hidden, except from the fearful.


Over the years I have been blessed by friends, left and right, to attend to their words and deeds, to see The Episcopal Church in considerable agitation, to take sometimes a bit part in this or that action.


It appears the popular way of talking about the situation in The Episcopal Church these days is that it is in distress or in conflict, or in trouble. The agitation is seen as a bad thing, tearing the fabric of the church, leading to the decline of the church, etc. And the things spoken of as leading to all this trouble are - the 1979 BCP, women in leadership in the church, beginning with the ordination of women as deacons and priests and now as bishops, the increasing inclusion of gay and lesbian persons in ordained leadership, and the secret never spoken of deeply despised efforts (not always very successful) of including people of color in the leadership of the church. This last is the elephant in the room unseen because no one will remark on the fact. Having failed on the whole to find ways to heal the distrust and separation regarding color that makes our desires to be inclusive a folly we eat ourselves alive by marshaling our fears of THAT change into all the changes that have come.


We are not an inclusive church because we would rather be the church we became than the church we could become. Period. That being so, it is no wonder that accountability turns from being how to be with and for the people of God to how to protect and save the people of church.


So, at the end of a long rambling bit, I return to Neil Young's comment,

"One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down
and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days,
one of these days,
one of these days,
And it won't be long,
it won't be long."


The letter won't be long, either in coming or in length. It will begin,

"Friends, for years I have wanted to sit at table with you again. Perhaps we will. But know this: the table is least often in the house. It is most often in the field. There are fields of plenty out there, more than can be imagined. Even if we are not at the same table, we will find each other in others. You can count on it.....