Short Takes 1: All Quiet on the New Hampshire Front

So, let's get this right.  Before the  Diocese of New Hampshire held its election for a bishop last week, the rabid right and the mild conservatives both were worried about the awful possibility that a gay person might again be elected to be bishop in New Hampshire.  Considerable wringing of hands and muttering too place about the gay cabal and the in your face presence on which they insisted. Doom and gloom were the order of the day.

Well, New Hampshire once again voted its own wishes and the candidate elected turned out not to be gay. On the whole gay Episcopalians and their friends opined that there may have been some disappointment, but the elected bishop, The Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld was a fine choice and more the choice of the electors.  There was general good wishes for Bishop elect Hirschfeld.

On the other hand the hand wringers had not a word to say about how New Hampshire once again exercisd its voice and elected, by democratic process a candidate of their choice.

The propensity by the right to dump on a canonical and democratic process that results in candidates of different sorts complete with dire predictons about the future is apparently inversly porportional to the ability to congratulate that same process when it yelds an election of a candidate, even one they can accept..

Alternately the propensity of the progressive and gay community is to demand an open process which includes otherwise qualified gay persons and then congratulate the winner who ever that may be.

It turns out that some (mostly the progressive and the gay) get it:  celebrate democratic process and live with the result.

I've heard not a single remark before or after the election suggesting that because the elected person might be a straight person they were leaving the church. Not so for the right. Did I miss something?

Anderson, President of the House of Deputies,"Until the gavel goes down on July 12th."

The President of the House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson, has announced today that she will not seek re-election as President of the House of Deputies at the next General Convention. This came as some surprise. She brings such energy to the Executive Council and such continuing attention to the issues of the church, the development of leadership, lay and ordained, and such commitment to the life of the church that it is hard to think that she might step down. But there it is.

True to form she is clear to say that she remains President of the HoD until "the gavel goes down on July 12th."  No lame duck here.  It's hard to imagine her being a lame anything, not to mention a lame duck. She has done her work with gusto, often taking issue with the "episcopal" bent to the workings of the church, arguing for leadership drawn from all orders, widely diverse, and greatly transparent. She may be ready to move on, but she is not abandoning the work. 

She will indeed lead as she has, with gusto, this one last round. Thank you Madame President.

Walking, one step at a time: The future of the church in Haiti

Apparently there are some readers who have recognized that Preludium has been remiss these past days. Big events (or so they seemed at the time) have come and gone and life for most Episcopalians and Anglicans has been every bit as normal as always, providing of course that "normal" includes a bit of chaos.

I am in Haiti at the moment for a variety of reasons, among them attending the consecration of the Suffragan Bishop of Haiti, the Rev. Canon Oge Beauvoir. That will happen tomorrow. It is a grand occasion and should be good ecclesiastical doings.

Today we stopped by to see how preparations are going. The Cathedral without walls - quite literally- has been for some time a large metal roofed open sided structure behind where the ruins of the old cathedral still remain.  It didn't particularly look like an Anglican/ Episcopal cathedral, but rather like a somewhat established pentecostal tent meeting sort of structure. The altar area was a raised stage at one end, but it felt makeshift.  Tomorrow, however, the tent of meeting will look a bit more liturgically proper, with an altar area more like a sanctuary.  It will be a raised dais with a semi-circular step-up in front and plenty of room for the ministers of the Eucharist. The roof is now supported by metal beams, all painted white, the entry is tiled. It looks, well, more churchy, but still a work in progress.

I've been thinking of the rebuilding effort. All over Port au Prince there are reconstruction projects that are slowly taking form, although still there is little to show for the work. Many of the tents are gone and the people resettled in other more permanent housing. The Champs du Mars (a major city center) with its monuments and statues is returned to normal use as  a park. But the Presidential Palace is still fallen down, unreconstructed. Schools and other civic structures are still pretty temporary. But life is going on.

The Cathedral is what it is.  One day there will be a new Cathedral, but the longer the "Tent of Meeting" is more like a tent and less like an English Cathedral set in Haiti with grand paintings and cathedral bells, and more like a place grounded in the reality of life in Haiti - where open (that is to say no) walls lets breeze in and voices out - the more I think slow is just fine.

Yes, a new cathedral is in the making. I hope it is raised soon, and with it the hopes of the Church in Haiti to keep on walking. But now is the walking time, and the people of the Church in Haiti are walking, rather running, to their future.  Perhaps this time their future does not copy English and American architecture. Perhaps this time there is the memory that the Tent of Meeting in Haiti is a meeting under the great tree that shelters and protects, but is free and without the constraints of old masters. 

The same can be said of the Roman Catholic Cathedral, whose ruins remind us that what was broken was itself an import from distant lands, whose people did not look kindly on imported slaves.  I see those ruins and hope that what they raise up will be for the first time truly Haitian as well.

What that will look like I do not know. But I do know that tomorrow we will be in a fine cathedral, one build not with the hands of strangers, and conforming to the world's standards for cathedral construction, but build by Haitians for worship and praise, if only for the day and hour in which we find ourselves tomorrow.

Pray for the Church in Haiti and for the bishops and people.

The current State of Affairs in the USofA and The Episcopal Church.

Preface:

Preludium was mostly shut down these past two weeks by the invasion of realities that both delighted and exhausted. Life lived fully is the best answer to the mind and heart numbing muck up in the political and religious lands we inhabit.

We spent ten days with a six year old and a two and a half year old, grandchildren extraordinaire (of course), and that was proceeded by five good days with members of the Philippine Independent Church (PIC or IFI) and two days with Executive Council where I attended my last EC meeting as a member.  Those two days were both frustrating and poignant.  It was an honor to serve on Executive Council but I cannot say that I am sad that my term is up. The last several meetings were difficult.

So here it is a bright sunny day in Lewes, the little town on the bay by the big water, and I am playing a little Warren Zevon to provide a bit of a beat to accompany the joys of spring.  Of course Zevon is mightily depressing, so of course my mind wanders to the question:  where do things in Anglican Land and other realms stand?

Where do things stand in the good ol' USofA?

1. First off, about the realm called the United States of America - I think we are in the midst of a nervous breakdown. We are beginning to realize that the American Dream and the American realities don't match. Zevon found words for this growing realization in his song, "Disorder in the House."

Disorder in the house

The tub runneth over

Plaster's falling down in pieces by the couch of pain

Disorder in the house

Time to duck and cover

Helicopters hover over rough terrain

Disorder in the house

Reptile wisdom

Zombies on the lawn staggering around

Disorder in the house

There's a flaw in the system

And the fly in the ointment's gonna bring the whole thing down

The floodgates are open

We've let the demons loose

The big guns have spoken

And we've fallen for the ruse

Disorder in the house

It's a fate worse than fame

Even the Lhasa Apso seems to be ashamed

Disorder in the house

The doors are coming off the hinges

The earth will open and swallow up the real estate

I just got my paycheck

I'm gonna paint the whole town grey

Whether it's a night in Paris or a Fresno matinee

It's the home of the brave and the land of the free

Where the less you know the better off you'll be

Disorder in the house

All bets are off

I'm sprawled across the davenport of despair

Disorder in the house

I'll live with the losses

And watch the sundown through the portiere."

Wonderfully creepy, yes? And it seems to match the situation. 

That, or perhaps even better and simpler, Allen Ginsberg's comment in his Independence Day Manifesto, "No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown." He wrote that in 2000, echoing his feelings from years before, and prophetically the truth for these years as well.

And in this nervous breakdown we are off to hold an election of a President, a full House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, not to mention all sorts of Governors, Mayors, and other honorable folk, and they, like most of us, have been rendered speechless by virtue of the fear that breakdown brings. Paranoid and simplistic voices that call the President socialist, so laughable that we should cry. So fearful are the voices that the President in turn dares not be an actual socialist and dares not laugh in their faces because he too knows just how much the sellout has taken hold even in his own mind. 

We are thundering down a road to a land where those who seek prophetic solace will once again read Isaiah and Jeremiah and Marx in one breath, find Jesus again and conclude with Che that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love". 

But for now everyone will worship the middle class, no one will mention the poor very much, and we will avert our eyes from the reality that America has become the great refuge for shameless greed.  For now, "Even the Lhasa Apso seems to be ashamed."

I am sick at heart for this place of great promise unrealized.

And with that as the backdrop, what about The Episcopal Church?

Preludium exists as a blog precisely because it was this writer's sense some fifteen years ago that The Episcopal Church and its part and life within the Anglican Communion was undergoing massive change and that the challenge of that change would lead to a new way of thinking of the Communion and a new way of thinking about being "church." So I wrote, "The Challenge of Change: The Anglican Communion in the post modern era." Following that, and with the encouragement of Louie Crew and others, I began to write for his blog pages and for The Witness, and in 2005 I began writing Preludium. 

I mostly got it right, but not without a major failing. While I wrote about the terrible events of 9/11/ 2001, about the mad and sad wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the fears and new political ultra nationalism, and about the end of any pretense to end poverty in this country, I did not dwell much on the way in which the last 10-12 years of life in America has influenced just what The Episcopal Church is about and why we too have shared in the nervous breakdown that is America.

We are about to hold General Convention 2012, the every three year meeting of Episcopal Church deputies and bishops from all over the church in what is meant to be the "assembly" of the whole church. With all our efforts to insist that a church wide assembly in the Episcopal Church is larger than an assembly of US based dioceses, its agenda will be almost entirely determined by US based interests and concerns.  The nervous breakdown that is America will have its mirror in General Convention.

There is no question in my mind that fearless and good people will gather and we will explore with honesty and clarity differences among us, will work out ways to find a mind of the church as much as possible.  As we always do we will find a way to express in prayer and blessing various aspects of our common life. 

But on two matters in particular we will fall short of our best possibilities:  The Anglican Covenant debate and its conclusion will be unsatisfactory and the matter of restructure of the church's ecclesial life will remain mostly unattended.

That is because we lack a sense of purpose in the larger realm of civil and religious concerns.

We lack any "manifesto" that speaks to the nervous breakdown that is America and that permeates all of America's institutions including the churches, and in particular The Episcopal Church. We live in the same culture of fear that IS America in these days and it is no wonder that friends and foes alike the world over are wondering just who we are.

The Anglican Covenant is no manifesto and the Restructuring proposals are no call to real and specific vision nailed down and made real. That is their problem.

How can we vote Yes on a Covenant that does not, cannot and is not even meant to address, the culture of fear that permeates all of life here, and I would submit, most everywhere in the greed thick parts of the world?  How can we make any kind of restructure that addresses new life after death when we are still afraid of death?

Che Guevara was wrong as could be on some things, but it wouldn't be bad to think that if God is love and those who abide in love abide in God, that real revolutionary thinking would itself be guided by great feelings of love. 

Allen Ginsberg set his queer shoulder to the wheel and so must we all, but he also set out to make America a place where poets and vision were part of what made the wheels turn. 

And he said about all our squirming around and avoidance, "Only those who have entered the world of Spirit know what a vast laugh there is in the illusory appearance of worldly authority. And all ... at one time or other enter that Spirit, whether in life or death. 

I believe it is time for The Episcopal Church to find voice for a Manifesto, one line of which, I would like to submit is this, "We must be a community of poetic sensibility."

I have written before on a notion of a manifesto for the Episcopal Church. Perhaps it is time to write again.

Then again, I can always visit with the young, the very young, who have not yet learned to be afraid. From them I might learn how to write plainly and without fear.

 

What Bishop Martins Said....about the PB and strategies towards a new structure.

Bishop Dan Martins, over at Confessions of a Carioca, wrote an important and well stated opinion regarding the Presiding Bishop's remarks to the House of Bishops and ended with one of his own, to wit, 

"That the 2012 General Convention make issues of structure not only the primary issue, but the only issue. Let us elect to those offices that need electing to, and let us pass a straitened minimalist budget. But aside from those two things, we need to put everything else--everything else--in abeyance until we figure out what we need to morph into in order to be a responsibly faithful church in this post-Christian era."

He asked if there were any takers.  

I have made some suggestions about all this earlier this last year, with few takers. The primary question I raised was, "should we have a special convention."  

In private conversation with several members of Executive Council I also raised the question of effectively doing the same as Bishop Dan suggests - pass a budget that does absolutely nothing more than required by canon, a 'straitened minimalist budget," and then get to the business of restructure. 

I still believe a special convention is the way to go, but immediate suspension of business might be a dramatic way to put the matter before the governance of the church. That would require as well putting on hold many of the resolutions proposed to General Convention (including the Anglican Covenant ones?) and generally not doing business as usual. Many of the tabled or delayed motions might go to Executive Council for their consideration later.


As Elizabeth Kaeton is given to pointing out, the problem with all this is that putting the matter to General Convention is to put it to the people already part of the system, its hierarchies, ways of working, special interests, old-boy (usually) stuff, smoke filled rooms or their Episcopal equivalent, and so forth.  Almost any other way of finding and making use of stakeholder opinions and idea, and drawing new ideas and blood into the system, will require some other sort of church wide and / or regional gatherings and drawing in people who might not otherwise care much one way or another about what we do. 


So, Bishop Martins is on to something, something that is filled, as are all its alternatives, with problems and dangers. 


So, are there any takers for the idea of making THIS convention one devoted to serious structural change?
 
My sense is that to do so would require that at the very beginning of the session of one of the two houses there would need to be a suspension of other business to debate and then vote on a proposal to direct Program Budget and Finance to produce such a minimalist budget - with very strict parameters- for consideration by the General Convention, and a proposal that the regular schedule of consideration of legislation be suspended in favor of a special order of business to consider such strategic changes in structure of General Convention and its CCABS and the work of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, to the end that church-wide activities directed by Executive Council on behalf of the General Convention and the DFMS better serve the mission of The Episcopal Church in its response to God's mission,  in a post-Christian era.

There are times when Bishop Martins speaks from the front edge of imaginative possibilities for the Church. His posting today is such an occasion. 

Go Bishop Dan!