Richard Hooker, Priest and Theologian, 1600

The Episcopal church commemorates Richard Hooker, one of the great theologians of our tradition, today. Hooker's writings, in particular Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, stressed tolerance and inclusiveness and the middle way of Anglicanism between what he saw as the extremes of Catholicism and the Puritan movement.

And in recent years, I remember this day in 2007 when the presiding bishop preached about him at the Diocese of Vermont's convention Eucharist.

Hooker is a remarkable example of what wisdom in the flesh looks like—which is probably why he made it onto our list of saints. He wrote his most famous work in response to controversy with another wing of the church. And you don't have to look much beyond the first page to see the connections with current controversies in this church.

Richard Hooker was appointed Master, or Rector, of the Temple Church in London in the late 1500s. He had an assistant there, from the Puritan wing of the church, named Walter Travers. Hooker's duty was to preach in the morning. Travers followed him in the afternoon, and he took the opportunity one day to refute what the rector had said in the morning, when he preached about salvation and the possibility that all of us will be saved. The Puritan position, along with Calvin, believed that some may be damned even before they can do anything. Hooker insisted that that understanding took away the possibility of God's grace.

Hooker's focus on reason and tolerance and inclusion is foundational to that broad stream of Anglican thought. This isn't just academic theologizing. It has to do with the basic identity of our tradition—that we can be comprehensive and inclusive as we search for a larger truth. And that rather than being a cop-out, that focus on comprehension is a sign of the spirit at work.

That focus on comprehension lies underneath the challenging and uncomfortable place we are trying to stand in as a church today—affirming that gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Christians are deserving of the best ministry of this church, AND that there is a place for those who take a different theological position. We say that we are willing to live in that uncomfortable and unsettling place because we believe that only God has truth in its fullness.

Wisdom, and the search for it, is one of the gifts and vocations that the body of Christ always needs. None of us ever has it all, and it is only in the wisdom of the body gathered that we can even begin to think that we might have the mind of Christ.

Hooker's statue stands outside Exeter Cathedral.

Quote of The Day

"Christianity is dying in Western Europe, even in Spain and Ireland. It is not exactly in robust health in the United States either with church membership and attendance declining across the board, especially among the young. The moral authority that Christianity once enjoyed among non-Christians eroded away long ago by scandal, hypocrisy, and identification with right wing reactionary politics (just ask the Spanish Catholics). Though Africa now has the embattled convert's fervor, it is not unreasonable to think that the same process of decline could happen there too. There are times when I think the Christian religion should die in order that the Christian faith might continue. But, a lot of babies would be lost with that bath water, perhaps too many to make the sacrifice worthwhile."
- Doug Blanchard/Counterlight's Peculiars in a much broader, lengthy essay, The Perils of Episcopalianism - "on the current tensions between the Episcopal Church and the Archbishop of Canterbury," - well worth the read in its entirety.

A Lesson from the Gulf Oil Spill: We Are All Connected (and There Is No Escape)

Katharine Jefferts Schori's career as an oceanographer and university lecturer (a B.S. degree in biology from Stanford University, an M.S. and Ph.D. in oceanography from Oregon State University) preceded her studies for the priesthood (an M.Div. from Church Divinity School of the Pacific) and her election as bishop of Nevada in 2000. Since June 2006 she has been the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

She writes recently in the Huffington Post

"The original peoples of the North American continent understand that we are all connected, and that harm to one part of the sacred circle of life harms the whole. Scientists, both the ecological and physical sorts, know the same reality, expressed in different terms. The Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) also charge human beings with care for the whole of creation, because it is God's good gift to humanity. Another way of saying this is that we are all connected and there is no escape; our common future depends on how we care for the rest of the natural world, not just the square feet of soil we may call "our own." We breathe the same air, our food comes from the same ground and seas, and the water we have to share cycles through the same airshed, watershed, and terra firma.

"The still-unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is good evidence of the interconnectedness of the whole."

To read the full article go to Huffington Post.

Immortalised by Google

When Grandmère Mimi made her state visit to England last year we met up in Yorkshire and visited the quaint village of Lastingham for lunch.

After our meal, Mimi and me went to have a look in the church. On the way back to the car, we were Googled and have been immortalised on their street view function.

Feast of Julian of Norwich, Contemplative

Lord God, who in your compassion granted to the Lady Julian many revelations of your nurturing and sustaining love: Move our hearts, like hers, to seek you above all things, for in giving us yourself you give us all; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today is the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, one of my most favourite spiritual writers and saints. She celebrated God and Nature. If you don't know much about her, why don't you read a bit.

Her book is a tender meditation on God's eternal and all-embracing love, as expressed to us in the Passion of Christ.

She describes seeing God holding a tiny thing in his hand, like a small brown nut, which seemed so fragile and insignificant that she wondered why it did not crumble before her eyes. She understood that the thing was the entire created universe, which is as nothing compared to its Creator, and she was told, "God made it, God loves it, God keeps it."

She was concerned that sometimes when we are faced wiith a difficult moral decision, it seems that no matter which way we decide, we will have acted from motives that are less then completely pure, so that neither decision is defensible. She finally wrote: "It is enough to be sure of the deed. Our courteous Lord will deign to redeem the motive."

A matter that greatly troubled her was the fate of those who through no fault of their own had never heard the Gospel. She never received a direct answer to her questions about them, except to be told that whatever God does is done in Love, and therefore "that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

And you can read more about her here!

Have a Good Lent

The Ash Wednesday liturgy is sparse and to the point. Traditionally it includes the Litany. This year at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London they've taken the ancient form of the Litany and added some contemporary references. Here is part of it:

From all worldliness, and love of money;
from hardness of heart
and contempt for your word and your laws,
R/ Good Lord deliver us

From the snares of corporate greed,
from the lure of the bonus culture,
from toxic financial instruments and excessive debt
R/ Good Lord deliver us

From the spirit of bombast,
from our fascination with power,
from state-sponsored torture and from
all use of torture
R/ Good Lord deliver us

From corrupt or easily led politicians,
from the 'its within the rules' defence,
from the slow and subtle encroachments of deceit
R/ Good Lord deliver us

From the abuse of process and patronage,
from the attraction of public honours,
and from all blandishments
R/ Good Lord deliver us

From complacency as a Christian community,
from living within sound bites and not your truth,
from love of trivia
R/ Good Lord deliver us

In all times of sorrow;
in all times of joy;
in the hour of our death,
and at the day of judgement,
R/ Good Lord deliver us

Get with the Program, CofE! A Woman's Place is in the House of Bishops!

I have never understood the idea of alternative oversight bishops in the TEC and CofE. Especially when both Churches opened up the three orders of ordained ministry to women waaay back in 1976 and 1992, respectively. Even back in 1976 I thought these compromises were ridiculous... - a comment I posted on Thinking Anglicans, May 25, 2008

A church that acknowledges that women should be allowed to be bishops cannot also say that it has doubts about it.- Christina Rees in the Guardian Comment is Free, February 9, 2010.

The General Synod of the Church of England has just completed. After 35 years debating this issue in the Anglican Communion, enough, already!

Christina Rees writes further,

The observation is made repeatedly that if one were to replace the word "women" in these discussions with "black" or even "French", the breathtaking offence of these views would become obvious. This verbal offence indicates a much deeper issue: females are still considered by some to be unable to represent Christ at the altar and as not being made fully in the image of God.

Of course, this is denied by the men and women who oppose women's ordination. They cite tradition, as if that has remained static over the past 2,000 years, and ecclesiology, as if the Church of England's relationship with some other churches is more important than what it understands to be true. All this in spite of the fact that elsewhere in the Anglican communion women have been ministering as bishops for over 20 years.

It will come. Within a few years there will be women taking their place among their brothers. As women have been integrated as priests over the last 15 years, now representing nearly 40% of all Church of England clergy, so too will women be appointed as bishops. When that happens, there will at last be parity for women, but what will remain is the more important work of transforming people's understanding of what it means to be human in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Today Thinking Anglicans lists several General Synod related articles in Comment is Free section of The Guardian.

Embracing the Poor

In light of the horrendous earthquake in Haiti, I am posting all of Simon Kershaw's essay - written from India, another country ravaged by poverty - appearing today in Thinking Anglicans.

As I sit typing this I can look out of the window over the city of Pune in the state of Maharashtra in India, about 100 miles south-east of Mumbai. The view comprises high-rise tower blocks, green lawns and trees, concrete and glass. It could be anywhere in the developed world (though the 30 C temperature and sun virtually overhead in a cloudless sky at noon confirm that it is not England!). But I know that just across the road, and out of sight from here, are the shacks, corrugated steel sheds, and tents that everywhere are intermingled with the lives and buildings of richer Indians and their western business partners. Pune today is a rapidly-growing city, the eighth largest in India, with half a dozen universities and growing hi-tech industrial, IT and commercial sectors.

It was in a very much smaller Pune, then spelt Poona, that in 1927 the Christa Seva Sangha made its first real home. Founded in 1922 by five Indians and an Englishman this ashram or religious community — whose name means the Community of the Servants of Christ — intended to form a life of common service and equal fellowship for Indians and Europeans. The Englishman was Jack Winslow and the community soon attracted some attention in both India and England, which enabled it to move to Poona after a few years. Winslow’s account of the Society can be read online. Originally dedicated to St Barnabas, the Society soon added St Francis as joint patron, a dedication that became more important as it adopted a formal rule and vows.

In 1927 the community was joined by a number of new recruits, one of whom was a young priest called Algy Robertson, and by 1930 there were around 30 members. Robertson was convinced that the Sangha should be a Franciscan community, but after a few years his health broke and he returned to England. Still a member of the Sangha, he became vicar of St Ives, a dozen miles north-west of Cambridge, and the vicarage at St Ives became home to several Brothers of the community as well as a refuge for visitors from Poona. There are still those in St Ives (where I have lived and worshipped for twenty years or so) who can recall the Brothers living in the vicarage and cycling around the town and to nearby villlages. In 1936, however, Robertson’s group joined with another Franciscan community in England to form the Society of St Francis, with a rule largely written by Robertson and based on the principles of the Sangha in Poona. In 1937 Robertson resigned from St Ives to move to the new community at Hilfield, near Cerne Abbas in Dorset, where he was based for the rest of his life.

The Franciscan ideal of embracing poverty and the service of the poor is one that comes swiftly to mind in the streets of modern Pune, just as it must have done in the very different Poona of the 1920s and 30s, to Francis in the thirteenth century, and just as it must have done to an itinerant preacher from Nazareth two thousand years ago. The poor are still with us, and the priority of working for the alleviation of hunger, homelessness, disease and injustice is as necessary now as it was then.

Keeping Alive those Ancient Uncouths

From Louie Crew, some eye-opening background history on the treatment of LBGTs. He does not excuse the Archbishop of Canterbury's silence vis-à-vis the proposed horrendous Ugandan anti-gay laws, but gives an historical context to the current situation in that country. We've come far and yet we keep alive those ancient uncouths.

Anglicans in Uganda are currently encouraging passage of a harsh new law that would institute the death penalty for some homosexual acts and would punish with severe prison sentences those who fail to report the homosexuality of those whom they counsel or even just know. The legislation will encourage the most vicious kinds of witch hunts. One Anglican priest in Uganda has likened lesbians and gays to "cockroaches." International human rights organizations are alarmed that this legislation may actually pass.

This violence has a long history, especially among the British and those whom the British have influenced.

The Napoleonic Code (1804) led to radical reform of almost all law in most of Europe. One of its effects was the decriminalization of consensual homosexual acts throughout most of Europe, EXCEPT in England.

That was no accident, and the Church of England was one of the main obstacles to reform of Britain's sodomy laws.

Britain continued to execute homosexuals for five more decades. England's last execution for sodomy occurred in 1857.

While the death penalty was still on the books, many visitors from the Continent wrote of their horror at the flagrant public pillorying of homosexuals in Britain. (See a brief account of the Vere Street Coterie --1810 -- at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vere_Street_Coterie).

The British obsession led Lord Byron to spend most of his adult life on the Continent. He and his homosexual friends called themselves "Methodists" as code for "homosexuals" in their private correspondence. (See extensive accounts in Louis Crompton's BYRON AND GREEK LOVE, University of California
Press, 1985; see also Crompton's HOMOSEXUALITY AND CIVILIZATION. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.)

Even after the death penalty was removed, the British fervor against gays continued little abated. Witness the conviction with jail and hard labor sentence for Oscar Wilde in 1895.

Wilde died only five years later, in 1900, a completely broken man, and it took more than six decades thereafter before Britain decriminalized consensual homosexuality (1967), almost a decade after decriminalizing heterosexual prostitution.

Britain's decriminalization of consensual homosexual acts would likely have been delayed further had not the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, supported the reform.

There is much lgbt blood on the hands of the Church of England. Uganda is merely keeping alive those ancient uncouths, with help from the silence of Rowan Williams. Rowan Williams is no Michael Ramsey.

In the early 1971 one of the bishops from Florida shocked the Episcopal House of Bishops by asking on the floor of the house how he was to handle a priest whom he had discovered to be "queer." His raw candor shocked the House, which immediately established the House of Bishops Task Force on Homophiles and the Ministry (1971-76) so that such discussions could go underground. (Only Episcopalians could have come up with such a prissy name as "the House of Bishops Task Force on Homophiles and the Ministry"!)

In October 1974 I took out ads for a new publication, INTEGRITY: GAY EPISCOPAL FORUM in THE EPISCOPALIAN, THE ADVOCATE, and THE LIVING CHURCH.

Immediately I received a letter from Bishop John Walker, a member of this Task Force, asking me to meet with the Task Force in Washington as soon as possible. We met at Epiphany in Washington, DC, and to that meeting I brought with me copies fresh off the Xerox, of the first issue of the FORUM, in which I called for chapters to be formed.

A priest named Tyndale and a layman named Wycliffe (who says the Holy Spirit does not have a sense of history?!), both from Chicago, but neither knowing the other, called me wanting to start a chapter. I put them in touch. Theymet in December and the following summer (1975) hosted the first national convention of Integrity at St. James Cathedral in Chicago.

In my papers stored in archives of the University of Michigan is a thick binder labeled "Episcopal Snide," a collection of hostile mail that I frequently received from bishops. Long ago I decided not to keep that collection near me. From the day I took out the ads, I understood that we all have much better news to tell to absolutely everybody. It is not ourselves whom we proclaim but Jesus as Lord and ourselves your servants for
Jesus' sake.

Louie Crew, professor emeritus of English at Rutgers University, is the founder of Integrity, and a longtime deputy to General Convention from the Diocese of Newark.

Well, it's about time

Episcopal Church House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson has issued a statement condemning the pending Ugandan legislation that would imprison for life or execute people who violate that country's anti-homosexuality laws saying it would be a "terrible violation of the human rights of an already persecuted minority."

Anderson was responding to a Nov. 16 request that Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Archbishop Henri Orombi of Uganda and she speak out against the legislation. Anderson is the first to issue a statement.

"For the saints of God are just folk like me, And I mean to be one too."

From a sermon for the Feast of All Saints preached by the Rev'd Jonathan Haggar (aka MadPriest), Rector of the Church of St Francis, High Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. This is an excerpt, but the whole sermon is worth the read.

Who we refer to as saints is down to us. Your are well within your rights to refer to the old lady who lives next door, who will agree to babysit your kids at a moments notice so that you can go out, a living saint. Why not? And the churches are free to choose who they want to, officially, call saints. The conferring of sainthood on earth is a human thing and is completely different to the sainthood that God bestows on God's people.

Now, of course, I would say this, but I think the Anglican churches have got the best system when it comes to choosing its saints. Our church always waits for fifty years after a prospective saint dies before it considers making that person a saint officially, unless a person dies a martyrs death, in which case they can be fast tracked through without having to wait half a century. In other words, we like to make sure nothing embarrassing is going to turn up, concerning a person's life before we start handing out the honours. But we do not insist that the candidate performs any miracles after leaving this mortal coil. In other words, sainthood in the Anglican churches is about what a person does on earth, while they are alive. And I think that is a very important thing to remember. Anglican sainthood is about flesh and blood, living human beings. That means that, ontologically speaking, a saint is no different to any of us. To put it into non-academic terms, they are made of the same stuff and they have the same potential to do good or to bad as all of us. And the flipside of that coin is that we are exactly the same in being and potential as those who end up having their names commemorated in our church calendar.

On the Anglican Non-Response to the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009

"Anglican niceness and cowardice is at its worst when it remains silent when confronted with legislation which is in contravention of Anglican policy and will criminalise and dehumanize a group of people recognized as requiring equality in western society. When will Anglican leaders find the courage to denounce the Ugandan legislation?"

Indeed, we have heard neither from the PB or the ABC.

Pluralist

Shocking, appalling, worse: and so is the silence, especially when some Anglican Bishop Stanley Ntagali thinks locking gay people up for a period of time is a better alternative, apparently compassionate when the Churches are leading the campaigns against the existence of gay people, a man inspired by his national President congratulating Anglican bishops last August for their campaign against gay people.

Changing Attitude

You would have expected the Anglican Church in Uganda, those responsible for implementing Anglican Communion policy and those with supportive links to Uganda to have issued strong statements condemning the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Lesbian and gay Ugandans now face the very real danger of being subjected to draconian legislation and more intense public vilification. Changing Attitude is in contact with a number of lesbian and gay Ugandan Anglicans who are terrified by the prospect.

On behalf of Inclusive Church and Changing Attitude, Giles Goddard joined me in writing to the Archbishops of Canterbury, York and Uganda and the bishops of Bristol, Sodor and Man and Winchester, the three English dioceses linked to Uganda. The letters have just been posted so no replies have yet been received.
...
Political Research Associates (PRA), a progressive think tank devoted to supporting movements building a more just and inclusive democratic society, called on Rick Warren to denounce the proposed antigay law in Uganda. [JayV edit: Link] In March 2008, U.S. evangelical leader Rick Warren told Ugandans that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, has just completed a report for PRA, to be released in mid-November, investigating the US right-wing evangelicals' outreach in Africa and related efforts to destabilize mainline Protestant denominations and their LGBT rights programs and policies in the United States.

Palestinian rights deserve Anglican action

P U L S E has a post up (by David Thomson) commenting on an opinion column from Thursday, May 21, by Ben White, a regular contributor to the Guardian's Cif/belief. (Ben White has also written for the Anglican website, Fulcrum.) I had to chuckle at the comments on Mr White's Guardian piece. Ben White takes on "even handedness" of Anglicans [that typically Anglican - and sometimes maddeningly frustrating - "via media" approach to any theological, political or cultural controversy] regarding resolutions on Israel-Palestine at the recent Anglican Consultative Council meeting. Mr Thomson sees the heavy-handed influence of a pro-Zionist right-wing organisation in the Anglican Communion which has campaigned vigorously against Anglican efforts to promote divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel.

Ben White writes that “a obsession with even-handedness is stopping Anglicans taking a firm stand on Israel’s disregard for Palestinian rights.”

However I’d argue that the obsession with even-handedness is not a cause but an effect — an effect of paranoia induced by the Israel lobby, strongly represented in the Anglican community by Anglican Friends of Israel.

This group spread the fear that criticising Israel will damage relations with the Jewish community, even if this were so, should it stop the church’s quest for justice? They also use ‘anti-Semitism’ (or Judeophobia) and therefore the Holocaust, to create an atmosphere of intimidation saying Anglican peace activists are “singling out” Israel (thus implying there is no good reason to criticise Israel and the reason must be anti-Jewish racism). No individual or organisation wants to be threatened with anti-Semitism and have themselves compared to some of the worst criminals in history.

It’s sad that these tired old tricks are still accepted and work as a distraction from the real issues of colonialism, occupation, international law, basic morality and justice.

At the 14th Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) meeting, held in Jamaica earlier this month, a resolution on the Middle East was passed, criticising the Israeli occupation. An original version of the resolution was originally submitted by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN)[JayV: APJN website], but as the language was felt by some to be too “strong”, a new resolution was put forward and adopted.

The resolution staked out a position based on international law, a rejection of violence as a means of conflict resolution, and opposition to Israel’s occupation and colonisation of the Palestinian territories.

It also called for a “two state solution”, and “lamented” the fact that Israeli policies in the West Bank “have created severe hardship for many Palestinians” and are “experienced as a physical form of apartheid”. There was an affirmation that a “just peace must guarantee the security and territorial integrity of both Israel and the future state of Palestine so that all the people of the area can live in peace and prosperity.”

For some, however, this call for two states living side by side – a state of affairs that would necessarily require one party to stop its domination of the other – was a cause for “dismay”. Anglican Friends of Israel released a statement (faithfully reproduced by The Times’s religion correspondent) which regretted how “once again”, Anglicans had “singled out Israel for criticism” without any “context” or taking into account “the Palestinian contribution to the conflict”.

Where the resolution condemned illegal policies like settlement building, the ICJ-condemned separation wall, and house demolitions, Anglican Friends for Israel saw a call for Israel to “lay down all measures which protect her citizens from Arab terrorism”. Apparently, not even Palestinian “interests” are served by such a “ghastly pronouncement”, which, the statement warned, “threatens to completely sabotage Anglican-Jewish relations”.

The resolution, passed “overwhelmingly”, was publicly backed by a number of those present, including the Anglican Church of Southern Africa Archbishop Thabo Makogba, who told the council how he had “lived under apartheid” and knew its “pain”. He went on to describe seeing the “‘the brutality’ in the West Bank and Gaza that ’segregates God’s people’.”

The original wording submitted by APJN had been specifically criticised by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who took particular issue with “a section that ‘condemns the judaisation of the city (of Jerusalem) by the government of Israel”. The Archbishop was reported as saying that “judaisation is a word that I cannot, in conscience, accept”, since “it equates ‘the political machinations of the Israeli government’ with the people of faith in Jewish society”.

That there is a deliberate policy of judaisation in Jerusalem is not a secret in Israel; politicians and policy-makers routinely talk of strengthening the “Jewish character” of the city (and other areas too for that matter).

So in fact then, while Williams is right to critique the conflation of the Israeli state’s policies with “people of faith in Jewish society”, his target should be that very same Israeli state which in the name of Jews worldwide maintains a regime of racial exclusion.

The archbishop’s other concern, according to the same report, was to avoid saying anything in such as a way as to “jeopardise the Anglican Communion’s dialogue with the Rabbinate”. This was a worry also taken up by others, including the coordinator of the Anglican Communion Office’s Network for Interfaith Concerns, who helped produce the alternative resolution that was eventually passed.

The Anglican Church has trodden an uneasy path in recent years when it comes to words and actions on Israel/Palestine. Despite recommendations by the APJN to pursue divestment as means of opposing Israel’s occupation, this has never been followed through.

While many individual church members and ministers across the worldwide communion are active in working for a just peace in the Middle East, the senior leadership is typically shy of going much beyond hand-wringing statements of sorrow and “even-handed” reproach.

It is unfortunate that the division, such as in the case of this recent ACC resolution, is often expressed in terms of those seeking stronger expressions of protest over the Israeli occupation against those seeking to avoid tension in Jewish-Christian relations.

The two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, of course. But even when these worries about interfaith dialogue are sincere (rather than a disingenuous smokescreen), how long can they hamstring serious action by the Anglican Communion in the face of Israel’s entrenched – and worsening – disregard for basic Palestinian political and human rights?

Cross-posted at Antemedius.

You might be Anglo-Catholic if.....

... you believe that Sacraments are to be administered, not passed around.
... you hold the doctrine that whatever is worth doing is worth overdoing.
...you think of the Wippell's catalog as liturgical porn.
...you get more exercise genuflecting, kneeling, and prostrating than running, jogging, or walking.
...most of the volumes in your library have been out of print for over a century.
... the primary causes of your violating the Tenth Commandment are found on the pages of Wippell's.
...You'd consider going over to Rome if it didn't mean giving up being catholic.
...on hearing the parable of the Good Samaritan, you wonder what the priest and the Levite were wearing.
...on Easter morning in your parish, the men at the altar wear more lace than the women in the congregation.
...you believe that the current controversies over the Bishopric of Jerusalem, the Open Pulpit Canon, the ordination of women, the new Prayer Book, and the Bishop of New Hampshire can be settled amicably but that the Alcuin Club and the Society of SS. Peter & Paul may need separate provinces.
...you believe that 'old-time religion' was what we had before Pius XII started mucking around with Holy Week.
....you'll fight to the death for the 1928 Prayer Book, provided it's never actually used.
... you are willing to receive a visitation from your bishop, but would go to the barricades to keep cassock-albs out of your parish.
... you think that "Almy" is French for Methodist.
...you think that "On Eagles' Wings" is where Low Churchmen read the epistle.
…you have trouble breathing if there’s not enough incense at Mass.

Borrowed from OCICBOV.

Awaiting a refugee

From The Lead

The Diocese of Montreal in the Anglican Church of Canada has sponsored more than 1,000 refugees in the last 25 years but one Algerian who is still in custody at Guantanamo has an offer from the diocese to sponsor him to come to Canada as a refugee.

The Anglican Journal reports:

Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, said Canadian officials would have to have access to interview Mr. Djamel Ameziane first. The current hold-up, she said, seems to be that the Americans are waiting until they have reviewed all the prisoners’ cases. “No one has formally and officially said that it is waiting for the U.S. to do their internal review but … all signs seem to point to” that cause for the delay, Ms. Dench said. “Once they’ve done the reviews, then they’ll be starting to think about ‘how do we find solutions for all of the people in Guantánamo and how do we involve these different other countries that might play a role?'”

Bishop Barry Clarke decided to sponsor Mr. Ameziane as a part of an ecumenical partnership with the Presbyterian Church in Montreal. “There’s an injustice here,” he said, noting that one the Five Marks of Mission in the Anglican Communion is changing unjust structures in society.

The Anglican Journal says that Mr. Ameziane has been imprisoned in Guantánamo since 2002, but has never been charged with a crime. According to information from the Center for Constitutional rights in New York where lawyers have taken on his case, he is an ethnic Berber who fled Algeria 17 years ago. He came to Canada but was denied refugee status and then traveled to Afghanistan. “As a foreigner in a land soon torn apart by conflict, he was an easy target for corrupt local police who captured him while he was trying to cross the border into Pakistan. Mr. Ameziane was then sold to U.S. military forces for a bounty,” his lawyers say.

Mr. Ameziane fears his life would be in danger returning Algeria with the stigma of having been accused of terrorist-related activities and would like to come to Canada because he has family in Quebec, said Bishop Clarke.

“People say to me ‘Can you really guarantee that he wasn’t a terrorist?' Well, there’s no guarantees in any thing, but on the other hand I keep telling people ‘We’ve done our homework. It’s not something that is just a nice thing to do,” said Bishop Clarke, commending Presbyterian pastor Glynis Williams for all her work on the matter. He added that the Canadian Council for Refugees and Amnesty International are also working hard to help Mr. Ameziane. “They’re not going to come and present something to me that they haven’t done their homework on.”

AN INVITATION

This Sunday, 1 March, 10:00 a.m. St Paul's Cathedral Adult Forum will show excerpts from “The Power of Forgiveness,” a documentary by Martin Doblmeir that explores recent research into the psychological and physical effects of forgiveness on individuals and within relationships under a variety of conditions. This will introduce us to different ways of thinking about how we as individuals and as a church deal with transgression, pain, forgiveness, and healing. The documentary is based on the book of the same name by Kenneth Briggs.

BISHOP ELY ON 'VERMONT EDITION'

Episcopal Bishop Tom Ely was on VPR's noontime Vermont Edition today and spoke about the current happenings in the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church and the various initiatives of the diocese of Vermont (effecting the MGD's, support for the church and people in El Salvador and the Sudan, environmental activism, "being the church," etc.).

SWINGIN' IN THE WIND

Bravo! Episcopalians are not fundamentalist Southern Baptists-in-vestments. John Chane, the Bishop of Washington, has written a letter to his diocese about the proposed formation of a new "Anglican" province in North America, and clearly, forcefully puts the case why it's doomed to fail. Read it all here. Some salient points:

... We face our share of problems in the Episcopal Church, but wholesale defections to a movement committed to denying gay and lesbian Christians the birthright of their baptism is not one of them.

The Archbishop of Canterbury wisely did not invite any of the bishops consecrated to serve in the Nigerian, Ugandan, Rwandan or Kenyan incursions into the United States to last summer’s Lambeth Conference. Nor did he invite bishops of the Reformed Episcopal Church, which broke from the Anglican Communion almost 130 years ago. Williams seems unlikely to reverse course now. He knows that the leaders of the proposed province have been working, overtly and covertly, to undermine the Episcopal Church for almost a decade, so what was a front page story to the editors of the New York Times was old news to him. It would be folly for the Archbishop to even consider recognizing a non-geographical province because it would unleash chaos in the Communion, with theological minorities in every jurisdiction seeking to affiliate with likeminded Anglicans in other provinces. Unfortunately, the Archbishop has contributed to the confusion and anxiety the leaders of the proposed province have sought to foster by meeting on numerous occasions with Duncan and his allies. These meetings have bestowed an unwarranted sense of legitimacy on those who seek to deconstruct the Anglican Communion.

What Duncan and Minns propose – that Duncan become the Archbishop of a newly minted non-geographical province with the support of GAFCON primates such as Peter Akinola of Nigeria and Henry Orombi of Uganda – is a rejection of the respectful diversity and generous orthodoxy that defines the Communion. It is a repudiation of the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury in our communal life. It flies in the very face of what it truly means to be an Anglican. For Minns to suggest that he is leading a “new reformation” is ludicrous and demeans the historicity and value of the real Reformation as we know it and live it. The movers of the proposed new province embarrass themselves, the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion by the self-serving media coverage they have worked so hard to achieve. The news of the proposed province appears at a time when more than 28 million Americans are living on food stamps, one out of every 10 new mortgage holders is facing foreclosure, unemployment is at its highest level in decades, the auto industry is “tanking” and the real danger of deflation or a possible depression looms large on the horizon. In the global south, millions live on $1 a day, and wars, ethnic and religious violence, poverty and the AIDS epidemic continue to wrack the African continent. To learn in this context that Duncan, Minns and their allies think that the most important issue facing the church is the sexuality of the Bishop of New Hampshire suggests a level of self-absorption that is difficult to square with the teachings of Christ. And to learn that the New York Times considers the complaints of these deposed, retired and irregularly consecrated bishops to be front page news suggests a fixation on “culture wars” reporting that deprives readers of a true sense of the challenges facing the church in this country.

ST. BARNABAS CHURCH IN NORWICH GOES SOLAR

VERMONT INTERFAITH POWER & LIGHT Newsletter November, 2008

At a ceremony in October, a new array of solar panels was dedicated at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, given by the
White Flowers Foundation and the children of church member
Ann Flowers in honor of Ann's 80th birthday. Bishop Thomas
Ely was present to celebrate with the family, the congregation,
and church's rector, the Rev. Beth Hilgartner. The Bishop
spoke of every solar panel being "a sign of our commitment to
a sustainable future for this planet..." The photovoltaic panels
are connected to the power grid, and on sunny days, the electric
meter now runs backwards, giving the church credit for the
power used at night and on cloudy days.

I attended St James's, Piccadilly when I lived in London. In September, Reuters did a short video about churches and carbon footprints and it includes a look at St James's and its photovoltaic panels. Have a look here.

NOT IN MY CHURCHYARD

The title is from a post over at MAD PRIEST

From THE LONDON INFORMER:

Kensington and Chelsea Council decided on Tuesday night that Grade II listed St Jude's Church in Collingham Road, Earl's Court, which was built in 1870, should be transformed into a training centre for up to 200 would-be theologians. But the application has drawn letters of objection from 25 households which surround the Victorian building. Many are concerned that students will increase the numbers of visitors to the nearby communal gardens.

Another Courtfield Gardens wrote: "The influx of so many people to our quiet residential square, even if they are theology students, is not welcome."

I lived on the same street and would pass by St Jude's daily en route to my bus stop. It's typical of small and struggling London churches, trying to survive and also reach out to others.