On Being the Principal Minister

From Peter Robinson, UECNA bishop and old on-line friend:

I really do not want to be prescriptive about ceremonial, but I do think we need to keep two ideas before us. Firstly, we are Anglicans, not wannabe anything elses. Secondly, the function of worship is to offer glory and praise to God, so every time we approach the altar or the reading desk we need to remember "I must decrease; He must increase!" That means that the church's ceremonial should minimize the individuality of the priest, and take him into the liturgy as an integral part thereof as the 'minister' and not the focus of public worship. For this reason I object in the strongest terms to the westward facing position at communion, and to the practice of individualizing or omitting the accustomed vestments. The minister should stand at the Lord's Table or the reading desk not as Pastor Bob or Fr. Jim, but as just another minister of Word and Sacrament.

I'll Take the BCP Behind the Curtain, Monty

So the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music is offering us four options for going forward on BCP revision:

• Revise Book of Common Prayer
• Create Book(s) of Alternative Services, and leave the BCP 1979 alone
• More talking, listening, researching, and discerning
• Deepening our relationship with the 1979 BCP

They also offer a "technical fixes" option which could go with any of the other four.

If you've read many of my BCP revision posts, you can guess that I prefer the fourth option: no revision yet. The current book needs some revision, but limited, and revision only. We already, in the form of Enriching Our Worship, have the second option, and it has been a major problem, both in terms of commonality and in what those alternate rites say. New rites (e.g. the trial same-sex blessing rite) have consistently taken precisely what is problematic about EOW as a starting point, and there was a large outcry when revision was announced of people who saw the process as specifically to legitimize if not impose these deviations; I was one of them. So the first option is undesirable, and the second option, legitimizing the current mess, is undesirable.

And more talking? Well, they didn't say "dialogue", which as we all know tends to mean "We know better than you on this topic and we’re going to have a ‘dialogue’ until you see the error of your ways and agree with me at which point our dialogue will be done." But setting the terms of the talking is crucial and problematic. Already we have Matthew S. C. Olver saying "I think it is important to acknowledge at the beginning of this piece that Christians must take seriously the concerns raised by feminist theologians" and "Related to this more experiential concern is the basic Christian theological claim that God is neither a man nor a woman, neither male nor female." OK, well, I do not agree to the second, which is not to say that I disagree, but simply that the issue is debatable. In the first place, if this is going to be "basic" for a Protestant, it has to be attested directly from scripture. And while I am certainly open to be corrected about this, I am not aware of such attestation; the principle appears to arise out of neo-Platonic idealism about God. Furthermore, the problem is not as a rule language concerning the Godhead, but about the three Persons. There the whole thing starts to come apart very quickly when the words "male" and "female" are pinned down, because given current sexuality doctrine there is nothing one can say about the words as genders that affords any objective truth, and without something objective to anchor them on, treating the names as rhetorical figures devolves into meaninglessness.

The bigger issue, however, is the demand to engage feminist theology. I'm plenty happy to engage it, but when I start complaining about its category errors, left and right, things are surely headed off into Dialogue. The tendency in these "dialogues" is to exclude me because I am male, and therefore (if I dissent) a troglodyte who has to be instructed (that is, lectured and then dismissed). It's hugely problematic that the many people who accept women as priests but who have problems with radfem talk about God are largely ignored, and the attitude from the SCLM up to now has been that EOW is the starting point for everything new. EOW is also our local source for the pro omnis error, which they don't mention; but it also represents a step away from Protestant principles.

I suppose there needs to be talking all right, but it needs to be about more fundamental principles than feminism or universalism. The biggest issue is our institutional hypocrisy about theology as a whole. We have creeds, which we stand up and say "on Sundays and Major Feasts", and then our clerics deny that we believe them. We affirm the church's teaching that communion is only for the baptized, and then advertise in all too many parishes that "all are welcome to partake." We promulgate a church position on abortion that has been reaffirmed several times over now, and nobody would dare to teach it on a Sunday. On the one hand, we get subjected to controversial deviations as if there was consensus to do so; on the other, we get subjected to deviations when there is stated consensus that they are deviant and not to be done. Trying to work out a new prayer book in these circumstances is a huge problem because this sort of behavior makes it a bad-faith effort.

that's why I'm in favor of sticking with the last option. I think there is plenty to fix in the current book, but I don't see how we can go about that until, to be really blunt about it, the progressive side starts playing fair.

Designing the Beloved

Kara Slade, in The Living Church, has written a fascinating and thoughtful reflection on robotics and sexuality which does not flinch from the difficulties of the subject, and especially the hubris hidden in the topic.

Let us start with this observation: "In Levy’s presentation, the language deployed to describe the ideal robotic spouse was inadvertently telling: ' All of the following qualities and many more are likely to be achievable in software within a few decades. Your robot will be patient, kind, protective, loving, trusting, truthful, persevering, respectful, uncomplaining, complimentary, pleasant to talk to, and sharing your sense of humor.' Suffice it to say for now that this statement reveals quite a bit about the priorities of the author, and very little about the task of technologically approximating any existing human woman." Or to put in in other words: the robot is to be giving out on the one hand and undemanding on the other. So that word, "love": this describes not something to be loved, certainly not the subject of agape. It is instead something to take "love" from.

And that takes us to something that Slade does not touch upon. She does remark upon the endless optimism of AI futurists that the human mind can be simulated, but it is, after all, 2017 and not 1976, the year that Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason was published. Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many people were willing to treat interaction with the manifestly stupid ELIZA program which he had constructed as if it were interaction with a real person. The lesson I see in this is that the Turing Test (conversation with a computer being indistinguishable from that with a human) is in practice not successful, because people aren't good at it. Weizenbaum went on to attack the whole notion of external behavior as a proxy for the interior life of the mind, and this is particularly pointed in a situation where that internal life really seems, in the end, to be unwelcome.

After all, the terms of Levy's ideal are frankly servile, and it is a short distance from serving to simply being used. One senses from all the emphasis on sexual companionship that these futurists have no problem with the idea of a robotic sex toy which cannot be raped because refusal has been edited out of its humanity. It one telling footnote, Slade remarks that "While writing in this field gestures toward both male and female robotic lovers, the predominant assumption is clearly centered on the idea of a robotic woman," and I imagine that feminist analysis of this would be unsparing. She remarks on the degree to which various alienations seem to drive the quest for the robotic companion, but there is the irony: if it were possible to fully emulate the humanity of a real woman, it does not seem (in the minds of these would-be Pygmalions) desirable to do so. This she does note, but I would go further: not only would they not desire it, but I believe that they would on one level fail to see that something was missing. That is, they would see that some "undesirable" impulses were absent, but they would fail to grasp that they had obtained a less-than-human, because all of these "faults" arise out of the will.

So here we are, right back in our own Eden, but we don't have to worry about Eve taking the fruit because she lacks the independence to do so. I am thus irresistibly reminded of the creation of the dwarves by Aulë in the Quenta Silmarillion. Ilúvatar sees how the dwarf fathers were created outside of his one, true creation, and he challenges Aulë's deviation from the divine plan; but when Aulë moves to destroy them, they quail, showing that they have been given life and wills of their own. I imagine our ideal companion robots putting up no such defense, and indeed one can imagine a robot who has specifically been created to be tortured (as I believe at least one SF write must have already depicted). And thus the alienation is complete: its creators put off from real human congress, the ideal robot companion is made a perversion of humanity, specifically so that it can be used and abused without qualm. We may not be able to give it a soul, but we will surely see to it that it does not accidentally get one. So much of robot mythology fantasizes that they may exceed our humanity and displace us, but here it seems that in our relationships with them, they may exceed our humanity because we diminish theirs— and with that, our own.

On Naming the President in Prayer

Let it be said first of all that a quick glance through the BCP shows there is little expectation that the president be payed for by name. Of the seven forms for the prayers in the eucharist, only two (Rite I and Form V) even offer an option for naming him; neither does Prayer 19 ("For the President of the United States and all in Civil Authority") among the miscellany in the back. (A correspondent informs me that the Great Litany does expect the name to be used.)

And yet. Consider the following miscellaneous prayers:

• 6. For our Enemies
• 26. For those who suffer for the sake of Conscience
• 28. In Times of Conflict

And consider what we pray for concerning our president: "Grant [him] and to all in authority, wisdom and strength to know and to do thy will. Fill them with the love of truth and righteousness, and make them ever mindful of their calling to serve this people in thy fear." If we pray so for a president whose policies we support, how much more so for one whose views we deplore?

In the midst of the upcoming elevation of the despicable Donald Trump, we thus have the following missive from the rector of that bastion of liberal churchmanship, All Saints Pasadena: "I have made the change to remove the president’s name (while continuing to pray for him by title) and beginning to pray for the president-elect (though not by name)." The excuse he gives for this is that "[his] name is literally a trauma trigger to some people – particularly women and people who, because of his words and actions, he represents an active danger to health and safety." OK, well, that is nonsense. First of all, I don't think it is really true; I have too many overly dramatic (which is to say perfectly normal) elderly southern female relatives to take that seriously. Again, I say, I join with those who oppose him, most of his platform, and the culture of greed, amorality, and self-service which he represents. But just upon hearing his name? Take some Buck-u-uppo, for crying out loud. Or perhaps our clergy should follow the example of the priest who slaps his gibbering fellow passenger in Airport. Catering to such drama-mongering is just bad all around.

But in any case, this concern provides a convenient excuse for a political snub of the president-elect. All Saints has dabbled in politics quite a bit over the years, to the point of attracting some federal interest back in 2004. And I suppose, on one level, that casuistry obligates them to do so, even though they are very often wrong. But this simply comes across as petty.

The Numbers: 2015

Things have been a bit mad here, and thus the naysayers have beaten me to the punch in announcing yet another 3%+ loss in Average Sunday Attendance, so let's go to the ten year numbers! Yes, we've got'em here, at least for membership and ASA.

Things are made a bit difficult with the merger of Quincy into Chicago, but as it turns out, counting all 1139 attendees in 2005 as lost is not going to be the worst number here, not by a long shot. Ignoring them, the big losers by percentage are (as anyone can guess; put your hand down, Mr. Virtue, and give someone else a chance) Ft. Worth, San Joaquin, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh, ranging from 71.2% to 80.7% losses. The next three big losers were all in Province 9. The worst domestic diocese that didn't split was Western New York, at 41.8%; the only non-losers were Haiti, Puerto Rico, Nevada, Central Ecuador, Taiwan, and Littoral Ecuador, which makes Nevada the only positive note among domestic dioceses. The ASA percentage loss for the church as a whole, 26.1%, is close enough to the median as to not matter.

And if those numbers are bad, the absolute losses are in many respects worse. The median diocese in 2005 had an ASA of approximately 5200, and three of the five splitters were well above that, with South Carolina in the top quintile. Now one of them is gone, three of them are in the bottom quintile, and only (again) South Carolina somewhat above that, as losing over three quarters of the diocese still left a sizeable remainder. Meanwhile, the next largest loser was Virginia, at 9083 fewer people no longer attending church in the diocese; that's a third of 2005 attendance, more or less. Well, there is not a whole lot of pattern to the losing dioceses, except that if you look at it by province there's Four (the South), there's Eight (the far west), and then there's everywhere else. Province Two looks OK until you take out Haiti, which is large and atypical in almost every way; with Haiti out, provincial losses jump from 23% to 27%.

Right now I don't feel like digging though ten years of Red Books to add up the various inputs and outputs, but my sense is that the shift from when I last did that for 2007 numbers is not that huge. What I found back then was that the numbers suggested (but did not prove) that the primary source of losses was middle-aged people leaving. That is certainly what happened in five dioceses. And recall this old chart:



Extending the graph to the right isn't going to change much; the jump from holding our own to losing 2-3% a year in 2002-2003 hasn't been undone.

The Crusty Old Dean has some discussion of this, some realistic (I think his prediction of 400K ASA in a decade is pretty accurate) and some not. It's important to a lot of people to dismiss theology as a factor, but I don't see how the supposed stability of the Unitarians has much weight in this: after all, everyone has expected doctrinal spinelessness from them since, oh, 1785. Everyone knows which people, in their not-already-round-the-bend parish, are holding on for dear life, hoping that they die or move before the next rector trashes things. The universal reaction to setting the revision machinery in motion, except for the hyper-progressives, was "oh hell," because everyone can see that the point of revision is to force Enriching Our Worship on the church as a whole.

But anyway, there are other numbers this time, perhaps more depressing. We have numbers on active priests in domestic dioceses by age, which show (as a previous analysis showed) that our clerics are old: the average age over the whole church is 59, and the numbers in some dioceses are far worse. Looking at the map below, you can see that the dioceses with older priests tend to lie in the west, while the dioceses with younger priests tend to lie along the Mississippi; the exceptions tend to include large urban areas.

If equal numbers of priests were ordained at every age, the average age of priests would be about 55. This is unrealistic on the high end because (one suspects) few bishops are willing to ordain someone who can only serve a few years, and because many priests will die or retire before the canonical limit of 72. But the numbers show that in most dioceses there are few young priests. San Joaquin has no priests under 45; Delaware, with 45 active priests, is the largest of six dioceses with but a single priest in this age group. Nationally, 15% of active priests are under 45. More striking are the numbers in the 65 and up range. In thirteen dioceses at least half the priests are in this age group, the most extreme being Eastern Oregon with 71%. These dioceses tend to be smaller and more rural; they show up as an intense red in the map.

It says something that, the other categories being broken out by decade, there's no "under 35" category. And indeed, a chart showing the number by age, with each bar proportional in area to the percentage of the whole, shows how lopsided things are:

This distribution is almost consistent with taking the "equal ordinations at every age" scenario and raising the minimum age to 35, which indeed produces a mean age of 59. But the clergy compensation report adds some interesting detail, for it does break out the 35-and-under numbers, and furthermore, it only counts full-time clergy, which constitute 69% of the total. Of the part-timers, 74% are 65 or older, and they constitute 69% or those in that age group, and 23% of all active priests. This report shows full time priests under 35 at 4%, and a little math shows that if all 43 part-time under-45 priests were in the younger group, this group would constitute 4.5% of all priests.

OK, so our priests are old, and our old priests are largely part-timers. But here we have another table breaking out active priests according to employment status. Here we see wild differences between dioceses. At one extreme we have Dallas, in which 80% of priests serve a single parish full-time, and at the other we have Northern Michigan, in which 91% of its priests are non-stipendiary, and which has no parish served by its own full-time priest. Nationally 55% of active priests serve a single parish full time, another 27% serve one parish fill time, 6% serve multiple parishes, and 13% are non-stipendiary, but this is an inadequate picture of how parishes are served, because there are many parishes which are served by retirees, and many large parishes have multiple full time priests (and indeed in a few dioceses there are more full time priests serving single parishes than there are parishes). What is more surprising is that the differential between male and female priests in full time positions varies a great deal. Nationally half the women and 57% of the men are in full time positions, but there are many dioceses where the women are more likely to be full time, and there isn't a lot of pattern to this: Eau Claire has few full-time positions but 50% of its female priests are in such positions, while in New Jersey, where 60% of the priests are full time, 80% of the women in the diocese occupy such positions. (Mind you, this works out that there are only two active women in Eau Claire.)

So, does this add up to anything? On one level, it's hard to say. We don't have statistics for what the priesthood looked like in 1905 or 1925 or 1955, but it's a reasonably safe bet that it was younger (and of course all-male and mostly white), and that a far smaller proportion of it was part-time. It goes without saying that its members were more likely to hold orthodox theological views, never mind traditional views on sexuality. But in terms of numbers, there's no arguing that things were not better then; the failure of growth would not be seen until the mid 1960s. As a universal, national Anglican church, we are failing.

Prescient Screwtape

Or at least his amanuensis: Tom Nichols on how C. S. Lewis anticipated our culture of treason. And it goes beyond that. I was pleased to see that public pressure (or at least the president-elect's ability to read the public) caused congress to recant its evisceration of its ethic review processes. But consider this passage:

Angry people, confused by not enough education and too much information, or unwilling to face their own poor choices in life, or bearing vague grudges about the forces that always seem to deprive them of the right job, or mate, or status among their peers, cheer on a Snowden or a Manning as a kind of self-actualizing exercise.

They’re happy that someone’s finally sticking it to the Man, or the system, or the Coca-Cola Corporation, or whomever they resent for not giving them a round of applause every morning just for getting dressed without help.

I can’t say I’m certain why this is happening. Some of it, I think, is from years of marination in an American culture that once celebrated excellence, self-reliance, and success, and now demands more “democratic” values like “equality” (meaning mediocrity), “community” (meaning conformity), and “education” (meaning pissing away a few years studying the deep works of Jay-Z at Georgetown). Add to this a therapeutic obsession with never “demeaning” others, and you have the alchemic makings of an explosion of insecurity and anger.

And is this not how the presidential election was decided?

Marked With the Name

Give praise, you servants of the LORD;
praise the Name of the LORD.
Let the Name of the LORD be blessed,
from this time forth for evermore.
From the rising of the sun to its going down
let the Name of the LORD be praised.

Today we observe a holiday of varied names, New Years Day notwithstanding. In old prayer books it was forthrightly titled the Feast of the Circumcision, as that rite is prescribed for the eighth day of a Jewish boy's life. Nowadays, perhaps, we are shy of such a messy, fleshly observance, and we remember it chiefly as day on which Jesus was named; in the Roman Rite they observe the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But today I will start from that older name.

Now the covenant of circumcision is not the covenant made at Sinai; no, it goes all the way back to Abram, and indeed was made on the day when God named him Abraham, meaning “father of many”. Circumcision is the mark of the men of Israel: to be uncircumcised was to be cut off from God's people. And thus Jesus, like every Jewish boy, was so marked in his flesh and given his name, the name of Salvation—for that is what “Jesus” means.

Thus, through the rest of the New Testament, we hear appeals to that name: “in My name”, “for My name's sake”, “because of My name” says Jesus, and then, in the Acts, we read of the disciples healing in the name of Jesus Christ. What does it signify? It means authority, to the demons; it is a vexation, to the authorities; it yields power, in the hands of the apostles; and it is identity, to the people of the Cross. We are baptized in a holy name, the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit, the name of the Lord, the Almighty; it is this baptism which is our circumcision, which marks us as Christ's own forever. The members of the Church, the body of Christ, are known to the world as Christians; we are his, and we go into the world in his name.

This name alone are we given for salvation, and no other, as Peter preached. At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow; in the end of days, all shall know him as the only Son of God, the righteous judge of all souls. The Name of Jesus signifies what we proclaim before every baptism: “There is one Body and one Spirit, one hope in God's call to us; one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all.” The Christian faith is not a philosophy; it is not a merely advice for arranging one's life. It is reliance on the one man in whom God has been realized and through whom the divine plan is made manifest.

Moses had to ask for God's name, and that name is so hallowed that no Jew will say it, or even, outside the synagogue, say “LORD” in its place. But we have a name which, though also sacred, we may say without fear, indeed in triumph. There is no shame in the name of Jesus, though the world deride it and ridicule those who proclaim it. No, in this name there is life and light, and therefore in assurance of our salvation, let us turn to the altar and proclaim the faith of the apostles, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Words We Pray

Neil Alexander has an interesting reflection on the pending revision of the Book of Common Prayer, particularly in terms of where we stand with the language of the 1979 version. What is interesting is how much ground he ends up giving to a conservative and possibly even a little reactionary revision. He admits, for instance, that "even after 40 years of Rite Two, a substantial group in our church still prefers traditional language as embodied in Rite One," and continues, "the pastor in me would be loath to take away the possibility of traditional language from those eucharistic communities of our church who desire it."

He goes a bit astray, though, in discussing the assembly of the 1979 book, and the way in which he strays is instructive. One can read in Hatchett (between the lines a bit, I must admit), that Rite II Prayer A is far and away the most hammered-on new material, and that the collects and many of the prayers represent the oldest material. And it shows: material which came later in the process is invariably weaker and less felicitous. The modernized versions of old prayers and collects tend to be the most pleasing to the ear; the older new material tends to be the most direct and taut. So when he says that "{t}he 1979 Book of Common Prayer embodies the liturgical and sacramental thinking of the mid-1970s": that is surely incorrect. One need only look at The New Liturgy, published in 1966, to see the complete outline and even some of the language of the new rite in place; in particular nearly every proper preface listed would be familiar to a Rite II congregation, albeit in post-Jacobean language. Prayer A itself is basically the rite first published in Services for Trial Use (the "green book") back in 1970, tweaked but without substantial changes for the 1976 proposed book. The BCP we ended up with represented the tail end of postwar liturgical thought, not the radicalization of the 1970s.

What was current in 1979 was the kind of radfem thinking which drove Enriching Our Worship and which leads to Bishop Alexander's remark about "pronouns". It was then still largely an idea within academia, but theologians are within academia, and liberal theologians, even before the book became final, were repeating Mary Daly's ideas approvingly. And it's these impulses which are sprinkled throughout his essay, in coded language. In particular, there's this passage: "That said, for many, the language of Rite Two is quite dated and needs to be revised, particularly with respect to gender-inclusive language. Many of us, myself included, would hope that a revision would mine the depths of Holy Scripture for even more expansive language for God." OK, well, that's where the problem lies. There have strong objections to nearly every rite promulgated thus far in interests of supplement or revision, and they are rooted in the fact that "inclusive language" has consistently meant God-language which every prior generation would have held plainly heretical. While the language of Rite II in places has no precedent within the tradition, what that new language says is entirely within the catholic tradition. What EOW says is not within that tradition: that is, after all, why it says what it says, because a certain line of modernist thinking rejects what traditionally has been said. That is the very heart of the revision problem: it appears to be impossible to come up with a rite which satisfies the "inclusive" faction but which can still be counted orthodox by those for whom "inclusion" is not their issue, and the only way that conflict is going away, it seems, is by driving traditionalists off or waiting for them to die, rather stepping up to catholic criticism of the novel god-language.

And back to those pronouns. My issue here is that, for the sake of a conspicuously neoPlatonist theory about the sex/genderlessness of God, we increasingly cannot say the words of scripture, because they do not conform themselves to that theory. I already have a huge philosophical problem with current talk of gender and sex, because the tendency is to absolutely demand and then utterly deny the equality of the sexes in adjacent sentences; on that level I simply cannot enter into the way these things are being talked about, because I immediately find myself unable to talk at all and make any sense.. Gender/sex as it relates to God is unknowable. But that is something of a side issue, whereas for a Protestant the supreme objection is that this doesn't come from scripture. Yes, I know: there are instances where feminine similes are used for the action of God, but that is not the same thing as the core God language. Jesus calls Him "Father", and who are we to gainsay Jesus? We need to learn to live with this, and not count ourselves more enlightened than the second person of the God Himself.

Looking at how I've seen Rite II used over the years, it seems to me that the structure has stood the test of time. Nobody except maybe a few Anglo-Catholics wants to make any changes to that, and I think that the "mays" and "shoulds" could be whittled down to reflect usual practice. There is a lot of polishing that could be done, particularly in getting rid of the "well tell God what he does" construct and in (yes, you knew I'd get to this) Prayer C. I think Bishop Alexander is right in the need for more discussion of the ordinal, but not in a good way. But already we have six options for Sunday Eucharist, and I'm not seeing how we need more-- except to allow theological deviance.

Tolerating Traditionalists

From the Covenant site comes the following:

We all are thinking about the future, and the place of “traditionalists” in the Episcopal Church. While we are tolerated, it is not yet clear what is being tolerated: we as individuals or the view we represent. I am assuming that the church has made its decision for the foreseeable future. Why would the church allow a bishop or a diocese to hold a contrary view? Can it accept reasons for such a minority stance as valid and if so, why?

I submit that, in these terms, the conflict is lost. I map out, in any diocese north and east of Virginia (including my own), as a "traditionalist" simply for insisting that the words of the 1979 BCP be used without alteration. And I am fine with that, but if doing what the canons say to do is something that has to be tolerated, lawlessness is the order of the day. It is not traditionalists who should be in need of toleration, but those who wish to deviate from tradition.

American Apostasy

The following passage is commonly attributed to Adrian Rogers, one time president of the Southern Baptist Convention:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

Rogers did not originate this passage; whatever his immediate source, it first appeared in The Cross and the Flag, a virulently anti-Soviet magazine put out by Gerald L. K. Smith, a one-time Disciples of Christ minister who fell into politics, riding the coattails first of Huey Long, then of Father Coughlin, and finally, perhaps, of Strom Thurmond, who wisely refused to acknowledge him. A virulent antisemite, his other views seemed to shift depending upon whose star to whom he had hitched his own. To take this present tract, Smith wrote it in 1957; but in the mid '30s he was the heir to Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth organization, whose aim was largely antithetical to Lewis's later views. Indeed, there is a certain timeliness to the movement's theses, but the later Lewis surely could not condone its redistributionist and tax-heavy principles.

Lewis's other claims to fame were the revival of Eureka Springs and the highly regrettable "Christ of the Ozarks" which he made the centerpiece of his facilities there, but this squib on economics was picked up and passed around by other right-wing agitators, which I must presume is where Rogers found it, rather than alongside Lewis's holocaust-denying rants. Now really, even considering the sorry state of economics, a cleric cannot justify taking this kind of passed-from-hand-to-hand political propaganda and proclaiming it as the word of God.

But as I was trying to find time to finish this post, the dismissal of national charity write above was rudely upstaged by a clip of Donald Trump talking about handling (so to speak) women. Incredibly, that paragon of virtue Ralph Reed blew the matter off with this response:

I’ve listened to the tape, my view is that people of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, create jobs, and oppose the Iran nuclear deal. I think a 10-year-old tape of a private conversation with a TV talk show host ranks pretty low on their hierarchy of concerns.

Meanwhile, the head of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, came through with this principled statement:

My personal support for Donald Trump has never been based upon shared values, it is based upon shared concerns about issues such as: justices on the Supreme Court that ignore the constitution, America’s continued vulnerability to Islamic terrorists and the systematic attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen in the last 7 1/2 years.

And here we are. In the words of Brent Orrell: "It represents the complete subordination of ends to means; the ugly reality is that this leadership will support anyone who claims to support their issues (mainly abortion and marriage) no matter how laughable those claims of support are and how insupportable the behavior and character of the candidate who makes them." Anyone who has seen Trump in action over the years knows that, when it comes to sexual morality, he has none whatsoever. He is nothing but appetite mixed with egomania and a taste for cruelty, governed by no other principle. Yet these "leaders" are willing to sail with him.

And yet nearly half the country is willing to vote for this man, who is so devoid of any Christian virtue that the only sins he cannot be seen to embody are those for which he has not developed a taste. The Seven Deadlies? He all but exemplifies the lot. Nothing he says or does seems to perturb them, and my impression is that they share his collapse into pre-nursery-school amoral impulsiveness. It hardly matters if these people go to church (and My impression is also that they don't) because it doesn't seem to register on them at all. Christianity is nothing more than not-Islam (and probably not-Judaism), a faint cultural marker that involves no religion.

Not that I am going leave the left out of this. Clinton, however duplicitous and evil you think she is personally, represents a program of civil charity which, if ill-advised, poorly executed, and intrusive, at least has some consonance with the teachings of Jesus. But as I've said before, the church's participation in this seems dictated by secular, essentially atheistic culture which is always in peril of stepping away from the gospel. An Atlantic article on the first presidential debate referred to it as "post-Christian" and noted that the faithfully Methodist Clinton avoided, as usual, the language of faith, which those of us in the same social class knows is the way it is done now. And it isn't as though Clinton's "deplorables" don't have a legitimate grievance with the power structures taking advantage of them, and it isn't as though progressive charity towards these people is influenced by their repugnant racism, sexism, and general classlessness. Trump is not their champion no matter how he pretends so, which leaves them with pretty much nobody. And there is no reason not to think that the upper middle class's drift into irreligion is going to be halted, and that even such charity as is thought of now will also fade.

This, then, is the American apostasy; and it presents a major challenge to evangelism. Religion, left or right, is increasingly just someone telling you not do do what you want, and nothing more. Even moral therapeutic deism, the default faith of Americans only a decade ago, is quickly losing ground to utter lack of relationship to God, so that even strident atheists, even agnostics may be held more religious. How do you articulate the divine message in the face of this? "Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again" is a proclamation which simply goes in one ear and out the other.

Life After Modern Death

After my recent sermon on faith it is only proper to turn to the matter of George Clifford's two part "things no modern man can believe" attack upon supposedly traditional ideas of life after death. Stewart Clem's response over at the Covenant website covers most of the bases, but I have a few points of my own to add.

Clem's first two points I would like to take up in a bit more depth. He quotes this passage from Clifford:

[H]istoric Christian understandings of what happens when a person dies, views that usually presume an empty tomb and Jesus’ bodily resurrection, are increasingly anachronistic in view of advances in astronomy, particle physics, and biology.

and a little further on, Clifford supplies a specific finding:

Astronomers, after losing their initial clashes with Christianity, have triumphed over Christian efforts to cling to literal interpretations of the Bible’s three-tiered cosmology (heaven, earth, and hell). Heaven and hell, if they exist, are almost assuredly not actual physical places.

OK, let's start with some corrections. The whole three universe story thing is a pretty modern interpretation: the earliest usage I could quickly find was by Minot Judson Savage, a Unitarian active in the later 1800s. I'm not going to get into the argument as to whether this is the picture of Genesis, but it is manifestly not the medieval Ptolemaic model, Dante notwithstanding; nor, when pressed, would they have agreed that heaven and hell were physical in the modern sense. Likewise, the more or less singular incident of Galileo has been mythologized into a permanent church versus science conflict which is also a product of 19th century rationalism. Fundamentalism, for all its flaws, is a reaction to this secular encroachment into the religious topics, not an ancient mode of thought. And this isn't just Clifford's fault. Neil deGrasse Tyson stated in the new Cosmos that Michael Faraday was raised in a "fundamentalist" faith, but the truth is that The Fundamentals would not be published until half a century after his death. Faraday and F. C. Baur, the father of the "Tübingen School", are almost exact contemporaries, but higher criticism really didn't hit English religion until a few years before Faraday's death.

The secularist narrative of its triumph over the Dark Ages (meaning not the period between the fall of Rome and high Middle Ages, but rather anything before the self-styled Enlightenment) is heavily invested in these anachronisms, but what ought to be increasingly anachronistic is this recourse to these highly unhistorical claims about how the ancients and medievals thought about natural science, the spiritual, and the nature of miracles. And it isn't as though nobody ever thought about these questions. Clifford says at one point:

First, what is the nexus between the spiritual and the physical? That is, how does the immaterial spiritual interface with the material, physical world? No explanation of that interface has gained widespread traction among scientists and theologians. In the absence of such an interface, how can humans, whose senses and cognitive processes are all physical, think, speak, or otherwise describe, much less interact with, the spiritual?

Now, surely any sophomore philosophy student can pick this apart. It's ridiculous to insist on a phenomenology in which the only things that happen are those for which there is some prior explanation, whether or not it is believed. Indeed, Christianity has, as rule, denied that such an "interface" is knowable, never mind whether "interface" is even a good word for what happens. Even among unbelieving science fiction authors and computer scientists, the notion that human "cognitive processes" are "physical" loses traction, for the notions that those cognitive processes could be represented in computational hardware, or that neurons could be fed stimuli quite unlike those of our six senses, are old and unsurprising. Consciousness is potentially metaphysical even in its physicality; nobody knows for sure, and beyond the highly questionable Turing test, nobody has any idea how to be sure. In the presence of the unfathomable and investigation-defying supernatural, it is not at all hard to do without the "ghost in the machine" reductionist caricature and live with a "soul" whose nature is likewise unknowable.

And it isn't as though people haven't ever talked about these problems. The whole thing seems to be founded in ignoring centuries of theologians and philosophers, preferring instead to take materialist positions that have been answered over and over. Or to put it in other words, what we're seeing here is a severe loss of philosophical nerve. All too many, now, have begged the question by declaring God dead, but instead of pushing back, theologians have, more or less futilely, sought the approval of the secular academy by conceding the battlefield. To take for granted what modern man cannot believe is to take irreligion as an axiom, but as there are modern men who do not believe so, the "axiom" is not so axiomatic, and men who know religion should be questioning it, not taking it without question.

What we're seeing here, then, is an emotional rather than a genuinely intellectual response. So what is going on here? That shall have to wait for the next post.

Ad Populum in a Pinch

I'm always interested in what Leander Harding has to say, and his observation about dealing with the ad orientum/ad populum issue in a turn-of-the-20th-century neogothic church was no exception. What struck me the most were these comments:

The nave is long, with a deep choir and a raised, high altar of marble against the (liturgical) east wall[....] Originally there was a rood screen in front of the choir, and the communion rail was at the foot of the altar steps.

The presentation of the Cross as tabernacle and temple in the Book of Hebrews provided a theological rationale for this architecture. Because of Christ’s sacrifice we may go boldly into the holy of holies, to the throne of grace, there to receive the body and blood of the Lord and be made one with him. The building’s original architecture allowed this dramatic movement to be enacted in the liturgy, by passing through the Cross into the inner sanctum for the administration of communion.

Around here, the typical outer suburban/town church is in a Victorian (or occasionally Federalist) building that is almost without exception a much shorter high-ceiling box, with a tiny chancel pulled out of the east end. There is typically very little room to pull the altar forward, but that doesn't mean people don't try, no matter how infelicitous the result. My current parish, in being expanded, went from this sort of compressed space to a truncated cross according to the current fashion, in which the sanctuary is a squarish platform for the acting out of the rite, with the altar at its center. Twenty years into using this arrangement, and problems which became evident early on are still manifest. The arrangement has never accommodated the lectern/pulpit/ambo comfortably, so that in the end it has migrated inside the rail and is moved out of the way before the offertory. We have been reduced to dependence on amplification, which ought not to be necessary, but the ambo cannot be placed in an acoustically satisfactory location.

There is,however, a deeper problem, a far more subtle lack which has only become apparent in watching a series of rectors cope with the space: it doesn't give any support to the liturgy. I have written before about how the 1979 liturgical rhythm moves so well with the tripartite neo-gothic space, and even in these small semi-rural parishes it works the same way. And this helps carry a priest through the rite, as long as they do not actively sabotage its solemnity. In our space, though, everything has to be carried by whoever is speaking or acting at the moment, because that person is on stage. The one thing that works well in spite of this is hymn singing, because there's nobody on then. And the thing is that I think at least communion could be improved by pushing the altar a foot closer to the retable and celebrating ad orientum, because then the celebrant wouldn't have to be on stage.

My high school chapel suffers the problems Harding outlined with his two altars, in spades. To cut them some slack, they were and are severely constrained by the need to fit more kids than the space was designed for into its utterly inflexible walls, but still, much of the mystery has been lost in its transformation into a liturgical stage. These little churches are scarcely less restrictive, as crowded as they inevitably are before the altar.

I have finally found a good picture of the interior of St. Clement's, Alexandria, so that you can see the kind of space that versus pop thinking was really aiming for. Here we see a very short and wide space, in which the only action occurring at the altar is communion itself (the pulpit and lectern are on the wall behind, as you can see). There is no audience, or rather, the celebrant is not performing to anyone there present; indeed, celebration is not versus populum at all, but rather in medio populi, which is a wholly better (and perhaps also more holy) symbol. But notice: the liturgical direction is turned back to the outside, toward the transcendent God.

It would be possible to transform a similarly shaped space into a similar plan, but it's a lot of work, and it needs room, which is (again) precisely what these little buildings do not have. And simply pushing the altar forward a couple of feet and putting the priest on the other side is not going to convert these Victorian spaces into the supposed patristic model; what you get instead is the turn-of-the-millennium auditorium church, writ small. I've given my reasons for preferring ad orientum in general, the chief of which is that I think in this era worship does need to be directed outward at a transcendent God; but I don't think you get the symbol of immanence by moving the altar two feet forward and conducting the rite from the other side.

Waiting in Faith

preached 7 August 2016, after weeks of doing Track 1 with its long run of OT prophet readings

This week we are taking a break from the denunciations of the prophets, but don't you worry: there will be more next week. But today, we take up the subject of faith.

So then: what is faith? Shortly we will all stand and say together the Creed, which in ancient times was called the “Symbol of Faith”, “symbol” in this case signifying a token: standing, in this case, for The Faith. And note carefully the words: we do not believe only of God, but in God. Yes, we do say that we believe God created the world, and that Jesus is His Son incarnate, and that he died and was resurrected. We believe that God is three in one, and that there is one church, and that Christ will sit in judgement in the last days. And in the large, we believe that Scripture tells us the story of salvation, which story we believe, and we believe that our priests and other ministers manifest God through word and sacrament. All these ideas and propositions we are called to believe, and I hope we do believe them; but believing these notions is not all there is to faith.

No, the Creed says that we believe in God, that He is not just something we know various things about (the chief being, of course, that He exists), but someone in whom we place our trust and reliance. Last week we heard Jesus tell a parable of a man of wealth, who put his faith in the storehouses of his ample goods. He trusted in what was perishable, and it failed him, but we who trust in God place our reliance upon what is imperishable: this we do believe.

But we believe; we do not see. The LORD first spoke to Abram in chapter 12 of Genesis, saying, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation.” Abram obeyed, and at the end of the next chapter the promise is repeated; and then two chapters on, we hear the promise repeated this morning, and by this time Abram is getting a bit concerned about this descendants thing, seeing as how he has none of yet. Another chapter passes, and Sarai, losing patience, gives her maid Hagar over to her husband so that he has at least some son. Two more chapters pass, and while the God of Hosts establishes his covenant with Abraham and visits him in the form of three men, still there is no heir. Sodom and Gomorrah are razed, Sarah has a run-in with Abimelech, and it is not until we get to Chapter 21 that Sarah finally is pregnant with Isaac—and in the very next chapter, God demands this only son as a sacrifice. Long the promise made to Abram went unfulfilled, and long was he tested, but he believed it, and scripture tells us, it was reckoned as righteousness.

And as we are told in the Letter to the Hebrews, Abraham “died in faith, not having received what was promised.” And likewise, we who are faithful await what is unseen: the final triumph of the kingdom of God. Almost two thousand years have passed since the day of glorious resurrection, and yet we wait. But in that waiting, we show our faith.

So how do we wait? First, we come together in worship, assembling as a people who watch and wait together, their whole unity made from that faith. Second, we read and repeat the ancient promises as they are told in scripture. Week after week we hear the story of salvation—not myths and fictions, but the account of the acts of God across time. Thus the gospel, the good news, is spoken in story, the story of Jesus' teaching and life and death and resurrection. Third, we respond in reaffirmation of our commitment to this faithfulness: singing, praying, hearing, and stating again the principal points of our belief. Fourth, we enter into communion through the Eucharist, which we carry out in faithfulness to Christ's command. And fifth, we go out into the world as witnesses to this faith, that others might become faithful, and that our own faithfulness be shown in acts of love.

So last week, this week, next week, the week after that, the year after that, over and over, we come together in faith. And if our faithfulness is not dulled, well, others are claimed by despair, by loss of hope, by sins of all kinds—pride, greed, lust, and the rest—sins which prey upon us as well. But for us, as for Abraham, our faith may be counted as righteousness. So be assured, that which we await will one day arrive. None but the Father knows whether this world will end tomorrow, or in our lifetime, but if we remain faithful, then we shall be ready for the glorious fulfillment of the promise of salvation given in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Saintly Slash

So this showed up in my Facebook feed today: Martha and Mary of Bethany: Sisters or lesbian couple?

Seriously??? I would like to hope this is just one of those random things that the internet spews forth under the principle of "bullhorns for everyone", but then, there's the Ruth/Naomi and David/Jonathan crowd, both of which made appearances in the same-sex blessing rite's lessons. For those of you who haven't run across it, there's this genre of "slash fiction", which originated in the 1960s-'70s SF fandom with heterosexual women writing stories of homosexual relationships between Kirk and Spock of Star Trek fame. This was abbreviated to "Kirk/Spock" and branched out to include other fictional characters paired in highly emotionalized relationships. I suppose it's a bit unfair of me to compare these extra-biblical matchups to fan fiction, but really, it's not that hard to figure out what's up with Ruth and Naomi (loyalty) or David and Jonathan (friendship/philia). Mary and Martha are more of a Bert and Ernie arrangement, but again, at least as they function in the gospel stories, it's right out there in the open.

But then queer studies or whatever got their, um, well, hands on these, and every two characters of the same sex have to be "shipped" (as they say) in what, to the, um, uninitiated, come across as prurient speculation. Or perhaps the point is to épater les orthodoxes. But it's the twenty-first century, and it is impossible to say anything genuinely shocking anymore on the internet. Thus, I give this my measuredly Anglican assessment:

Give unto me a break.

Another Seminary Closes

The announcement has come today that Episcopal Divinity School will be shutting down at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. The temptation for grave-dancing at the demise of the chief radical liberal seminary is strong, but instead, in this response from Rod Dreher one may read various entries from the course catalogue and marvel. They do have courses more obviously relevant to the parish priest, but you may peruse the about-to-be-irrelevant last year's catalogue yourself and see that the same kind of contrived liberal speak pervades the whole thing. It is quite a distance to the usual cool academic and administrative prose of Trinity School for Ministry's catalogue, and perhaps an infinite distance from the latter's Statement of Faith, which may be found on page six if one needs to be convinced of their dogged orthodoxy. I cannot imagine such a document having a place at EDS; instead we have this required course:

“Foundations” is Episcopal Divinity School’s way of introducing incoming master’s program students to the understandings and commitments underlying the school’s purpose statement “to form leaders of hope, courage, and vision” who “serve and advance God’s mission of justice, compassion, and reconciliation.” Students will consider vocation both as the call to personal transformation and to act as God’s agents of change and liberation in the world. Analysis will consider personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural power dynamics and will focus on race and racism as it informs our understanding of other forms of oppression. Through experiential learning, class presentations, and assignments, students will reflect on how their own social location shapes their actions and thinking while developing tools for theological reflection, social analysis, and engagement in the struggle for the renewal of the church and the world.

Does that mean something? I hardly know, but I do not see in it any much religion. It could just as well be required at Oberlin for all incoming freshpeople, er, first year students.

Likewise, in the comments to the ENS article we have this brave look to the future:

[The decision] is more than economic; the culture has changed and so has our Church. It is time for transforming our understanding of theological education to meet the challenges of today. EDS and its former institutions have always been leaders for social justice and the ethical issues we face in our society. The School must now transition into an innovative and imaginative place that affirms religious pluralism and serves the church and society with love and spiritual vitality for all people. The shape of our institutional future is filled with hope for new life.

Again I ask: does this mean anything? I realize that nobody has any idea what to do with the failing institution's assets, but still, does worshipping God have anything to do with it? What about preaching salvation? Can we at least say "Christ has Died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!"?

But Who Listens?

Tony Clavier commended the Word to the Church promulgated by the House of Bishops from their March meeting, but remarks on the likely futility of such pronouncements:

We tend to function as if we still had a ready hearing. But who listens? As we have shrunk, we have become the more partisan. The conservative party at prayer has become the progressive movement in church. Our General Convention adopts a huge number of resolutions on political and social matters unheard or read by the powers that be. Our largely right of center laity either bristles at or ignores these resolutions. Thus when our General Convention or in this case our House of Bishops has a non-partisan, objective “word” for our church and hopefully through Episcopalians to the nation, who listens, who hears? In large part we have squandered the utility of our national pulpit because we haven’t the discipline to give objective moral guidance to the church and nation, or we simply assume that our political opinions are gospel.

And this is but the tip of the iceberg of our irrelevance. As a few of you may be aware, there's this fellow named Donald Trump who will almost certainly become the Republican presidential candidate. I would describe him as a buffoon, a political incompetent, and a businessman whose wealth is made possible by the fact of starting out with so much, ameliorating his many failures and manifest mismanagement. He has no positive qualifications to speak of, and many negatives. And yet, he has consistently prevailed in the Republican primaries, to the dismay of a wide swath of commentators and analysts. Why are people voting for him?

Well, there is yet one more thing I see about him: he is a man who does not so much lie as he cares neither one way nor the other about truth. Over at the Atlantic they have begun to consider whether Trump's message is anything more than an outpouring of emotion signals to a people for whom rational consideration of issues is foreign. And in that is enmeshed Trump's blatant disregard for any sort of social norm. I shall reduce it to one single aspect of his business dealings: the art of the Trump deal, it appears, is to simply to refuse to pay up, and then through threat of legal action, to force his creditors to take cents on the dollar. It would have been a terrible temptation, preaching on last Sunday's lesson from First Kings, to begin by saying,

The widow Vera Coking had a house in Atlantic City, beside the property of Donald Trump. And Trump said to her, "Give me your house, so that I may have it for a parking garage, because it is near the hotel I am building; I will give you its value in money." But she said to Trump, "The LORD forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance."

And, well, at least Trump was not successful in getting her land. But in gauging his appeal, I have to consider that some large portion of his base shares his amorality. As a claimant to moral authority, we have no voice which they will heed. Indeed, we are held in contempt for stepping across the visceral taboos which are all that are left of their morality. Can we even preach salvation to them? Well, we are not interested, and the social justice we do preach has no traction, for they reject the bonds of community upon which such justice must depend.

But if even if we remember the command to convert the world, will it hear the call? That, increasingly, is the question we must confront. We can no longer be a church for seekers (and at this lesser task we fail, because we have so much trouble repeating the most basic words of our faith), because increasingly the people about us have either despaired or lack (they think) for nothing, and so they do not seek. This is our challenge.

Jesus' Marriage Annulled

Ariel Sabar has an article in the just-published Atlantic detailing his investigations into the provenance of the Jesus's Wife Fragment. His research points to one Walter Fritz, one-time business partner to Hans-Ulrich Laukamp (the supposed owner of the fragment) but more intriguingly, also former masters student at the Berlin Free University, studying Egyptology before abruptly disappearing from the program. Karen King (the Harvard scholar behind the revelations) responded with the admission that the investigation "tips the balance towards forgery."

So now that the affair is all but over, let us review the matter. Still the most telling comment on the whole affair was made at the beginning by Jim Davila: "[T]his fragment is exactly, exactly, what the Zeitgeist of 2012 would want us to find in an ancient gospel. To my mind that weighs heavily against its authenticity. [....] My working hypothesis at the moment is that someone who knew what they were doing went to a lot of effort using a piece of ancient papyrus to create a remarkable forgery." And he is quite justified in stating, in his response to the new story, "I called it correctly as soon as the existence of the papyrus was announced and I maintained that position throughout all the twists and turns of the story over the last three and a half years." With less knowledge of the field, I personally said that "[i]f I were a betting man, I could put my money on this coming to nothing."

So, here's the score: on the one side we have the mainstream media, who seem to largely be staffed by people who are ignorant about this stuff, don't want to learn, and have an antipathy toward anything orthodox. This particularly is manifested in their views towards sexuality, which tend to run towards "even if it does frighten the horses; especially if it does." Gnosticism, as they see it, is this Crowleian-Gardnerian-Learian thelemo-wicco-countercultural palimpsest, scraped clean of the original hatred of the material body in preparation for forgery of modern sexual (im)mores as ancient. Surely, if they had spent much time asking the many people who are familiar with the material and who don't participate in the academic Gnostic Sales Company, they would have found out that (a) from the beginning these others were extremely cautious if not outright doubting of this text, that (b) if it had been genuine, it almost certainly wouldn't have intended to say that Jesus had an actual in-the-flesh wife, and most of all (c) that it didn't matter to orthodox Christianity anyway. Sure, simple sensationalism goes far in explaining their credulity, but it's hard to imagine that, for example, the revelation of a ca-AD 90 text of John would get the same hype. Well, except maybe on Fox News.

But anyway, on the other side we have Dr. King, and with her, Harvard. Given the immediate and strong negative reaction from the field, there is no question but that she must be faulted for her credulity. And I'm afraid I have to say that I have to think that this was predicated on her membership in the Gnostic Sales Company. She was a Jesus Seminar member, which I consider a public relations effort for pushing the merits of the Gnostic material in understanding apostolic Christianity, and she has published other books pushing the Gospel of Thomas forward. And while I suppose there's a degree to which nobody can be faulted for putting their own ideas to the fore, Harvard certainly should have known better.

Perhaps the best thing about the affair, besides the vindication of the doubters, is that the religion writers who abetted the fraud are having their faces rubbed in the matter. Laurie Goldstein at the NYT, the chief cheerleader, was made to back down back when the parallel Qau codex forgery was uncovered; now the others are being presented with the same fate, not to mention being roundly scooped by a competitor precisely because they didn't bother to do some pretty basic homework. I can only hope that in the future the next big "discovery" will be treated more circumspectly.

Shoot, If You Must, This Old Gray Head

Trigger warning: bad poetic allusions

Well, Dean Hall is gone from the national cathedral, and while he may not be moldering in the grave or anyplace else for that matter, some small bit of his soul is marching on in the announcement that the two representations of the confederate battle flag are to be removed from the Lee-Jackson windows and replaced with clear glass. It's oh so tempting to suggest that they should be replaced with white glass, but at least they aren't going to efface the whole thing, and for whatever reason they're leaving in the two representations of the confederate national flag. And, well, perhaps the Corps of Engineers flag should removed for offending the sensibilities of environmentalists everywhere.

OK, OK: sorry for all the cheap shots. But there's a certain irony in the whole project in that the whole controversy is over a very small fragment of a fabric deeply woven with a symbolism towards which the committed leftist progressive must have an uneasy relationship. Jesus to the north, sitting in royal judgement over the world; Jesus to the south, sitting in triumph; Jesus to the east for a majestic two-fer: it's all so royal. But at the same time, the towering presence on Mount St. Alban, the highest hill around, symbolizes the influence the cathedral establishment feels it deserves. In the '50s, it was still plausible; when the cathedral was finally consecrated in 1990, it perhaps was still plausible. But by then, already, the fragmentation of American society into warring political tribes had become a feature of public life, and the church, any church, could no longer present itself as the moral voice of the nation.

And by then there were no longer a series of signs along US 40, one each mile, telling the traveller the distance to the Barbara Fritchie House in Frederick. Whittier's poem, it is widely agreed, is something of a political pious fiction, assembled from a mixture of tales which more likely than not had their origin in the defiance of another woman, and which probably didn't involve Jackson. I have never visited the attraction, though I understand it is still in business. It was so blatantly a tourist trap as to be avoided by my parents. In the end a more scenery-conscious age swept the signs away, and a more cynical age swept away such pure sentimentality as Whittier wrote. There is something if the same naive secular hagiography in the window, which forgives the two of being on the wrong side of the conflict in favor of recalling their piety (which was quite real).

Such noble sentiments were once not ridiculed. As the First Things article from last year recounts, Dean "I marched with MLK even though my granddaddy was that great segregationist Woodrow Wilson" Sayre, under whose helm the window was commissioned and installed, wrote that "Cathedrals do not belong to a single generation. They are churches of history. They gather up the faith of a whole people and proclaim the goodly Providence which has welded that people together as they have hoped and suffered and believed across the centuries." Washington National Cathedral certainly was built under that vision, in the haphazard course of such projects; interrupted over and over, steered by benefactors and the whims of current taste, it is perhaps a miracle that it holds together as well as it does, and surely that can be ascribed to the long presence of Philip Frohman as architect. In it are recorded the concerns of a century of American life, through two world wars and into outer space. Perhaps one of my favorite memorials is the spot in a transept where it is carved that then Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher laid his hand in blessing; another remembers that Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last sermon in its pulpit.

And now, apparently, two pieces of clear glass, each about the size of my hand, are going to testify through the ages to the contrived twitchiness of early 21st century progressives. I suppose I should be grateful that Dean Hall's original notion was not carried through; and yet the window, in the hands of the cathedral chapter, has been turned from its original purpose of reconciliation into a permanent sign of division. The day may yet come when the battle flag is just history, and perhaps then some crate in the cathedral archives may be opened, and two old pieces of red, white, and blue glass may be returned to their former places. But I do not hold out hope that I will live to see the day.

Another Year in the Sausage Factory

So once again I was a delegate to diocesan convention, this time as an alternate. This year worship tended towards high-and-wide, pretty much straight out of the BCP except for the one spot anyone can guess (it was during Eastertide, so the other spot didn't come up). Musically it was all organ but there were a couple of quite unfamiliar numbers, particularly the opening hymn. If one is going to set Hyfridol, which is probably in the top ten in Episcopal hymnody however one slices it, it behooves one to make a text which is rigorously metrical. And for that matter, please come up with one's own tune, rather than reusing Sine Nomine (another case later on). At least the service music was almost all familiar.

A chart of parochial report data, if it be for 2015, does in fact report positive numbers: ASA of 10,273 compared with 10,256 in 2014. It's less than 0.2% gain, but any gain at all is an achievement after a solid decade of losses. This was against our new assistant bishop Chilton Knudsen's declaration that "ASA is passe." Is that so? The ongoing attempt to pretend that we don't have to take our losses seriously is a painfully destructive denial of reality, particularly considering the lack of interest in why people are leaving on the one had, and the self-congratulatory undertone of how it's the result of purification.

This was reinforced by our speaker, the Very Rev. Mike Kinman, dean of the cathedral in St. Louis, who also preached the eucharist. Between the two addresses, we got a Change sermon and a Social Action sermon. Anyone who has read this blog much knows how I abhor the former, and while there is a place for the latter, we keep coming back to the problem that baptizing people in the Triune name and bringing them into the church just never seems to be a priority, a problem reinforced when Bp. Knudsen blessed in the Modal name. Can't we get over that?

And so, on to the resolutions. I ended up sitting with a group from two churches at the far western end of the state, where even the city parishes are small and parish survival is a big issue. This came up twice in the resolutions, once in the obligatory compensation resolution and the other in a canonical revision which, among other changes, created a formal process for closing a parish from the outside. This, apparently was prompted by a lawsuit, but it was opposed by our table, who were surely concerned that central Maryland standards of viability might not reflect their situation. Another necessary resolution dealt with an amendment to the cathedral by-laws, which apparently we have to be involved in; it went through without comment.

Another inevitability was a alcohol policy resolution, which passed without difficulty. We also got a "let's shame everyone how hasn't gotten their anti-racism training" attempt which was not surprisingly muted to read "don't forget to get your anti-racism training."

The bishop of Puerto Rico was present for the occasion of setting up a companion diocese relationship. I have no idea what these do for anyone but there it is.

A particularly peculiar resolution was one to recommend putting Origen on the calendar. This was obviously way out of the competence of nearly everyone in the room; I could barely handle the materials myself. It's hard to say why this was brought forward, though it's possible his ideas about universal salvation might have prompted this, universalism being very popular now. At any rate it was very difficult for anyone to mount a contrary response, and only one person made a pretty limited attempt.

The big event was the last resolution, which was dealt with parliamentary procedure right out of Lewis Carroll. This resolution proposed that the diocese "give an amount equivalent to at least ten percent of the assets of its unrestricted investment funds to the diocesan chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians (UBE) as an initial act of reparation." We used the same procedure as last year of small table discussion and sending cards back to the resolution writers; for this resolution, however, each table got a representative (I presume from the commission that wrote this) as a facilitator. Mind you, I was sitting next to a retired state trooper from the extremely white and poor west end of the state. The word "privilege" was of course brought out.

The subsequent and irregular handling of the resolution demonstrated how problematic the whole thing was. The resolution specifically set no limits on how the UBE was to use the money, and this is probably what brought on the rewrite to dump the matter on diocesan council for further discussion. This was announced first, then voted; then we were to discuss the matter. Given the constraints this discussion was essentially impossible and therefore next-to-nonexistent, especially since it was the only "business" keeping us from closing up shop. In any case only two people spoke, the first of which pointed out that the original resolution was out of order from the beginning because it lacked certain requisites of a spending resolution. Oh the time this could have saved....

The other speaker foolishly pointed at the elephant in the room. I personally could not see this as anything as a symbolic but ineffective act, and I said so in table discussion. I was not so foolish as to point out the bigger problem: that we are so very deeply out of touch with the lower classes. One clause of the original resolution "encourage[d] all congregations to examine how their endowed wealth is tied to the institution of slavery and consider returning a portion of that wealth as part of this initiative." OK, so the patriarch of my branch of the Wingates is supposed to have emigrated to North Carolina back in the the 1740s, and if you want some slave-generated wealth, consider that "Old Brick" in Columbia had space in the balcony for said slaves. All these years later, though, my father's mother family were workers exploited in the same cloth mills managed by my great-grandfather Wingate; I remember my grandmother's pride in managing to escape the factory floor for the offices. In any event, my parish was started in the 1880s. And my mother was from a broken farm family in Ohio; her grandfather was a Dutch immigrant.

Really, we could liquidate every asset of the diocese and not make a dent in the poverty and suffering of blacks in Maryland, for we have neither the wealth nor the influence. And we talk about the problem as outsiders, all around, when we talk at all. Thus, one person stood up to the microphone and spoke of our lack of interest in poor whites, and how his parish was much more recently founded, and finished by stating that he was not racist. The whole performance was met with embarrassed silence, and that was the end of the discussion.

Christos Voskrese