Things left undone

Legislative Day #8 Tuesday 06. 20. 06

As thrilled as I was two nights ago with the election of the first woman as Primate in the Anglican Communion, I find myself deeply, deeply sad tonight.

Most of our day was taken up with the Windsor Report – to the detriment of the rest of the business of the church.

Oh, we did defeat – soundly – Resolution A161 (the moratoria), but it’s not over, friends. The fat lady has not yet sung, and she has been warming up all day in a back room at Lambeth Palace.

We understand that we have yet ANOTHER special order of business scheduled for the morning – a joint session with the House of Bishops.

Apparently, one of the members of the House of Deputies has been on the phone with Lambeth Palace all day, and we’ve been told that our resolutions are . . . what’s the word that’s being used ? . . . . I’m half brain dead from a combination of lack of sleep and the deadening dullness of the legislative process, but I think the words used were “insufficient” and “problematic.”

Well. There it is, then.

Canterbury has spoken. And we, in the colonies, are apparently listening.

I thought we did a brilliant job today. We expressed our regret in A160 and apologized for upsetting the communion. We soundly rejected A161, largely on the canonical questions I raised about discrimination.

In truth, however, the conservative/evangelical/neo-puritan Radical Right Wing of the church helped us to soundly defeat it. They hated that resolution almost as much as we did, but for very, very different reasons. Even so, I did the math. Even without the conservatives, we still would have carried the vote. Oh, it would have been a small margin, but we would have won it.

However, we wrote a blank check in Resolution A166 – the Anglican Covenant Development Process. We have no active participatory role in the development of this Covenant.

Take a minute to get your head wrapped around that one. I don’t think even the Radical Right has taken in the full implication of that one yet.

Okay, ready? I’m going to repeat it. Here it is again: We have no active participatory role in the development of the proposed Anglican Covenant.

We are “supporting the process,” and asking the Executive Committee and our members of the Anglican Consultative Council – who, you will remember, were DISINVITED while we continue to fully fund our membership – to “follow” the process of covenant development and report it to the 76th General Convention.

Nothing else. Our role is essentially passive. We granted ourselves no active participatory role in the development process.

So, here’s my question: How can there be an authentic covenant if there is not active participation of all of its constituent members in its development?

Ahem . . . . Can you say, ‘magisterium’?

It is becoming reality – The Episcopal Church is becoming more and more dominated by the same ‘foreign rule’ that provided the impulse for the first Reformation. Except, of course, that the purple sacristy slipper is on the other foot, as it were. Now it is England that is the “foreign rule” to America, instead of the Britons objecting to Roman rule.

As bad as that is, what makes me sad – to my very core – are the pages and pages of resolutions which will not be addressed tomorrow, our last legislative day. I look at my big, thick General Convention binder and it makes me weep.

Everyone talks about mission, and evangelism, and justice and our youth, and how very important that work is – and, it is. Most of it will go unattended because we have been completely absorbed ourselves in The Windsor Report. Ninety-five percent of the work that was done in the last three years and reported or acted on by this convention will not be addressed by the national church because we’ve indulged the platform developed by Lambeth Palace.

Here’s what I think. I think we should just ring up Lambeth first thing in the morning and ask them to send us the agenda for the day’s work.

Good morning, good sirs. Tell us, please, what would the Archbishop like us to do today? And, please do tell us what language he’d prefer. We speak only lowly American here, and you Britons speak the Queen’s English, which sounds ever so much more impressive and authoritative. This is, no doubt, why we buckle under so easily. (It’s a hackneyed saying that was never truer – England and America are two countries separated by a common language.)

I suspect there will be an end run by the House of Bishops tomorrow to answer the demands for a moratorium on the election of LGBT bishops and the authorization of rites of blessings for same sex partners. I don’t know if the Senior House (the House of Deputies) has the good will to entertain the heavy hand of authority from the councils of power in our church. I think we’re already really, really pissed off.

I only know that whatever more time we spend on the demands from hallowed halls of Lambeth Palace, the less time we’ll be able to spend on the demands from the people who live on the streets of America.

The more time we spend ‘submitting’ to the so-called ‘requests’ and ‘invitations’ of The Windsor Report, the less time we will spend tending to the cries of the poor.

If I had my way, we’d close this last session of General Convention with a Service of Repentance and confess our most grievous sin of creating and worshipping false idol of unity, communion, and conformity.

For all that we will leave undone, Lord, have mercy.

Elizabeth+ 06.20.06