Communion and Holiness: not peace but a sword
by Ephraim Radner (Jan 28, 2005)
Diocese of Florida Convocation, January 28, 2005
A communion-dividing issue
I come as an "insider" here. Not an insider to the actual life of the Diocese of Florida, but an insider to the same struggles of our church, within diocese and congregation; an insider to the same dilemmas, constant uncertainty, desire for resolution, fear of failure, hope for renewal. It's what I go through too, daily, like you. The privilege is that I am not alone, but share it with you.
I'm not wholly certain why I was invited to be here. I am known for having argued for and written extensively (and too densely!) about the Christian calling of "staying put" in the church in which we've been placed, even in its lostness and error, for the sake of some transforming purpose. Was that perhaps I was asked here? To talk about this?
On the other hand, I know that my views about such things have been contested. My close friend, the theologian Russell Reno, has recently left the Episcopal Church and become a Roman Catholic; and, using the language of John Henry Newman, he has called my commitments (at least for him), too woodenly "theoretical" to live by, too "hard" to bear up the soul. Others, including folk here in the diocese like Rob Saunders, have acutely (and graciously) argued that I have missed important aspects of the Scriptures and the tradition in making the claims I do. Perhaps this is why I've been invited: to enter into an engagement of different senses of calling.
I'm not, however, going to address any of this today. Except from this aspect: I've worked in the churches the Philippines, Africa, Haiti, the inner-city of this country, and personally - not theologically, but personally - one of the most powerful things that has kept me in this church is the service of grace out of poverty - the true "beatitude" of Jesus - that I have received and literally been bound by, through the people of these places. I can't even begin to describe this here, although I will point to its root origin in a bit. But the point is: I cannot leave them. Even as we speak now, and discuss our differences in this diocese, my good friend and brother Father Max Accime is trying to find food for children in Gonaives, Haiti - literally this, through the Church, for Christ, in the Holy Spirit. I cannot leave them. Not at this time. Not in this place.
Having said this, though, I must say something else: however much one wishes not to leave, it is possible to be left behind by the Church. Yes, it is; it is possible to be left behind by the Church herself, as Jesus takes her to the Father in His great offering.
I'm not sure I agree with Dean Moore's response to this possibility, an attempt to escape its fulfillment - creating two (provisional?) parallel churches. I'm not sure there can be such a thing, for when there is more than one "church", there is only brokenness, not a set of choices that permit our safety. But I certainly agree with his premise, the premise, alas, of our church's imminent fragmentation, as if following the visage of the Church at large. For it would appear - and I agree -- that, in the next few months, the Anglican Communion will split somehow in a formal way. I say this, not because I want it, or seek it, or work for it. Hardly. But this is what is happening before our eyes. Perhaps this split will affect only the Episcopal Church, and only a small part of it; perhaps it will touch several broad portions of the Communion as a whole. Who knows? But the signs, including those emanating from our House of Bishops, and from the actions of aggression, fear, and denial by individual bishops, seem clear. As the English House of Bishops joint Theology Group reported the other day, lifting up a quote from the Windsor Report itself and underlining it: "There is a very real danger of ECUSA, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Communion as a whole beginning to 'walk apart'". This was not an idle speculation.
So, from what was once a question to be addressed in the abstract - why might we ever split the communion over our present differences? - we are now on the cusp of that question's transposition into the concrete: why have we split it? Why has the present controversy in the Communion in fact proven a "church-dividing" issue? Surely, people ask, it can't "just be about sex?", can it?
Now one could respond to such a question in a number of ways. One could say that churches have divided for all kinds of reasons - from the Trinity to Indulgences to national sovereignty to whether Jesus comes before or after the Millennium. That's just the way it is; whatever is important here and there; and today it happens to be sex. (It's odd, for instance, to see Roman Catholics and Monophysite and Nestorian churches now saying they actually agree on the nature of Christ; and that they're divided because of "historical misunderstandings" over these past 1500 years.) Yes, history is odd, but what are you going to do?
One could also try to explain the division in terms of the way teaching and discipline about sexuality touches something fundamental about the Christian faith. I happen to think it does. But the Windsor Report, as we all know, makes no such argument. The farthest it goes in this regard is first, the descriptive observation that "the overwhelming response from other Christians both inside and outside the Anglican family has been to regard [the actions of ECUSA and New Westminster] as departures from genuine, apostolic Christian faith" (28); and second, the bald evaluative statement that unilateral authorization of public rites for same-sex unions by individual provinces "constitutes action in breach of the legitimate application of the Christian faith as the churches of the Anglican Communion have received it" (143). These are both extraordinarily strong statements; but they are not arguments.
Finally, one could point out that most traditionalists, like myself, are not talking about "dividing the communion" anyway; we've been talking about "discipline". And discipline is how communion expresses itself in the face of some internal wound. Discipline - no matter how rigorous (and I believe it must be) is about healing, not division.
Holiness at the center
But I shall now try to answer the "communion-dividing" question at face value, if somewhat more descriptively than argumentatively. I won't speak to the issue of homosexuality and the way it touches fundamentals of the faith; that has been done elsewhere, as I said. Instead, I want to locate the matter's importance theologically and in terms of our mission in the world. And I want to do so by focusing one key element in the WR, "key" that is for grasping, not the Report itself, but what is at stake in the events to which the WR responds: and this key element is the matter of "holiness". In short, I will claim that the Communion is concerned with sex, because sex is tied up with holiness; and holiness defines the very character of our true witness in the world to God, something the WR knows we must find a way to preserve. We are dividing because holiness is being submerged.
The Report, after all, begins right at its start by linking "unity" and "communion" - the center of its concerns - with a third primary element, what it calls "the radical holiness [emphasis in original] to which all Christ's people are called". Then it concludes this opening section by affirming that "unity, communion, and holiness all belong together, [and] ultimately, questions about one are questions about all" (3). As a kind of example of this, the Report immediately proceeds with a summary of parts of 1 Corinthians, where, among other things, it cites those texts of Paul that describe the Church's people as those who are "sanctified in Christ Jesus" and "called to be saints" (1 Cor. 2, in 4). Later on, in its discussion of the authority of the Scriptures, this very authority is described in terms of the Scriptures' role as a "vehicle" by which the Holy Spirit "shap[es the Church] in the holiness of a new creation" (cf. 55-56). That's what Scripture does; that's it's "authority". So, I do in fact believe, and in a way consistent with the WR implicitly, that we can begin to understand - if only from one perspective - why this whole matter is both so important to the Communion, and why it is in fact "all about sex" at the same time, by considering just this question of "holiness".
It's all about sex
But I should say up front that the question of holiness has also been avoided in this discussion, including by and large in the WR itself. Traditional Anglicans have not always been helpful here: the debate is really about Scripture, we say; hence the WR's attempt to deal with the matter of Scripture's authority (rather confusingly, I would say). Of course, it is about Scripture, but only within the context of a particular purpose for its power. And that purpose is unveiled precisely the place others around us understand. Indeed, there is a certain fear of stating the obvious in a way that most observers intuit it: it is about sex, after all, isn't it? Not all by itself of course, but in the context of the human person's Christian vocation as a creature from and before and with and towards God. (And this is where Scripture enters, as the WR itself rightly indicates.)
The fact that we are afraid of admitting this, goes to heart of the matter. Do you remember in one of the Presidential debates that the candidates were asked what they believed to be the "cause" of homosexuality? Bush surprised many people by simply responding, "I don't know". In a real way -- and independent of political judgments on my part, I should add! -- that was the correct response. Correct, because that simple statement of uncertainty is deeply indicative of the real profound ignorance - scientific and spiritual! -- that shrouds all of this discussion of sexuality. And furthermore, it is "fearful" to face uncontrollable desires, pleasures, confusions, drives� and "not know" what I they are all about. (Scripture says nothing about the meaning of erotic desire, except in the context of the curse and of struggle). We simply don't know the meaning of our desires, and not knowing what they are about, we rightly fear them. Rightly, I emphasize.
Fear them, in a way analogous to our fear of death, for instance. We don't know what happens to our consciousness when we die; we don't know what it "feels like" to be dead; what happens to our relationships with our loves and our hopes. We have assurances, of course - O death, where is thy sting? Nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, not even death -- but these promises only stand over our fears; they do not resolve the basic uncertainties from which these fears arise. And so, even though I hope in God's victory over death in Christ, I fear death all the same: the death of my children, of my wife, of my own self. Freud was only the last in a long line to place death and sex together - in this he was merely following the poets of the ancient world, the psychologists of the late Middle Ages, the philosophers of early modernity, not to mention Scripture itself. "Love, strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave", as the Song of Songs says (8:6), and as we read somewhat creepily at our marriage services. Sex and death together plumb our anxieties; they are stirred by and stir up our ignorances and fears.
I have no qualms in admitting that this is "all about sex". For until we do, we have not begun to talk honestly. (And I will cause some discomfort here.) Not long ago, I led a clergy conference in the West Indies. We talked, not surprisingly, about the current crisis in our Communion. At one point, a priest said, "for all our strong views, you know, we still have not had a real discussion amongst ourselves about homosexuality and about sexuality in general". Who has? And I'm not saying we should either; I'm just saying we should admit that don't really want to. And when I hear, as I have from a number of my Central and East African friends in the church, "We have no homosexuals here; this is a Western disease", I wonder. Is it really? I'm not sure they are simply talking about self-construing "gay identities" here. In any case, what was all that stuff about the 19th-century Ugandan monarchy? I worked for several years as a young priest in Burundi, in Central-East Africa (I shall come back to this in a moment); I would often ride the cramped little Toyota mini-buses from my village down to the capital city. On several occasions, squeezed up against some man, I was clearly and deliberately fondled. What is this about "having no homosexuals"? But note too: when I raised these kinds of experiences with my African friends, they would reply, "oh, these men on the bus assumed that you were a missionary, and you wanted it". Now why would they assume this? Because of the predatory history of western Christians - Catholic and Protestant, by the way -- and because of the well-known hypocrisy of their manners. And perhaps because of their own desire. I don't know.
But don't let anybody tell you this is all obvious, that we understand what this is all about. In the midst of this issue of sexuality are a host of trembling and usually silent assumptions, continuous with real but uneasy experiences, with real confusions, real angers, real fears. They touch upon the driving power of desire and violence, money and control, pride and mendacity - that's what sex is tied up with. Among us all! And when Lambeth asked for "listening" to the experience of gay people, it was perhaps unwittingly asking for something that will go very deep, and will cut in all directions, if we ever dare to engage it.
But that's another story. The problem here is that Americans, think this is all "manageable". Sex, that is; and presumably all the other stuff that goes with it (violence, money, control, pride, mendacity). "What's the problem?", we ask; "it doesn't hurt anybody". I'm not sure what the real message is in this kind of glib dismissal. We all know the recent comments of someone like Louie Crew, founder of Integrity, member of Executive Council, and political adept extraordinaire within ECUSA: "let's move on and get over sex", he says in response to the WR, "and let's start dealing with real problems like AIDS and poverty". What do comments like this mean? Pass out the condoms and start some micro-credit programs, and that's "real love of neighbor"? Sex, money, desire, violence, power - Americans seem to think that we can make it all line up, control it, properly channel it, enjoy it. And look at us! At least as the world looks at us - they despise us, not because we are worse than they are, but because, fearing who we all are deep inside, they see our complacency in the face of our interior mysteries and evils, and they are astonished at the bloated and self-satisfied ignorance we are willing to embrace.
For to say "it is all about sex" is to say that this is about the human person and its - our - unknown depths and the fears that drive us in their midst. And this, after all my friends, is connected precisely and exactly with the center of the Christian faith: for did not our Master say, "the truth shall make you free" (Jn. 8:32) and His beloved tell us, "perfect love casts out fear" (1 Jn. 4:18)? To say, "it's all about sex" is to say up front that this is about how we come to the knowledge of salvation, to the freedom from fear, to perfect love: it is about the transformation of the human person in Christ Jesus, into the very image of our Redeemer. And that is about holiness - to "be as He is", "holy", "perfect", "renewed in the spirit of your mind, [having] put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true sanctity" (Eph. 4:23-24).
Discovering holiness
Let me offer an account of how, in a way, this has become clear to me. And yes, it was in the context of an encounter with the African Church, where I worked as a newly ordained deacon and then priest for several years, a fact that is pertinent to the present dynamics of the Communion itself (i.e. faith has been shared!).
Now I went to Burundi, at age 24, as someone formed within a very liberal background: I grew up in Berkeley, California; I met Ellen Barrett, the first professed lesbian clergywoman as a frequent celebrant and preacher at my church, and I shared assumptions galore with this whole religious and political context. But I wasn't mindless either - most of us share the assumptions of our context, I remind us all. I was serious and inquiring about my faith; just uninformed and spiritually parochial.
But when I went to Burundi, I fell into the midst of a church and culture that was extraordinarily confused in its own way: it was characterized by enormous resentments and affections together, by a complex relationship with British missionaries, by political quicksand, by deep-seated and hidden angers and violences stemming from the experience of genocide and military oppression, by poverty and grasping, by splintering of Christian witness. Nothing had prepared me for this level of moral disarray and pain. (No worse, I realize in retrospect, than our own! But I was only 24!) And I was almost forced to go to the only place where an ongoing encounter with my African and British colleagues could take place on the basis of some common grace: that was the Scriptures, read, studied, discussed together among all of us. (The WR is right when it talks about Scripture - serious Scripture study - as a place for discovering unity.)
It was only in this common immersion that I came to the gaping realization that I was not up to the place - this church and culture - in which I had been thrust, that only something and someone deeper and more courageous and more wise and more loving could walk more deeply into the midst of these lives; and I was not yet that person. It was the realization of my need to change if I were to be anywhere near faithful; and that this change was part of the Scripture's essence, of the Gospel's essence, of God's essence.
Now the curious thing is, once you realize this about yourself, you begin to see God at work in others. You're looking for, hopeful for change. My eyes were opened up to the luminosity of certain men and women - the evangelists and catechists, who had given their lives literally to Jesus, the few who dared to speak openly of reconciliation in the face of violence and threat and fear. And only then did I begin to perceive holiness - the historical and visible character of the Christian life - as a seed that had in fact been planted all around me, in this person and in that person. And things began to crumble in my heart - assumptions, securities, fears. And these men and women whom I began to notice turned out to be the people who later became confessors and martyrs over this past decade. They were there, already, around me.
Coming back to America I was met with a culture, within my own church, that I finally realized was one of moral indifference to the self, in favor of simple action for others. The latter is good, of course; everyone claimed to be interested in the "plight" of Africa (at least South Africa), but there was little sense that the bond of this interest lay in the character of our common hearts and the Lord who calls them together into a new place. Without the sense of calling and possibility and measure of actual transformation in our very hearts, the net result of "interest in others" is a failure to persevere, to "love to the end" (John 13:1), to achieve the "perfection" of "holiness" (as our Father in heaven is perfect - Mt. 5:48) given in the sending of His Son. I went to work in the inner-city, and quickly discovered that American interest wanes mighty quick when money gets a little tight. Actual sacrifice for others, as opposed to simple liberality, is not our middle name.
I have found myself more and more over the years, in this restless, shifting, inconstant culture of our nation and our church - it goes across the board, liberal and conservative -- and in the face of the repeated challenges to Christian faithfulness - I have found myself turning back to individuals from the past in Africa (and elsewhere), who have "stayed" and persevered in their places of life and service; they have become my (unmet) models: I ask myself in this or that situation, "what would they do? How would they respond?" And with this, I have seen, in part, what was the power of the Scriptures to draw us together in the first place: the Scriptures present the form of this life, in its epitome, antitype, figure, perfection in Jesus' life and teaching -- there is it, in the Scriptures: the Holy One (Acts 3:14)! And the apostolic witness to this, given in the Church's catholic life, rose up for me with a new weight. Apollo Kivebulaya was an apostle in the Congo borderlands of Burundi, an uneducated man in the early 20th century who wandered the hills and forests in bare feet in order to share the Gospel; like Paul, beaten often, yet radiant in his message; finally expending his life in this pursuit. Few people have heard of him, like the many others of his ilk. Like Archbishop Joahin Ruhuna a few years ago, who was gunned down because he preached reconciliation; or Gerard Nzeyimana, a priest shot to death a few weeks ago for working for peace. Or Yoweli the catechist, who hid the wrong ethnic group, and died because he told the soldiers they too should learn to love Christ in this way. But these are the men and women I would seek advice from if I could. These! That acknowledgement is, in a sense, what "communion" in Christ is about. That is what holiness does to a person: they are changed into the image of the truth and draw others to them. Changed bit by bit, in their hearts, their passions, their loves, their bodies, their hopes.
Renewing the human person, renewing the world
An example of what this means was given in Abp. Josiah Iduwo-Fearon's GC main Eucharist sermon in August, 2003, on Ephesians. Now Ephesians is a great text for unity; it is cited all the time in contexts where "communion" is discussed; the WR uses it up front. But more often than not, the message of Ephesians is truncated. Fearon preached on the lectionary for that Sunday, which simply provided the context for Paul's discussion of unity in cc. 4 and 5: a change of life, from darkness to light, from old man to new man, from former life to new life. He spoke of how this represented the center of what it meant for him - and many other Nigerians - who became Christians. Paul mentions many elements involved in this change - speech, possessions, and yes, sexual life. So did Fearon. In the midst of this GC, in which the topic of gay bishops and gay blessings loomed like a hovering storm, he carefully said to the 10,000 of us gathered: "look: to become a Christian means being changed in every aspect of our private and public life; changed in our hearts; changed in our desires; changed in our controlling passions and hopes; changed into the form of Jesus as the Scriptures show us. My life changed with Christ, and I know no other truth about the Gospel, nor do the Christians whom I am privileged to serve. This is what lets us be the seed for a new world where we live, and where so many desperately seek hope." Did people listen?
This was not some stunted "evangelical" sermon. Fearon, in fact, was giving a classic exposition of 2000 years of Christian tradition, spanning E. Orthodox, RC, and Protestant devotion and theology, on the Christian vocation to a life of growth in holiness. For this is what the tradition is about: the confrontation between the unknown powers driving a self enslaved to the fearsome mystery of death and sin, and the radiant power of God in Christ Jesus to change us into His own image of the New Adam. Read Maximus the Confessor, Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard Baxter and John Owen and you can see this grand commonality of vision. The whole church has known, for centuries, that the moral life of sexual continence is part of a single battle for generosity, courage, sacrificial self-giving, love itself - it is a battle, of course, whose exact contours and meanings remain obscure and darkened, like death; but it is the church's vocation to engage this battle, to equip her children, provide examples for its victory, year in and year out, decade by decade, so that light might dawn upon the nations "having no hope and without God in the world" (Eph.2:12). The habits of this calling are precisely what lead to the blazing light that the confessors and martyrs of Christ provide the world. African, Asian, Latin American: they know that the new world given in Christ is caught up in this network - this communion -- of transformation. And they learned it, however haltingly and unevenly, from the Gospel handed to them by the West and East. As Abp. Nzimbi of Kenya told us later in Convention, "you taught us this". Yes; and we have forgotten it.
Abp. Fearon is a highly educated and literate man; more so than I and most of us here (and I should say that the notion, put forward by some of our own American bishops, that uneducated and backwards African bishops are allowing their ignorance to drive this whole communion affair is both ludicrous and insulting). And he is conscious of the unbroken tradition he embodies. Still, it is unlikely that most Anglican traditionalists, in North or South, are acting out of a conscious theology of sexuality that is specifically informed by this tradition, let alone that is in deliberate continuity with major scholarly reflections on the matter. (Such as those of JP II's sweeping and profound Theology of the Body.) The WR, as we know, refers to none of this. But my point today is that there is a theology of sexuality that is at work in the Communion's general and consensual rejection of ECUSA's recent actions. It is a theology we are all being called into, to rediscover, to remake as our own from the roots up. It is one, however, that is tied, as a subsection, to the larger theology of human transformation - that is, of transcending death and fear, of freedom from the passions, of letting go of self for the sake of God. The theology of sexuality and marriage falls within this realm, in all of its struggle and procreative agony. And its center is the renewal of our image in Christ Jesus' own.
I commend to you a recent book by the scholar Jaroslav Pelikan (Divine Rhetoric), on the Sermon on the Mount in Christian interpretation. The great expositors of the Christian tradition all understood how Jesus' teaching here involved a call to a transformed humanity. Love your enemy; turn the other cheek; do not be anxious; lust not in your heart; call no one a fool. But it was Luther, Pelikan argues, who began the modern path of increased unease with aspects of this message. Pelikan outlines how Luther struggled to escape the fact that Jesus spoke of purity of heart, of chastity of soul, of being a "eunuch for the Kingdom of God", on the one hand, and of marriage on the other not as contrasts with each other, but properly speaking as mutually informing images of each other. Luther could not see how they go together. And so, for all his stress on grace, Luther could not grasp the Augustinian insight into concupiscence - that desire for self apart from God -- which is the fundamental dynamic to be overcome by Christ in all things, sex included. And Luther, despite himself, began to open the way, now received almost thoughtlessly by Americans, by which our sexual lives are assumed to exist in a sphere independent of the realm of prideful lust whose fate is to be brought under the sway of the spirit of Christ, according the forms of his own life. It is almost impossible in America to engage intellectually this possibility - and hence engage the possibility that regular forms of sexual practice require, intrinsically, their own transformation.
Now I have not mounted an argument here that homosexual self-expression is incompatible with a life of transfiguring holiness. And, of course, advocates of same-sex blessings have called them "holy" in a very deliberate appropriation of the term. But this too is a claim on their part, not an argument. And it is a claim that the saints do not uphold, and never have. For it is a fact that the Church for 2000 years has underlined this incompatibility between homosexual self-expression and transfiguring holiness. And this consistent emphasis is a part of a coherent view of human vocation. Utterly coherent and compelling. And the complete failure of ECUSA's gay proponents to show how affirmed homosexual practice can be congruent with and integrated within the Christian vision of transfigured sexuality, in which the fearsome and mysterious enslavement of the flesh is overcome in following the forms of Jesus' own life as given in the Scriptures - their failure to make this case even partially has in fact been noted with dismay by the WR (135), and by a host of other Provinces, including now the English bishops. And noting this failure is crucial. For if the church in America cannot teach and train her flock in the coherence of holiness, how shall she engage, let alone sustain her vocation to suffer for the faith of Jesus? How live with the saints?
This question touches upon our relationship with our brothers and sisters around the world, as well as close by in our midst. It touches liberals and conservatives. Yes, it is about "communion". The political violence in Haiti - a place I have a close connection with -- for instance, now almost automatically means the cancellation of visits by American church partners. And the Haitians have come to take our trembling for granted. This is what they expect from Americans; they must live with it, in their loneliness. By the same token, the young people in our congregations almost assume that we have nothing to tell them regarding the struggles they wage for their sexual identities. "You can't even make up your own mind", I have heard one of them say; "I guess I will have to sort this out myself." There is no one in our midst to offer them examples of honesty, compassion, self-control and self-giving here. And the point is that what happens in our life with Haiti is exactly, intimately, and inextricably bound to this lack. Make no mistake about it. Holiness is about communion. And it goes deep.
"Unity, communion, and holiness all belong together", according to the WR (3). The issue isn't simply determining what is "right" behavior, according to Scripture. (That becomes an issue, of course, but only on some very secondary level.) Rather, the issue is what are the avenues, the frameworks of life together that represent the holiness of the Church and her members (a "blameless offering" to God [Col. 1:22])? The issue is, shall the Church provide a context within which forms of holy life are molded?
The WR has been criticized as, in the end, being merely about a "procedural" set of issues: let's make sure we consult each other, don't let's do things without being nice to others, make sure bishops don't jump the gun on some sensitive issue, stay within your own diocese, be attentive to what Primates say, etc.. "Playground rules". But these caricatured concerns are really an outworking of something much deeper. At the opening of the WR, and later ( 2, 9, 41 ), the vocation of the Church is posed in terms of God's "mission" within the world, with the Church as God's instrument before the eyes of the world. "The world is watching", we are told, watching for the "new mode of being human which has been unveiled in Christ" (41). The Church is thus seen as the "example" itself of the person of God - reconciling in love through the self-offering of the Trinity. What, then, does the "world see" when she "looks at" the Church? That is ultimately the question of "holiness". It is provided in terms of self-offering love, in terms of the "witness" of the church. But the question is posed by the WR in a more forceful manner: the church is holy when shaped in such a way that her own "martyrdom" can be seen; what the WR calls the "costly grace" of "transformed humanity" (9, 41). What much of the Anglican Communion is telling us here in America is that "radical holiness" is about such shaping, such training, such molding, so that the martyrs can be offered and be seen, and the world changed. And if we will have none of it� indeed, I wonder not so much that the church will be "divided" (it already is) as whether there will be a church at all. When the WR presents the final choice - to Americans more than any others - of "walking together or walking apart", they are presenting us with the choice of being the Church or not; period. That is why our bishops cannot afford to postpone, equivocate, or avoid this choice today: their own accountability before God, and ours, is at stake right now.
And yet� a couple of months ago I participated on a panel at the American Academy of Religion. The topic of the present crisis in the Anglican Communion came up. David Roozen, a Dutch Reformed (I believe) professor of religious sociology and congregational life at Hartford Seminary got up and said, bluntly, "as an outsider to the affairs of Anglicanism, but as an expert in American denominational cultures, I must tell you that I believe the WR to be a complete non-starter in America - among liberals and conservatives both". Why? Not because we hate procedures in themselves. But because we have no training to live in a way through which we can give ourselves over to others, even in the simple matters of procedure. We are not martyrs; not confessors; not ascetics; not even procedural cooperants. Yes, why? �.
And the world watches. And she yearns.
