Their Lady, And Ours

Harvesting holy water

As our flight from Mexico City to LAX was about to take off, two women sitting next to me crossed themselves. Visiting Cuernavaca’s Roman Catholic cathedral a few days before, I had seen a mother and two children filling containers from the baptismal font and putting them in a shopping bag. I don’t know if they planned to sell it or put it to some sacramental use. Either way, tap water wouldn’t do. They wanted the holy article and plenty of it.

During our two-week pilgrimage, we Diocese of Los Angeles laypeople and clergy, led by Bishop Mary Douglas Glasspool, observed many more overt expressions of piety than we’re used to seeing in the U.S. Nearly 100 million Mexicans, 83% of the population, are Roman Catholic. Curious about how many were practicing as opposed to nominal Catholics, we asked one of our Spanish language teachers to tell us who actually goes to church on Ash Wednesday. “Todos,” she said with a smile. “And even more go on Pascua (Easter Sunday).”

Some of us attended a Saturday morning mass with at least 3,000 souls in Mexico City’s Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the world’s third most visited sacred site. I found myself in a clutch of communicants near the altar. I passed la paz del Señor with a dozen men, women, and children. After the consecration, as a parade of priests and deacons plunged into the crowd, I hesitated, unsure of the protocol. I felt hands against my back, turning me and gently pushing me toward a priest standing nearby.

As far as I could see, everyone was served. Later, I lit candles for my ailing mother and for Kathy, who cared for her while I was away. I have never been more moved in church. Surely God’s spirit was there, if anywhere.

And yet 20 minutes before, our guide for the morning, Francisco Guerrero, one of the founders of the newspaper La Jornada and a nephew of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Octavio Paz, had said that just being there made him feel depressed. Francisco is an expert on the indigenous people of Mesoamerica -- Aztecs, Mayans, and myriad others who thrived before Spain’s conquest in 1521. After briefing us as we stood on the plaza outside the basilica, he sent us to explore by ourselves. He refused to set foot inside. He said he could never forgive the church for exploiting the Mexican people, from the 16^th century until now, when, he told us, the basilica alone takes in $1 million each day.

Our Lady at home

At the heart of such passions and debates about the church’s role in Mexican society is the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Official doctrine holds that a maiden appeared to peasant Juan Diego in 1531, a decade after the Spanish conquest. Speaking in the Aztec tongue of Nahuatl, she sent him to pick flowers on a hilltop where a temple to the goddess Tonantzin had stood until the Spanish destroyed it. There he found not indigenous Mexican flowers but Castilian roses. He arranged these in his coat, or tilma. Appearing before the Catholic archbishop, Juan found that the image of a woman with brown skin had been burned into his tilma’s fabric – a Virgin Mary custom-made for the new world. Our Lady’s basilica stands near the hilltop where Juan is said to have found the Spanish roses. His tilma is displayed in a climate-controlled enclosure high above the altar where the mass we attended was celebrated.

Did it really happen? Or did the Spaniards concoct the story to legitimize its conquest and sweep away the vestiges of indigenous religion? We heard these points of view and others from scholars such as Francisco as well as clergy in the Anglican Diocese of Cuernavaca, our host. Whatever the story’s origins, when Mexicans threw off Spanish rule in the 19^th century, Our Lady inspired them. Today she is a symbol of national identity for the faithful and nonbelievers alike in a country whose public institutions are often obdurately corrupt. Francisco’s uncle, Octavio Paz, famously said, “[T]he Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery.“

Yet many Mexican Protestants believe they should offer worshipers an alternative to myths and magical thinking, especially when they have been used exploitatively. Some Anglican priests won’t display Our Lady in their churches even when their congregants want them to. A few we met during our visit were surprised to learn that some U.S. Episcopal churches with Anglo-Catholic leanings and Spanish-speaking congregations make a point to honor her. In the U.S., such gestures are the essence of our inclusive Anglican identity. Our Mexican colleagues tend to stress the exclusivity of Anglican identity. Such differences in perspective are in themselves emblematic of the richness of the tradition that those north and south of the border love in equal measure.

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

Making Room

During Advent, we await Christ by preparing our busy hearts to accommodate the incalculable abundance of God’s love for the world and all of us, God’s beloved.

The image that keeps occurring to me is a tiny, cluttered apartment suddenly having to accommodate a building-sized, heart-shaped pillow. The pillow’s so big that its unyielding, irresistible cuddliness flattens the furniture against the walls and then, like rising Tollhouse cookie dough, oozes through every door, window, and crevice.

There’s so much pillow that there’s no room for anything else.

Such is the gift of Christmas, if fully accepted – ours heart so full of joy, forgiveness, and a yearning to love God and others that there’s no room for the familiar old furniture.

We will always resist being rearranged to that extent. And why shouldn’t we? What’s at risk of being moved out of the way usually isn’t anything so bad as the opposite of the godly virtues, which is to say despair, vengefulness, and all consuming regard for ourselves. We’re entitled to like our furniture. We inherited some of it. As for the claw and ball table leg where we keep stubbing our toe in the dark -- well, we do manage to avoid it most of the time. Moving things around just creates new ways to risk getting hurt.

Bishop Bruce with food bankers

We might be so content with the status quo that we’ll figure out how to confine the giant heart pillow to the spare bedroom. Instead of letting Christ consume us, we’ll coexist. We’ll spare our Lord a ventricle and a few subsidiary veins and arteries, just occasionally letting him flow into the whole expanse, such when we’re holding a baby, listening to Handel, or seeing a sunset -- or on Saturday evenings or Sunday mornings, when we’re in church.

If our hearts are prone to constrain Christ’s abundance, so are the churches we build in his name. We set them up just the way we like them, fill them with nice people such as ourselves, and then do things the same way over and over again.

Make no mistake: If you’re like me, church’s congeniality and predictability help make the experience holy. Just to expose the limits of my metaphor, I don’t propose moving any of our beautiful furniture. But how could we throw our doors open wider and let more of the giant pillow out? Could we do even more to turn our community’s face to the world?

Bishop Bruce and Roger Bradshaw

Bishop Diane Jardine Bruce posed this question to your parish leaders during her visit in October, when she invited us on a neighborhood walkabout followed by a conversation about what we had observed. Our group included Mother Martha, People’s Warden Gregg Stempson, Bishop’s Committee members Phil Bowman, DJ Gomer, Dave Nichols, Paula Neal Reza, and Erin Schwarz, and me.

We explored neighborhoods within walking distance of our church and talked about how their residents would love St. John’s if they gave it a try. But standing on the sidewalk looking across at our beautiful campus, we wondered how we appeared to them. It’s the church with the expensive private school, someone said. “What does ‘Episcopal’ even mean?” someone else said jokingly. “Is it hard to get in? What are the requirements?”

Bishop Bruce was delighted to see St. John’s outreach in action. She consecrated our School’s new “Seeds of Hope” garden, where we’ll grow produce for those in need, and dropped by the Rancho Santa Margarita food bank, where Roger Bradshaw and his St. John’s crew comprise the core volunteer group every third Thursday.

These new outreach and community ministries (others are Happy Hour, St. John’s Moms Club, and Caregiving Mosaics) naturally suggest others. Demographic data that Bishop Bruce provided revealed that 15% of our city’s population is Hispanic. Our walkabout group wondered how welcome those neighbors feel at St. John’s. What if we provided a translation of our services into American Sign Language? An obvious reply is that no one in our congregation is a member of the Deaf community. But that might change if we provided the service.

Your parish leaders were amply inspired by Bishop Bruce’s visit. Still, we all have more than enough to-do lists this time of year. Advent is less about doing than being – being ready, open, and vulnerable. Advent people and churches will inevitably be changed by Christ’s love. I can’t wait to find out what St. John’s becomes in the new year. I can’t wait to see who we really are.

This post was originally published in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

Counter-Reformation

We think, and rightly so, that we have a lot to teach our young people. But just as often, as our wonderful St. John’s youth leaders will tell you, the wisdom flows the other way around.

The photo shows eight-year-old Sierra Schwarz at a recent meeting of the St. John’s Parish Council, on which her mother, Bishop’s Committee member Erin Schwarz, serves. Sierra just happened to be reading a biography of Elizabeth the Great, founder of the Anglican Church and royal protector of the Book of Common Prayer, which unites Episcopalians to this day.

In a just few years, Sierra will be eligible for youth group – whose middle and high schoolers recently gave me a lesson of their own in Anglican theology.

For a couple of years, I’ve experimented with a deconstructed Holy Eucharist service that puts enormous emphasis on congregational participation. I first used it when Thom’s, Orange County’s so-called emergent community, worshiped at St. John’s. For the 2013-14 year, I adapted it for our monthly Youth Eucharist services.

If you listen carefully to the Eucharistic prayer on Wednesday, Saturday, or Sunday, you’ll hear the whole history of human experience. The wording varies from rite to rite, but the story’s always the same. God’s creation began in unity and love and fell into disunity and sin, to be called back to oneness in Christ.

During my deconstructed service – you might have called it a messy mass -- I closed Elizabeth’s prayer book and invited worshipers to retell the creation story in their own words. They took turns elevating the bread and wine, and we said the prayer of consecration together. By your Holy Spirit, make this bread and wine into your body and blood. (Don’t worry. I had a bishop’s permission!)

I thought that by stepping back from the familiar liturgy and celebrant’s role, I was giving people a renewed sense of ownership and individual involvement in a powerful sacrament that Jesus Christ gave not to the church but to the whole people of God. Hoping to attract a younger generation of skeptical seekers, many churches are experimenting with this kind of liturgical democratization, giving congregations a larger voice in worship, deemphasizing the ordained orders, and setting aside the old prayers and music.

But as it turns out, my experiment wasn’t that popular with the new generation at St. John’s. During their postmortem meeting at the beginning of the summer, our young people said they wanted the old service back.

Don’t get me wrong: Before last year’s experiment, Youth Euch was hardly the drill from Sunday morning. Using music and other means, I did my best each month to vary the first part of the service, the Ministry of the Word, when we hear scripture, share a homily, and pray for our needs and those of others.

But when it comes to the second half, the young people missed the solemnity, piety, and predictability of the prayer book mass, the words we all know and the traditional roles we play. Whatever we’ve experienced in the course of our day, whatever sadness or joy, we come together and bind ourselves to Christ and one another just as we have for 2,000 years. The Lord be with you. And also with you.

Patti Peebles, our chaplain and youth leader, put it best when she gave me the kids’ verdict on my messy mass. “They’re Episcopalians,” she said.

Elizabeth would be proud. And so am I. 

This post first appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

Amid A Crowd Of Stars

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

With my mother at Easter

W.B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old” appears in A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, published in 1952 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. My copy has an inscription on the endpaper: “To Harvey on Christmas 1955 with deepest affection from Louis.” Harvey Taylor was my father, Louis Cook my godfather. Handsome Detroit newspapermen, for years they competed for the affections of my lovely newspaperwoman mother, Jean.

I was 14 months old that Christmas. Louis’s inscription expresses magnanimity in defeat. Still, he had probably guessed that alcoholism would destroy my parents’ marriage. Louis told me years later that he’d driven my father to more than one AA meeting. Six-foot-five in his stocking feet, gentle and strong, winner of the Bronze Star in World War II, Louis was biding his time.

In November, my mother moved to Yorba Linda, leaving behind the Pasadena house she bought half a lifetime ago when she got a job editing the old “View” section of the Los Angeles Times. A few years later, she became associate editor and one of the nation’s top female journalists. Kathy and I have been cleaning out her house, the work of many middle-aged children. There isn’t much left. Needing homes are the wrought-iron coffee table she loved and a long, Ponderosa-style dining room table and chairs she had made for the dinner parties she loved to throw.

All I really care about are the things she wrote. A commencement address she delivered at Mount St. Mary’s College. An article entitled “What Is An Episcopalian?”, which she wrote for the Detroit Free Press in 1961, when our General Convention was called in Motown. Her elegiac features about the 1965 murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo. Diary entries, including one on the date of my birth saying I weighed eight pounds, and it hadn’t gone easily. About a year ago, her advancing dementia robbed her of the pleasure of reading these aloud to visitors.

And then there are the letters. Especially Louis’s.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

My mother wouldn’t marry Louis, which I always wanted her to do, since he was my father for all intents and purposes. She never really explained why, and now, she can’t. Her eyes sometimes glimmer when I mention him or my father. She doesn’t remember her devoted second husband, Richard Lescoe, at all.

The surpassing gift is that she saved about twenty of Louis’s love letters. They’re all written on old-fashioned newspaper copy paper. He never dated them. He wrote one, addressed “Dearest,” during his first visit to New York City, where it appears he was attending the famed Al Smith politicians’ dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria as a member of a Free Press delegation. It must’ve been about 1966, when he and Jean were in their forties.

“I have at last found the milieu for which I was born,” he wrote. “Nowhere in Manhattan can be found a gayer, more suave, more sophisticated man of the world than I. Especially since I stumbled out of a bar taking with me somebody’s Kuppenheimer overcoat. Unfortunately my victim’s gloves don’t fit me but they are Sak’s gray suede and I cut quite a figure dangling them carelessly in my left hand as I saunter down Park Ave.”

My mother loved John F. Kennedy, and at the black tie dinner at the Waldorf, lifelong labor organizer Louis encountered JFK’s nemesis and my future boss. He wrote, “I hesitate to mention this, darling, but Nixon is a fairly engaging character at close range.” Later, my mother managed to convince herself, but not me, that she had voted for Nixon, which made it easier to accept that her son was helping write his books. Her willfulness and my immature frustration made our relationship difficult. The dementia has taken all that away, too. I don’t think she’s ever been happier, nor have we ever been so close. And that is Easter.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

This post appeared originally in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

Fun Is Good

John, Susan, Mary, and Michael

We were 28 deacons and priests, aged 55 and up. It was a brisk, exquisitely clear night amid the ponderosa pines of Prescott, Arizona. We’d already spent many hours in plenary meetings on big subjects such as vocation (the Church’s word for where and how we serve and work in Christ’s vineyard), personal health and finance, and spirituality.

According to our schedules, this was a “a night of creativity.” But nobody had asked Fr. James, chaplain of St. George’s Independent School in Memphis, or me to bring our guitars. Instead, as we stood in the lobby awaiting instructions, we could hear Wilson Pickett singing “In The Midnight Hour.”

Through the glass doors, we could see that our CREDO team had replaced the U-shaped conference table with two dozen smaller ones covered in yellow and red butcher paper. There were stacks of magazines, baskets of colored feathers, and an abundance of Elmer’s Glue-All, two-sided tape, and colored pipe cleaners. I shot a glance at Eric, a vocational deacon from New Jersey who runs a social justice ministry for young adults in the Diocese of Newark. With a nod, he confirmed what I’d feared. “Arts and crafts project,” he said tersely.

To borrow the circumspect language we try to use on the diocesan Commission on Ministry, arts projects are not my gifting.

And yet within minutes I was cutting letters and images from magazines and gathering supplies while singing along with my sisters and brothers to Stax Volt, Motown, and the Doobie Brothers. The CREDO faculty didn’t tell us what to make. Our conference director, LA’s own the Rev. Hartshorn Murphy, said, “Let the materials choose you.” Entering the festive space, I had suddenly thought about afternoons and evenings in Yorba Linda when everyone’s over for dinner. One might say that the Holy Spirit, right on cue, had sung me a song of abundant joy. So I fashioned a household god for our big mixed family, including ten feathers in ten colors and earrings that say “life is good” and “best day ever.”

Local diety

Knowing exactly what I was supposed to do during our evening of creativity was the fruit of discernment. Discernment usually doesn’t mean choosing between right and wrong. It’s the tool we use when, as one of our faculty members said, “there are many right answers.” The purpose of our mid-October conference and retreat was to help us use the gift of non-anxious discernment in aspects of our lives and ministries that really matter, even ones that entail risk, hardship, and loss.

The Episcopal Church’s periodic CREDO conferences are organized by the Church Pension Group to help clergy get and stay healthy. St. John’s paid $500 for me to attend. CPG paid $5000, which shows how seriously the Church takes the well being of its pastors. Some of us received insights about how to plan for retirement, others about whether to open their ears to calls to new positions. CPG gave us practical advice about taxes and investments. We worshiped, prayed, meditated, went on dawn walks and did dawn yoga, and encountered God in many other ways, including small-group fellowship, where I made new friends in Mary (Utah), Michael (Monterey), and Susan (New Hampshire).

And yet all week I was thinking, “I wish Kathy could come; I wish everyone could come,” because most core CREDO teachings belong to all God’s people. One example was faculty member Priscilla Condon’s prophetic ministry about eating to honor the fleshy temples we have the privilege of occupying (also the theme of seminarian Robyn Henk’s early-2012 class at St. John’s). We left resolving to exercise more, drink more water, cut out the margarine and artificial sweeteners, and above all remember, as Priscilla taught us and Dr. Oz confirms, that Trader Joe’s coconut oil and raw honey are good for what ails you.

"Credo," incidentally, means “I believe.” We each left Prescott with a three-part CREDO plan and many CREDO resolves. One of mine is to continue to live into a teaching we were also offered in Latin by another faculty member, the Rev. Canon Matthew Stockard: Felicitas es bonam, which means “Fun is good.” Amen!

This post original appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

The Republicans Are Getting Ready For Isaac

So too the Episcopalians.

New Modes Of A Great Tradition

Gary Hall, the new dean of Washington National Cathedral, on Episcopal future:

[I]f the Episcopal Church is to thrive in the 21^st century, it must do three things. It must develop a clear, missional identity. It must project that identity outward and invite people into it. And it must take seriously the needs and concerns of those who come toward us and adapt to the new life and energy they bring.

Does that mean that we will no longer continue to worship in our stately Anglican ways? Of course not. But it does mean that we will need to find new modes of liturgical, musical, and theological expression to complement the great traditional strengths we already have. And this is not new behavior for Anglicans. Queen Elizabeth I forged a pragmatic consensus between Catholics and Protestants in 1559. Bishop William White of Pennsylvania led the first General Convention of the Episcopal Church to a uniquely American way of governance in 1789. The church opened itself up to the sacramental ministries of women bishops, priests and deacons in 1976. We have always been a pragmatic, evolving tradition.

Hat tip to Rich Straton

Halling Off To Washington

During the 1980s one of the joys of going to All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena along with my mother, Jean Taylor Lescoe, a longtime congregant and former vestry member, was the preaching and teaching of its senior associate rector, the Rev. Canon Gary Hall, who's just been called as dean of Washington National Cathedral. (The Washington Post's coverage is here.)

In this video, he discusses his Hollywood roots, progress of ministry, and most recent work as rector of Christ Church Cranbrook in the Romney family's home town of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Peace Through Partnership

Alexander D. Baumgarten, who represents The Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., takes justifiable pride in the even-handed, classically Anglican position our church staked out on Israel and Palestine:

As one bishop pointed out to me after final passage of...resolution [B019], we just witnessed something nearly unprecedented in the past three decades since the General Convention began addressing this subject: bishops and deputies from a variety of viewpoints on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict coming together enthusiastically and vocally in favor of a single resolution that calls for all Episcopalians to join the conversation. Equally importantly, the resolution calls for us to invite others into the conversation: Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and other Christians. There are to be no outcasts in the conversation, and all voices are welcome on equal terms. I can attest firsthand how rare this kind of genuine dialogue and listening is in practice, and also how fruitful it is when it does take place.

One other very important theme comes out of this very important resolution: investment of our own treasure in the Palestinian economy, and commitment to visiting, and being in partnership with, the Anglican Church in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Suheil Dawani, a Palestinian from the West Bank, along with the Palestinian government, have repeatedly stressed the need for outside investment and the creation of economic infrastructure in the occupied territories in order to allow Palestinians to prepare for the creation of a future state. The Episcopal Church has recognized this before, but Resolution B019 gives new and important flesh to the concept.

Finally, it’s important to note what the General Convention declined to do. The House of Deputies overwhelming rejected a move to endorse boycott and divestment of Israel and the study of two documents that have been criticized by some – including the Episcopal Church’s chief operating officer, Bishop Stacy Sauls – as theologically problematic in their portrayal of Judaism. One deputy noted that these steps would have been “conversation stoppers” and that we can’t create a broader base of understanding and support for a just peace if we can’t successfully bring people to the table. Another deputy noted that economic punishment of Israel, which Bishop Dawani and the Palestinian government both have criticized, could end up hurting the Palestinian economy, as it is fundamentally intertwined with Israel’s.

Photos: Arab and Jewish schoolchildren in Jerusalem, June 2012
Hat tip to Norris Battin

Holy Toledo

Rt. Rev. Leonard Blair, the Roman Catholic bishop of Toledo, is the man whom the Vatican assigned to quiet the Leadership Council of Women Religious (which represents most U.S. nuns) because of its members' views on contraception, the sacramental status of gay and lesbian people, and women's ordination. During a proper grilling this week by Terry Gross on her program, "Fresh Air," Bishop Blair paused to gloat about reflect on another troubled denomination:

You know, it's very interesting. In the New York Times earlier this month, there was an article, "Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" And, you know, the author - and I don't mean to pick on Episcopalians, because I'm just quoting what this writer said in the New York Times, but he said today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict suddenly adopted everything urged on the Vatican by, you know, liberal theologians and thinkers and people who dissent. But he said instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded group, he said the church is really experiencing a tremendous drop in its - in practice. And I mean Catholicism is too having its share of problems. But, you know, this is - just becoming like the world and just accepting the secular culture's answer to all these things is not really a solution for people of faith.

The photo below of our bishops suffragan in the Diocese of Los Angeles, Mary Douglas Glasspool and Diane Jardine Bruce, shows exactly how our church looks. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters should be so blessed. But the Vatican's only solution is that the nuns and everyone else must continue to obey celibate male priests and bishops:

[W]hen it comes to the priesthood, and I don't know that on a program like this we're able to explore the theology of it, because it is a theological one; it's not political. It's not sociological. It's theological. About what the sacraments are and what it means for a man to stand at the altar and act in the very person of Christ as a priest.

I mean, St. Paul talks about Christ being the groom and the church being his bride. That symbolism, theologically, is very much a part of our understanding of the Mass and the priesthood. And that's, I think, also why Christians who maintain their faith in a priesthood - namely, the Catholics and the Orthodox - do not have a female priest.

But churches such as in Protestantism, that speak only about ministry rather than priesthood, for them it's much easier to have women do that because it's a very different kind of faith about the meaning of these things.

The church doesn't say that the ordination of women is not possible because somehow women are unfit to carry out the functions of the priest, but because on the level of sacramental signs, it's not the choice that our Lord made when it comes to those who act in his very person, as the church's bridegroom.

Most of Jesus's followers and apostles were male. It could hardy have been otherwise in first-century Palestine, where women and children were devalued. The Son of Man taught in terms that men and women of his time could understand. Bishop Blair believes that the 21st century church must be governed according to these relatively primitive human standards, redolent with injustice and sin.

Not all Christians agree. The bishop's brief summary of Protestantism notwithstanding, in the 1970s and 1980s the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States decided that women should and must be priests and bishops. With the guidance of the Holy Spirit -- and having recovered, through careful study of the Bible and the church's early history, an understanding of Jesus's and St. Paul's high and highly counter-cultural regard for women as leaders in the church -- we have concluded that the Savior of all humanity is just as fittingly represented at the altar by a woman as a man. Roman Catholic scholarship helped make this leap of faith possible.

When The Episcopal Church shed 2,000-year-old Mediterranean gender norms, the harder debate about gay and lesbian people awaited. For making a place for all people as God made them, critics accuse us of moral relativism and abandonment of the authority of scripture. I can only speak for myself, an orthodox Christian who believes in the saving power of Christ's life, suffering, death, and bodily Resurrection as revealed in the New Testament and the creeds and traditions of the church. I'm skeptical only about the few passages that seem to command us to discriminate against woman and gay people -- friends, relatives, and colleagues living gracious, generous, faithful lives.

Perhaps because they've seen how gender and identity debates have roiled our and the other mainline denominations, Bishop Blair and his colleagues don't want any of it. That's why he doesn't quite hear what his sisters in the Leadership Council of Women Religious mean when they plead for open dialogue. He tells Gross:

[I]f by dialogue they mean that the doctrines of the church are negotiable and that the bishops represent one position and the LCWR presents another position, and somehow we find a middle ground about basic church teaching on faith and morals, then no. That's - I don't think that's the kind of dialogue that the Holy See would envision.

But if it's a dialogue about how to have the LCWR really educate and help the sisters to appreciate and accept church teaching and to implement it in their discussions and try to heal some of the questions or concerns they have about these issues, then that would be the dialogue.

I think that the fundamental faith of the Catholic Church is that there are objective truths and there are teachings of the faith that really do come from revelation and that are interpreted authentically through the teaching office of the church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and that are expected to be believed with the obedience of faith.

And those are things that are not negotiable.

Many Catholics have left the negotiating table and their church. Some have even turned up at the Lord's table in our parishes. After alluding to declining membership in the Episcopal Church, Bishop Blair seemed to bring himself up short. He may have remembered the statistics that have crossed his desk about Catholics' declining attendance at mass. Gross, his interviewer, had also reminded him about clergy abuse scandals and Catholic women's disregard for the Vatican's teachings about birth control. "Catholicism is too having its share of problems," he admitted. Indeed: A spirit-killing, extra-biblical insistence on priestly celibacy. A penchant for secrecy and coverup. And a continued insistence on the diminishment of women.

Yes, the Episcopalians are struggling because our reforms are pressing the outside of the envelope. The Roman Catholics are struggling because, for the current Vatican leadership, reform is a dead letter. I know what page I'd rather be on.

Massive Question

Those who think that anything goes in The Episcopal Church should read Mary Frances Schjonberg's coverage (supported by my Diocese of Los Angeles colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist the Rev. Pat McCaughan) of the painstaking debate about open communion that took place at our recently concluded General Convention in Indianapolis.

According to our national church's canons [I. 17. 7], only baptized persons are eligible to receive the consecrated body and blood of Christ. Feeling that the canonical requirement might impede the movement of the Holy Spirit in a spiritual searcher's life, some priests and parishes invite everyone to come to the table, baptized or not.

No one checks congregants' baptism IDs at the altar rail. The question is whether priests err by failing to articulate the rule or by flying in the face of it.

In Indianapolis, the Rev. Anna Carmichael, rector of St. Mark's in Hood River, Oregon, was part of an unsuccessful effort to persuade General Convention to abandon the requirement altogether. Her reasoning, as Schjonberg and her colleagues reported:

“While I understand that as a priest I have taken a vow to uphold the rubrics of the prayer book, I feel that sometimes pastoral care and pastoral sensitivity are equally as important as our theology behind what we do,” she said, adding that the Episcopal Church is always striving to extend its welcome to all people “and I hope that at some point our welcome will include unbaptized at the communion rail.”

In the end, the convention preserved the requirement. It even turned aside a resolution containing this sentence: “We also acknowledge that in various local contexts there is the exercise of pastoral sensitivity with those who are not yet baptized.” Opponents of the wording argued that while priests always reserve the right to make pastoral judgment calls, being that explicit would have amounted to a proclamation of open communion. At the core of the debate is TEC's passion for baptism as the first and greatest sacrament, the irreducible outward sign of membership in Christ. Some fear diluting its power by eliminating it as a condition for participating in Holy Eucharist.

Yet I'm sure most priests have a story about someone who probably wouldn't have decided to be baptized without first being welcomed to the table. At St. John's, the wording in our Sunday bulletin (inspired by another LA Diocese colleague, the Very Rev. Canon Michael Bamberger; that's he above, celebrating mass for us pilgrims last month at Emmaus-Nicopolis in Israel) probably wouldn't pass muster with the canonical cops:

Episcopalians consider all baptized persons to be members of Christ's Church. Wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are invited to come to the Lord's table and receive the Lord Jesus Christ in the consecrated Bread (or Host) and Wine.

The first sentence is designed to do two things. Roman Catholics and members of other denominations often come to an Episcopal parish wondering if they're allowed to receive. We want to be sure to tell them yes. It also implies that membership has its altar privileges, while the second sentence creates ambiguity by implying that membership doesn't matter when it comes to Holy Communion. Folks have asked me about the ambiguity and ended up baptized, marked as Christ's own forever, as a result. The more traditional approach, of course, is to honor baptism by refusing Holy Eucharist to the unbaptized. That's the way my Roman Catholic wife and fellow St. John's minister, Kathy O'Connor, grew up.

Even though TEC doesn't require it, some families prefer to wait until their baptized children are old enough to understand the significance of Holy Eucharist. For such families at St. John's, Randall and Kristen Lanham offer wonderful early communion classes each spring, the Episcopal equivalent of the first communion process in Roman Catholic parishes.

If parents are willing, I and most priests will give communion to anyone old enough to exhibit the curiosity and a tooth or two. We figure that people are more likely to make a habit of church attendance if they can't remember a time when they weren't welcome at the Lord's table. And welcome is the operative word. In an era of mounting skepticism about the institutional church, it's unwise for any denomination or parish to fail to make hospitality a core value.

Besides, if we should stick slavishly to I. 17. 7 and try to keep the unbaptized from the communion rail, our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters may have done us one better. Many have had the experience of being told one has to be a baptized Roman Catholic to receive communion. God bless those priests, especially at funerals, who make a point of saying that all are welcome, even though by doing so they're violating Vatican rules. That's why I never ask for the sacrament in a Catholic church when there's a chance that the priest knows I'm not one of his own. Why force my brother either to deny me the body of Christ or violate canon law?

For whatever reason, in late June we St. John's pilgrims didn't have to display that kind of sensitivity during an early-morning mass in the grotto at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. We stood a few steps from the traditional place of Jesus's birth as a Franciscan priest from Italy served us each Holy Communion. The photo at right above shows pilgrim Christian Kassoff being communicated.

The priest may have thought we were Roman. He may not have cared. But when I blogged about the experience, my friend Charles Frazee, a specialist in church history and his Roman Catholic church, wanted to be sure I understood that no Catholic priest is permitted to deny the sacrament to someone who seeks it, baptized Catholic or not, unless the person is known to be guilty of a grave sin (being Episcopalian isn't included). TEC doesn't have that kind of universal access stipulation in our canons. So, um, are we really stricter than the pope?

W. D. J. Really Think?

The Rt. Rev. Stacy F. Sauls, former bishop of Lexington, Kentucky, now serves as CEO of The Episcopal Church. In a letter published today in the Wall Street Journal rebutting a column by a disgruntled New York layman, Bishop Sauls writes:

The church has been captive to the dominant culture, which has rewarded it with power, privilege and prestige for a long, long time. The Episcopal Church is now liberating itself from that, and as the author correctly notes, paying the price. I hardly see paying the price as what ails us. I see it as what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Many years ago when I was a parish priest in Savannah, a local politician and disaffected Episcopalian began a conversation with me. In that case the subject was homosexuality. It could have been any of the things mentioned last week as our ailments. "I just think the church should not be governed by the culture," he said. I replied that I agreed with him, but that "I just hadn't noticed that the culture was all that hospitable toward gay people." He stammered. "Well, maybe not here in Georgia."

The Episcopal Church is on record as standing by those the culture marginalizes whether that be nonwhite people, female people or gay people. The author calls that political correctness hostile to tradition.

I call it profoundly countercultural but hardly untraditional. In fact, it is deeply true to the tradition of Jesus, Jesus who offended the "traditionalists" of his own day, Jesus who was known to associate with the less than desirable, Jesus who told his followers to seek him among the poor.

The bishop's argument is eloquent but a little off point. Back in Georgia, he delicately maneuvered his friend into admitting that their state was hostile to gays and lesbians. Since then, the U.S. public, led by our young people, has grown far more accepting. Americans' support for gay marriage appears to increase month to month. The elite culture, especially opinion leaders in the media and popular culture, is militantly hostile to homophobia, and rightly so. And though we haven't fully lived into the democratic imperative of honoring the dignity of each individual and offering opportunity to all, it's also an exaggeration to say that our society marginalizes ethnic minorities and women.

Anyway, in our common struggle for human dignity, it's hard to say who's governing whom. Church people have been part of all our great civil rights movements, as have the unchurched. In formalizing equity in law and canon, sometimes secular society has led the way, other times the church. Today, TEC and what Bishop Sauls calls the dominant culture (especially its judges, DAs, and civil rights divisions) are essentially synchronizing.

So with apologies to the bishop, we actually haven't liberated ourselves from the culture. We have, however, pretty much liberated ourselves from members of our own covenant. He appears to be putting the best possible face on what amounts to us Christians' failure to remain in dialogue and community -- left and right, progressive and conservative, gay- and women-friendly and not. One may assign the blame for our separations and schisms however one wishes. But a failure is a failure. Alienation is alienation. While we honor Christ by welcoming all into his body, there are members of the body we don't much care for. The left hand is often appalled by what the right hand is doing, and vice versa. Christianity is a divided house, and we may remember what our LORD said on that subject.

We're all hopeful that the mainline church's center of gravity is shifting to a place where it will attract those who would never have worshiped with us 30 years ago. But will the secular-minded elites who in all sincerity applaud our enlightenment on identity and gender actually come on Sunday morning to participate in our communities, in the sacraments, in practices and disciplines that call everyone, even the exceptionally enlightened, to humility, repentance, and amendment of life? We may say that it's all up to God. But unless they do come, we will also have also liberated ourselves from the imperative of evangelism.

The Episcopal Church is doing better than its critics claim. Many of our parishes and missions are thriving as inclusive, loving, service-driven communities. And yet I fear our secular political partners on a whole array of issues view us progressive Christian soldiers as objects of curiosity and sympathy as much as sources of inspiration. From a secular perspective, Christ's whole church appears to be diffuse in its core message, even dying, in large part as a result of its failure to transcend its internal tensions and contradictions and keep both left and right wings under the mighty shadow of our Creator and the abiding hope of the Resurrection. In the end, Jesus -- who loves unity as well as justice -- might not be quite as pleased with any of us as we may think.

Don't Douthat

Everyone seems to be on about The Episcopal Church's recent General Convention in Indianapolis (where it adopted a provisional rite for the blessing of same-gender unions and banned discrimination against transgender people in Holy Orders) and Ross Douthat's reflections on the decline of what he calls liberal Christianity, which concludes:

The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that perhaps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.

Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

By equating religious with political liberalism, Douthat misses or avoids what really ails the body of Christ. Profoundly varying ideas about Imago Dei account for our greatest divisions. In the churches which Douthat doesn't think are on the verge of extinction, there are God, the angels, males, and the rest of creation. Almost all growing or stable churches ban women from the pulpit or ordained ministry. These include most megachurches, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches -- as a matter of fact, pretty much everybody. Look at it this way. There are a little over two billion Christians in the world. About two billion worship according to authorities, doctrines, and creeds that marginalize or silence women when it comes to leadership and ordained ministry.

For reasons known best to them, many, maybe even most, of the women in these denominations seem to be okay with being second-class ecclesiasticitizens. Only in a few isolated corners of Christendom -- the mainline denominations in the increasingly secular industrialized world -- have women insisted on the inerrancy of Holy Scripture insofar as Gen. 1:27b is concerned: "In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

Let's say for purposes of argument that, worldwide, 50 million Christians participate in non-gender oppressive church structures. That's probably optimistic. Even if it's true, then Douthat's liberal Christians comprise less than three percent of the faith. I suppose someone could write an op-ed demanding that churches overseeing the faith lives of the remaining 97% of the world's Christians should (to borrow Douthat's language) change or die. If they were excluding blacks, Latinos, or any ethnic group from leadership and ordained ministry, such a critic would probably get a ready hearing, while pious orations about the true faith coming from those in the oppressor churches would not be especially in vogue.

It does seem to be less of a scandal, compared to other forms of bias and discrimination, that almost every church in the world keeps women down. As it is, most critics of the so-called liberals rarely mention gender. You may think it's because they don't want to call attention to their greatest vulnerability, but they probably don't see it that way. They have scripture and tradition on their side, or so it may appear. Where's the gender equity in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the 12 disciples, or certain Pauline restrictions on the role of women in church?

There are satisfactory answers to all these questions. The narratives and doctrines of orthodox Christianity come from the first five centuries of the first millennium, whereas women's equality (in human eyes as opposed to God's and Christ's) is a modern concept. Fears and misunderstandings about women run deep in human culture. Even the land of the free and home of the brave practiced gender apartheid until 1920, when women got the vote. Oppressive church structures have proved far more resilient.

Christianity's real crisis is whether a wholly Christian sense of a creating, saving, supernatural divinity can transcend the global church's prevailing medievalism. The Episcopal Church took a giant step in that direction in the 1970s, when it began ordaining women as priests. It stands out among other mainline denominations which have taken the same step because it has taken the perilous next step of venturing a modern conception of how gay, lesbian, and transgender people fit into the Imago Dei. Radio talk show hosts will always yuck it up and take cheap shots about gay bishops and priests in drag. But it's exceedingly ironic to spend your Sunday morning in the pew next to women who are banned from the priesthood (not to mention girls who would make great priests when they grow up) and then write articles criticizing The Episcopal Church for its differing application of equality under God.

Again ironically, most of these critics are now on the political right. Laurie Goldstein reported last week that the church's choices about same-sex unions and transgender people meant it was moving further to the left. It's conservatives' shame that affording dignity to individuals in all their God-endowed diversity is now construed as leftist.

This is not to say that Douthat doesn't make some good points. We can make the pursuit of equality for ourselves and the groups of which we're members an end in itself. We justice-obsessed church people can all too easily adopt the language and cynical tactics of the politicians. Even worse, we may be tempted to abandon the language and even essence of orthodoxy.

Many have abandoned the church completely because they can't abide or forgive its legacy of prejudice. Perhaps it's just my own privileged background that enables me to believe we can strip away prejudice while still proclaiming the forgiveness, salvation, and hope obtained for all people by the death and bodily resurrection of the Son of God. As long as Douthat's wondering what will save the church in the 21st century, I'd say it's an inclusive, muscular neoorthodoxy that is less concerned with gender and sexual identity and interfaith alignment, that unapologetically proclaims the unique teaching and saving power of the Incarnation and Resurrection.

And yet what's worse: Soft-pedaling orthodoxy to make the church more attractive to the skeptical, abused, and marginalized, or failing even to admit the unbridgeable contradiction between God's heart for justice and the unjust oppression of women and others still being practiced throughout his global church? Liberal Christianity's critics enjoy comparing attendance numbers and the size of the Sunday collection. And yet I seem to remember our LORD saying something about money and rendering unto Caesar. TEC's struggles are emblematic of a quest for an understanding of the mind of God and his transcendent love for all his people that most of Christ's church in all its prosperity refuses even to contemplate, much less venture. Its authorities and officials, including Benedict XVI, aren't even stuck in the 20th century. They're stuck in the post-Constantinian fourth -- because, frankly, once you let the women back into leadership, God knows what happens next.

My Sunday sermon on these subjects is here. Since people like to say that Anglicans and Episcopalians owe their churches to Henry VIII's divorce, it's important to remember that Jesus's public ministry was ignited by the killing of John the Baptist, which occurred because of Herod Antipas's divorce and marriage to his niece Herodias. That first-century Galilean homewrecker is shown above in Paul Delaroche's conception. Sometimes the church really does seem to be all about sex -- or at least the complexity of human relationship in contrast to the unity to which God calls all his people in Christ.

And Speaking of Bishops

Jon Bruno stole the show at General Convention, and he wasn't even there.

Limning Some Historic Limestone

From our diocese's daily e-mail from The Episcopal Church's triennial General Convention in Indianapolis, we learn that Bishop Suffragan Mary Douglas Glasspool is combining theology with geology:

Having arrived Monday night, I left the hotel early Tuesday morning to go for a run. The J.W. Marriott Hotel, where the Los Angeles deputation is staying, is adjacent to White River State Park, a lovely area that encompasses the Indianapolis Zoo, White River Gardens, and a limestone walkway along the (you guessed it) White River. As I was running on the walkway, I suddenly noticed several carvings and inscriptions in the wall that borders the walkway and one struck a chord of recognition: the Washington National Cathedral! For 24 hours I puzzled over why the Washington National Cathedral should have a place alongside the Indiana State Capitol Building and the Empire State Building, and it finally occurred to me (duh!) that perhaps our National Cathedral was built out of Indiana limestone. I checked out this supposition with the Bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, and found that to be the case. Mystery solved!

Photo by Bishop Mary

Shedding Divestments

Mainline churches invest billions on behalf of their retired employees. Should they punish Israel for its occupation of the West Bank by selling stock in companies that do business in Israel or are accused of de facto support for the occupation? The Episcopal Church considers the question at its triennial General Convention this week and next in Indianapolis. Our bishop in Los Angeles, Jon Bruno, opposes divestment and boycotts, as does Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. From Indianapolis, Matthew Davies surveys all the pending proposals for the Episcopal News Service:

Jefferts Schori visited Israel and the West Bank in 2008. Asked about divestment, she told ENS in a recent interview that the Christian tradition “generally has not been to shun people. It has been to call people to greater engagement … and relationship, and I think that is especially needed in the land of the Holy One right now.”

During an Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles gathering in March, Jefferts Schori urged Episcopalians to “invest in legitimate development in Palestine’s West Bank and in Gaza” rather than focus on divestment or boycotts of Israel.

If people have particular concerns about corporations’ policies, she told ENS, “then positive engagement would mean to become a shareholder and go to a shareholders meeting and challenge the administration of the corporation. It’s a positive response rather than a negative one.”

By a narrow margin, our Presbyterian brothers and sisters said no to divestment yesterday at their biennial meeting in Pittsburgh.

The Remembrance Of Them Is Grievous Unto Us

The Huffington Post (which has the best and most coverage of spirituality and religion of any mainstream publication) on the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer, which was yesterday. They used to say a properly educated newspaperman knew Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. My newspaperwoman mother would add the prayer book, which she said taught her the glorious cadences of the English language (making May 2 the birthday of her composition professor). This bit of the General Confession is from the 1928 edition, which she gave me when I was confirmed on April 30, 1967 at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit.

Faith And Minds Alive

What a wonderful time to be a Christian, and an Episcopalian. Above is a fascinating hour-long conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Then my Nixon buddy Paul Matulic pointed out this Slate exchange between Douthat and William Saletan as well as the fact that the New York Times turned to an Episcopal priest, Randall Balmer, to review Douthat's book:

Although Douthat’s grasp of American religious history is sometimes tenuous — he misdates the Second Great Awakening, mistakes Puritans for Pilgrims and erroneously traces the disaffection of American Catholics to the Second Vatican Council rather than the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” — there is much to commend his argument. Yes, the indexes of religious adherence are down, and the quality of religious discourse in America has diminished since the 1950s, in part because of the preference for therapy over theology. Theological illiteracy is appalling; many theologians, like academics generally, prefer to speak to one another rather than engage the public.

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries. I suspect, moreover, that Douthat has overestimated the influence of intellectual trends like the Jesus Seminar. The thinkers he quotes are important, but I would also recommend the lesser-known work of writers like Roger Olson, Jean Sulivan, Doug Frank, Miroslav Volf and David James Duncan as evidence of the vitality of Christian thinking; they may occasionally poke provocatively at the edges of orthodoxy, but most do so from well within its frame. Finally, the fact that we are having this conversation at all (much less in the pages of this newspaper) is testament to the enduring relevance of faith in what sociologists long ago predicted would be a secular society.

Chuck Colson's Redirected Zeal

Mark Ellis on the conversion experience of Chuck Colson, who died Saturday:

[A]s Colson awaited arrest and prosecution for his Watergate involvement, Tom Phillips, then president of Raytheon, invited Colson to his home and witnessed to him about Jesus Christ.

“I left his house that night shaken by the words he had read from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity about pride,” Colson wrote in 2008. “It felt as if Lewis were writing about me, former Marine captain, Special Counsel to the President of the United States, now in the midst of the Watergate scandal. I had an overwhelming sense that I was unclean.”

After Colson left Philips, he got into his car, but couldn’t drive away. The conviction of the Holy Spirit came upon him and he began to weep, “I couldn’t (drive). I was crying too hard – and I was not one to ever cry.” “I spent an hour calling out to God. I did not even know the right words. I simply knew that I wanted Him. And I knew for certain that the God who created the universe heard my cry.”

At that pivotal moment, Colson was born again. “From the next morning to this day, I have never looked back. I can honestly say that the worst day of the last 35 years has been better than the best days of the 41 years that preceded it. That’s a pretty bold statement, given my time in prison, three major surgeries, and two kids with cancer at the same time, but it is absolutely true.”

The former counselor to the most powerful man on earth began to serve the King above every earthly king, which gave Colson’s life renewed purpose. From that day forward, he knew he belonged to Christ and he was “on earth to advance His Kingdom.”

And that he did, as a model of repentance and a prison ministry innovator whose work blessed the lives of tens of thousands of convicts and their families. Some were skeptical about the sincerity of his conversion, possibly because he seemed no less intensely results-driven than he'd been in politics. But grace had transformed Colson's priorities, not his temperament. Like St. Paul after he'd forsaken his persecution of Christians in favor of church-building, Colson was as zealous for Christ as he had been for Nixon. He even took on some of the trappings of the executive. When we hosted a Prison Fellowship donor event at the Nixon library, smooth-talking Colson aides arrived a day early wearing  blue blazers and PF lapel pins. They were as focused on pulling off a well-choreographed event for the boss as Nixon's factotums had been back in the day -- all the advance-man basics such as making sure the microphone was properly positioned and the drinking water in place, holding room properly arranged, and schedule double-checked.

When I was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2004, Colson sent me a Bible with a gracious inscription and called to offer congratulations and blessings. He said he was sure I'd be a good evangelical preacher. While I sent him some sermons, I can't recall if he responded. I assume he found my big-tent Anglicanism to be a bit pallid. He and my church definitely differed on whether gay and lesbian people should be afforded full sacramental status. In one of his last columns, he continued to assert that homosexual relations were inherently sinful. Giving in to Nixonian hyperbole for old time's sake, he vowed not to be cowed into silence by those writing press releases for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, preposterously implying that its criticism of his statements about homosexuality was comparable to his being on an IRA hit list or receiving death threat during Watergate.

When he called in 2004, Colson told me that he was pleased that another Nixon associate had joined the ranks of the converted or ordained -- meaning himself, another Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder, who became a Presbyterian minister, and Jonathan Aitken, a disgraced British politician who was Nixon's friend and biographer and later wrote a book about Colson. (During his celebrated visit to the Nixon library in 2009, John Dean asked Kathy to be sure to tell me that he'd been an Episcopal acolyte.) I chose not to say that, of this quartet of Nixon Christian soldiers, I was the only one who hadn't been in the slammer. My call to ordained ministry hadn't to do with being loyal to Nixon to the point of criminality but to a considerable extent with being viewed as disloyal by members of his family.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Hat tip to Carolyn Dennington

Meaning And Mechanism

TEC's presiding bishop (and presiding oceanographer) Katharine Jefferts Schori is featured on the Huffington Post talking about science and religion. Science is about mechanism, while faith is about ultimate meaning, she says; using both views at once gives us "better depth perception."