Whoever Isn't Against You is For You

Just a quick note. I just endured a three hour meeting and spent another hour and a half finishing up a difficult statistical issue in paper/research I'm doing at the moment. So I'm going to share some thoughts and then go home and watch some miniseries on Elizabeth I I'm supposed to get from Netflix this evening.


This morning, I was friended on Facebook by a stranger. This happens every once in a while. Lately, the friend requests have been getting so strange as to be spammy. So I've generally been rejecting them. This request was from what I might describe as a High Church Pentecostal with Anglican leanings. Clergy-in-training, interested in liturgy, studying for a Ph.D. In other words, the exact kind of person I usually socialize with by Internet ;)

And this man was the kind of person not easily classified in the liberal theological kind of box I worship in on Sundays, where traditional Christianity is the tool of the capitalist, imperalist oppressor. The kind of person interested in loose denominational structures and fighting racism and economic disenfranchisement in the inner city, but clearly has connections among those bogeymen denounced at the pulpit most Sundays including folks at conservative Episcopal seminaries from familiar countries with familiar surnames.

Well, I sent him a message asking him if I actually knew him. He replied that he didn't, but he saw that we had lived in some common places, had some common interests, and (since I was an Episcopalian), he just wanted to connect with fellow Anglicans. I friended him immediately. Maybe, I'll run into him in real life soon. I hope so.

It's a common story in Laodicea. To go from liberal to conservative Anglicanism here (and not just wishy-washy varieties either, but true centers of thought and action), you need only to cross the street. It's called Las Robles, and I know people who do so and have done so.

Laodicea is in this way amazing, and I'm fairly sure God brought me here for two reasons: (1) to provide Martian weather services and (2) to see the split in Anglicanism across a gulf of 200 m. I'm also suspecting there's a third reason that may combine the two somehow, but the Lord remains vague on the issue.

I tell this story as an introduction to my feelings about what went on in San Joaquin last weekend, which are mixed to say the least. What can you say about a Diocese in which the Bishop subverted the letter and the spirit of the discipline of this Church unto perpetual scandal and a Presiding Bishop who pretty much did likewise to relieve the uncertainty and fear of those bereaved and scandalized? Say what you may about Fr. Martins of Carioca Confessions, but he's right that the Presiding Bishop can't call Special Conventions by fiat and dismiss a Standing Committee by edict. The Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor seem to be operating on that great elastic principle of American constitutional law: that the Constitution of the General Convention is not a suicide pact. I don't know if the Presiding Bishop has a coat of arms, but I'd put as her motto now, et ultra viros et ultra vires .

But I wasn't unmoved by the reports at Fr. Jake's place. People asking basic questions about Integrity. I think I've known about Integrity since I was knee high. People out under the shadow of a bullying hierarch longing for new life. It's a Diocese whose renaissance I pray for several times a week. I can't be unsympathetic.

But I also can't be unsympathetic to a Standing Committee illegally ejected, despite their standing on a tacet, nolit consentire. In a church where we sometimes show surprising mercy to those guilty of crime and immorality, we seem to have little care for those caught in an echo chamber, in a grex clericorum of enablers, who allow a few legal machinations to pass by them. And when they see the horror and ridiculousness of what they've allowed, they indicate their willingness to proceed by canonical process, only to see canonical process thrown out of the window by the +Squid and the Ale.

I think this travesty will pass over, no matter what. But to people my age who look on these events in later years, I can tell you that it will be hard to pass beyond the power games on one side of the Anglican wars when the power games on the other side are this striking.