Trailer for For the Bible Tells Me so

Passed, Nov 15, 2008

Resolved, that the Eighty-Seventh Convention of the Diocese of Western North Carolina, believing that our commitment to the Anglican Communion and our commitment to dismantling structures of discrimination are expressions of the same inexhaustible love, call upon the 76th General Convention to enact legislation to insure that sexual orientation cease to be a barrier for full inclusion in The Episcopal Church.

2008 Resolution

Following a year of study, prayer, conversation and discernment, the 'Call to Listen Committee' (responding to Res #10, 2007) has written a resolution to be considered at our 2008 convention. As chair, I'd like to thank the committee members for their wisdom, their many hours of hard work, and their deep affection for the diocese. --Michael Hudson

Resolved, that the Eighty-Seventh Convention of the Diocese of Western North Carolina, believing that our commitment to the Anglican Communion and our commitment to dismantling structures of discrimination are expressions of the same inexhaustible love, call upon the 76th General Convention to enact legislation to insure that sexual orientation cease to be a barrier for full inclusion in The Episcopal Church.

from Porter's Last Lambeth Blog

The draft of the report is on the Lambeth Website. I would just remind you before you read it that it's a report, not a resolution. It is a record of the conversation, not the mind of the Church. This is especially important as concerns the Proposed Covenant. The timeline for that document is (I think) as follows:

+The Drafting Group meets again in late September to revisit the document in light of Lambeth and other feedback.

+They present a report to all the Provinces (national churches) and invite comments between the fall and March 2009.

+They meet again in April 2009 to rewrite the Covenant given the new input.

+They send a new draft to the Anglican Consultative Council in May 2009.

+The ACC will either recommend it or rewrite it or send it back to the Drafting Committee or table it.

+If sent out, all Provinces will vote on it---(it's unclear if that would mean the General Convention 2009 or 2112 or The Episcopal Church).

Therefore, nothing has been ratified here. We have talked about it but not voted on it.

Sunday we have the final plenary. I would anticipate that is a time for summing everything up.

The gift of being here is to know the wideness of the Communion by experience and relationships. The challenge, I think, is to do better at letting Anglicans across the world know about us. I am simply stunned by the lack of reliable information about The Episcopal Church. Few people know anything about our response to the Windsor Report. We cannot do anything about the past, but we can and must do better about getting our story out to our brothers and sisters across the globe.

I would also add that in many ways the experience is the product. If indeed the "bonds of affection" across the Communion have been strained, then our time together is a way of strengthening them. There has been a healing here and a resolve to look at each other differently in the future.

No doubt some will say "You didn't do anything," but I think that's a limited and outside view. We changed our perspective which in itself is doing a great deal. One of the English bishops said, "No one is clapping but the Holy Spirit." I think a lot of people (like me) are clapping but I know the Holy Spirit is. "How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! "

I will be reporting back to the diocese in various ways.

Keep us in your prayers as I keep you in mine.

+Porter

Gene Robinson in England

Lambeth 2008 Opens

Whether one agrees with Bsp. Robinson or not, the attitude he takes with him to Lambeth is an attitude each of us might take day by day to our places, our work in the world. He was quoted by the AP yesterday:

"I so want to be a good steward of this opportunity. I want to do God proud. I have this wonderful opportunity to bring hope to people who find the church a hopeless place."

Exodus or Enslavement, by Daniel O. Snyder

Exodus is an inspiring story and has been used in countless sermons and spiritual writings. It is the founding narrative not only for Jews and Christians but its underlying archetypal image is found in nearly all religious traditions. I find it, therefore, deeply disturbing that The Exodus, of all narratives, would be used to describe a conference being held this week at Ridgecrest, the Southern Baptist regional conference center near Black Mountain. Exodus International is an organization for people who presume to ?heal? homosexuality. What I find particularly distressing, in addition to the obvious homophobia, is the desecration of a foundational narrative of a religious tradition I cherish. It is a sacrilege.

I?m choosing my words carefully. ?Desecration? means to abuse or destroy that which is holy or sacred. A ?sacrilege? is a crime. The word is derived from sacrum and legere and means, literally ?to steal sacred things.?

In my work as a pastoral psychotherapist and spiritual director I often work with people who are struggling to understand their sexuality in light of their faith. Regardless of orientation, faithful human beings want to grow in spiritual discernment. They also want to name the truth about who they are, and to know that their love and their sexual expression of it is blessed by God, and that they can live as whole beings in a committed, spiritually grounded partnership. We all have much to learn about sexuality and spirituality but this is a process that requires prayer and discernment, not ideology. For Exodus International, ideology trumps discernment and ?Exodus? becomes enslavement to the views of those who presume to speak for God.

Of the many powerful narratives in scripture, the Exodus story is perhaps one of the richest in its imagery of the journey from enslavement to freedom. As such it offers unlimited possibilities for spiritual practice. It is truly a sacred narrative precisely because it comes alive again and again whenever someone turns to God in prayer. It is therefore a sacrilege, literally a theft of the sacred, to force this narrative into the service of an ideology. That which is holy is desecrated, abused, and distorted when we reduce God to the measure of our fears. Inviting others to participate in such desecration, offering ?healing? in the name of ideology, and standing as gatekeeper to the sacred, is to distort the spiritual journey and to use sacred narrative as bait for entrapment. It is, frankly, abusive.

Like other forms of abuse, spiritual abuse is often delivered with warmth, kindness, and in the name of love. Exodus International will offer hugs, celebration, Eucharist. There will be pastoral prayers, hymns, and the joyful embrace of community. Nor will any of this be offered with any evil intent. Indeed, it will be offered in all innocence, with the best of intentions and good will, with heartfelt conviction and genuine desire ? all in the name of ideology. However innocently offered, it is still spiritual abuse.

To those at Exodus International I would say that, obviously, there are lots of ways to have this conversation. We could discuss the Biblical texts; we could debate what is ?Christian;? we could argue on the basis of theology, sociology, science, or psychology. But, as we all know, these conversations rarely lead to ideological agreement. So let?s forego the Scripture wars. Let?s not stake out ideological positions, invent gods to support them, and then force religious narratives into their service. Let?s just agree that God wants to lead us all to freedom, and that the Exodus is a journey that can be discovered again and again in the present moment. I have read the Exodus International website and considered your arguments; now I would invite you to consider the possibility that God might be calling you to an Exodus out of homophobia. I would invite you to hear the prophetic voice that is rising up in our gay and lesbian communities, telling us that homophobia is a fear that God seeks to heal, indeed that God has already healed it in a growing number of congregations. To those who presume to ?heal? homosexuality, I say let?s all heal our homophobia so that we can come to a common table where faithful people, gay and straight, can all grow and learn together about the wonderful diversity of God?s creation.

Daniel O. Snyder, PhD

Black Mountain, NC

(Snyder is in clinical practice in Black Mountain, and is an active member of Swannanoa Valley Friends Meeting (Quaker). For confirmation, his phone number is: 828/664-2014. Email: dansnyder@alumni.guilford.edu.

Leading Evangelical Offended by GAFCON

The Rt Rev Dr Tom Wright, a leading Evangelical Anglican bishop in the Church of England has said that the tactics of a new factional network within Anglicanism amount to "bullying".

Speaking on the BBC's World at One news programme, the Bishop of Durham, the fourth most senior post in the Church of England, also a noted New Testament scholar, said that the action taken by leaders of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) were also "deeply offensive".

Dr Wright, a key figure for conservative evangelicals inside and outside Anglicanism, said that GADCON was "taking a global sledgehammer to crack the American nut" in setting up the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA) - variously described as a breakaway, an alternative and a renewal movement.

The US reference was to the ordination of openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. (Listen to the interview here--and ponder, will GAFCON perhaps help English bishops better understand cross-boundary meddling in North American?)

Dr Wright had earlier written a more friendly article on the GAFCON conference for the evangelical group Fulcrum, which seeks to harmonize different strands of the movement - itself sometimes deeply divided.

"I spend 90 to 100 hours a week doing the work of the gospel in my diocese," said Bishop Wright. "To be told that I now need to be authorized ... by a group of primates somewhere else who come in and tell me which doctrines I should sign up to is not only ridiculous, it is deeply offensive."

He added: "The idea that they have a monopoly on biblical truth simply won't do. We must stand up to this. It is a kind of bullying."

From Ekklesia

19 Parishes Represented

The Rev. Susan Sherard was both pragmatic and inspiring as she spoke about listening.

The Workshop portion of A Call To Listen is now passed. Yet opportunities to be creative in the way we learn, have conversations, and prepare for convention continue. It was wonderful to see nineteen different parishes represented Saturday and to be with the fifty people who came to learn and share, to think through and begin to sketch design plans for their own parishes.

If you missed the workshop, ALL THE MATERIALS are available online. And new material will continue to be added.

Transcending Pride & Prejudice, John Rice

Rublev's Trinity

God’s love and welcome, as extended to my wife and myself in the mid 1970’s, first drew me to the Episcopal Church while living in northern Vermont. Since those days, I have worshiped in many other Episcopal Churches from Vermont to North Carolina, having been blessed to pastor three of them. What they all have had in common is God’s love for all who walk through their doors. Never have I seen church membership requirement based upon one’s sexual orientation. I give God thanks for this!

I guess in some ways, we are all sheltered from the realities of others. This certainly is true for both gay people and those that are straight. We obviously are not comfortable to walk in each others shoes; thus, it is amazingly difficult to understand the others perspective on the issues of our sexual orientation and how this informs and shapes our life together as communities of faith. We basically are not listening to one another, which makes it so challenging, if not impossible, to hear each others concerns and pain. For example, do we as a church know the deep pain that our homosexual brothers and sisters carry due to experiences of being judged, rejected and left to feel unwelcomed by heterosexual Christians. At the same time, do those who support the move towards blessing same sex unions understand that such a blessing would be seen as a painful betrayal by thousands of Episcopalians who have sought God’s ways through scripture, tradition, and reason.

Our church, the body of Christ that we refer to as the Episcopal Church, is being bruised and battered. We have become so very good at articulating our differences. However, we tend to lack the grace-filled eloquence of what we have in common – the love of God for all people as witnessed to us by the words and deeds of Jesus. O Lord, help us to move into listening that takes us into seeing – into conversations and dialogues that peak with such statements, “Oh, I really understand … I really ‘see’ what you’ve been saying.”

I must admit that I have stopped listening to the debate on sexual orientation - of whether it is a sin or not a sin. Whether my interpretation of scripture is right and yours is wrong. Why have I stopped listening? Because the air waves and written words are jammed with statements laden with judgment, anger, prejudice, and pride. It is like a husband and wife who go to marriage counseling. The counselor asks them to share what has been going on. Each is very good at pointing out the sins of the other, while neglecting their own. The power of prejudice, of seeing the other person in ways that are less than who God creates us to be, is rampant. Pride, the power of seeing myself as being more than who God creates me to be, is just as strong. We have our own reality show. We could call it the Episcopal Churches version of Pride and Prejudice.

Where do we go from here? I think we must go to God, seeking God’s deep Spirit-filled counsel. And we must go together – gays and straights, ‘Anglicans’ and Episcopalians. I believe that we are being given the opportunity to listen to God’s truth as revealed by God’s Spirit, and as best we can articulate these revelations to one another. Godly listening moves us towards the possibility of reconciliation. Reconciliation is only a short step from words of forgiveness. Forgiveness always brings resurrection – the gift of new life in our relationships with one another, the gift of new life within our churches, the gift of new life within God’s Episcopal Church. I pray this may become our new reality, with God’s help!

Saints at the River, Betsy Swift

Howe Caverns

My experience as a lesbian and as a Christian starts where all such stories start - in darkness. In one sense I refer to the darkness of the womb, for I have been all of this since before I was born. In another sense, however I mean of course the darkness of confusion, because nothing in my girlhood in a stereotypic Irish Catholic family prepared me to integrate sexuality and spirituality - much less an "alternative" sexuality! These matters were never spoken of, but heterosexuality was assumed, by family, community, and so by myself.

I am sure I never heard the words lesbian or gay growing up, but somehow absorbed the shame associated with being "that way," most likely from the pamphlet rack at the back of church. Nevertheless, I grew up in the church and it nourished my mind and spirit. When I later met the person I knew I wanted to marry, and it was another woman - I was immeasurably shaken, and began the journey of integration of sexuality and spirituality - but it began with the disintegration of all that I had held most dear up to that point.

A few years later, I had the great experience of visiting Howe Caverns in Central New York State. I had always been fascinated by the idea of these caves and rock formations underground, but this was my first visit. For $5.00 you get an elevator ride down 20 stories - the equivalent of a modest skyscraper, only down. I was thrilled by the tour of stalagmites and stalactites, the opalescent limestone, the constant year-round temperature of 57 degrees. What really surprised me, though, was the river. I didn't know that - there's a river running through the cavern, not stagnant, but flowing water - it's this river that has, over the millennia, carved out the cavern.

I was satisfied with having finally seen stalagmites and stalactites first hand, happy that I had made the time to take in this little natural wonder, but what stayed with me from the trip was that river. It haunted me, and became quite a useful image for me, in terms of articulating my experience of spirituality, as a lesbian in a sort of post-christian point in my life.

I came to think of spirituality as a great underground river - this underground river flowing through the whole human family, and the various religions as wells that tap down into that river from the surface. So, around these wells we learn as children to celebrate holidays and to associate the great truths we were taught with the seasons of the year. For example, near the darkest night of the year, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus who is called the light of the world - and almost every culture on earth holds similar feasts celebrating the return of the light. So likewise as we in the Northern Hemisphere experience spring as rebirth, the celebrations of Easter and Passover became intimately connected to the experience of spring.

These experiences of religion on the "surface," around the well, take us down to the river - to the deep human experience of spirituality and connection to something beyond ourselves. The well gives us names for it, but at the river we are speechless.

So, when we lesbian and gay folk are told that we are sinners, that we are unacceptable as members of the community or as ministers, or that our families are defective - the pain of this rejection is not only that, but is the pain of loss and dislocation as well. The loss of access to our spirituality can be as painful as the loss of a family, or of one's whole culture.

Some of us find other paths, other wells, and find again a point of access to that river. But for some, those images and symbols etched deep in us in childhood continue to have the most power, and we resolve to find our way back home - without denying ourselves - either our gay and lesbian selves or our spiritual selves.

For those of us who were raised in the christian traditions this raises some interesting challenges: "Christian" is a scary word in gay & lesbian communities. Prominent "Christians" are often heard spreading disinformation about us in the media, railing against our right to exist, lobbying for the homophobia agenda, operating treatment centers to "cure" us. But "Christian" is also in some sense the name of my family of origin. I found that I could escape being Christian about as successfully as I could deny being Irish, or stop being one of the Swift kids.

As a catholic christian, I learned my prayers before I went to school, the smell of incense and the swish of vestments are among my earliest memories. The rhythms of the church seasons of repentance, celebration and waiting are part of my blood. I can't change that, that's what takes me down to the river.

As an adult, it's important to go beyond these primal memories. To go from the well to the river below. As a Christian, what I know about the river, I know about from the person of Jesus. That's where I found the key to reclaiming the name "Christian" from the forces of hate.

So the journey through the darkness of confusion, back home to a place of community and faith, was for me a process of reclaiming, reaffirming, owning my experience. My experience of my own humanity (sexuality + spirituality finally not in conflict) and God's word saying "It is good." Who can say exactly how that happened? It is the story of a life, it happens under the surface, like the secret life of mushrooms, so much more than ever meets the eye.

My partner Barbara and I found our way to the Episcopal Church where we are able to be open, and where we have found not only acceptance, but real participation in the life of the community. This has been soothing and healing, but the journey goes on. Just as Jesus sent the ones he healed to serve, or to carry a message, not just back to their same lives.

I am proud of the journey that the Church is also on, and pray that we will have the courage to live the truth of inclusion that the Spirit has shown us in community.

Betsy Swift is a parishioner at St. David’s, Cullowhee.