1. On Quotes and Tattoos

If this blog had arms, I would tattoo this quote from Michael Curry around its bicep:

“Our commitment to be an inclusive church is not based on a social theory or capitulation to the ways of the culture, but on our belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are a sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all.”

For the other arm, I might go with this one from Jim Naughton: “We can’t repent what isn’t a sin.”

Those phrases came, of course, in response to the decision by the Anglican Primates Meeting to suspend the Episcopal Church from decision-making bodies for three years as a result of its support for LGBT rights, including marriage. That decision is disappointing, though, as the Reverend Mike Angell outlines here, it won’t change anything in the day-to-day life of the Episcopal Church. Nor will it result in the church being kicked out of the Anglican Communion, or anything like that.

 2. The Episcopal “Consequence” and the Religious Right

The reaction to the vote by American conservatives is exactly why I’ve paused my conversations with the Religious Right. Here’s old favorite Dwight Longenecker, for example, with “Seven Ways the Episcopalians Will React to the Suspension.”

What bothers me about that post?

The pointlessness of it all.

Before reading a word of response from the Episcopal Church, Longenecker decided we’d be wrong.  If we weren’t too prideful, we’d be too hurt. If we accepted the decision stoically, we’d be “false martyrs,” and if we argued against it, we’d be “counter-attacking” with ruthless rage. The guy who complains we’re wishy-washy Moralistic Therapeutic Deists was now predicting we’d be too defiant.

And I don’t even know what to do with this lovely “prediction”: “The African bishops will be portrayed as homophobic gay killers. They will be portrayed as ignorant jungle bunnies who ought to mind their own business. It will get racist and it will get ugly.”

Sigh.

To give you an idea of just how little Longenecker knows about the church to which he once belonged, here’s Prediction 7: “The Episcopal Church of the USA will leave the Anglican Communion and become just another one of the nearly 150 Anglican style breakaway churches.”

And here’s the end of Curry’s statement: “God is greater than anything. I love Jesus and I love the church. I am a Christian in the Anglican way. And like you, as we have said in this meeting, I am committed to 'walking together' with you as fellow Primates in the Anglican family."

As Ruth Gledhill put it, that is “a genuine turning of the other cheek. He is not threatening to walk away, he is pledging his Church to walk together with all the Primates of the Anglican Communion.”

Does Longenecker see that? No. Or, if he does, he writes it off as “false martyrdom.”

See how it works? There’s literally no response that the Episcopal Church could offer that would satisfy writers like him. Apart, of course, from renouncing all of the theology and moral logic that has led it to its current position.

But, oh, yeah. Longenecker says that theology and moral logic don’t exist. See Prediction 1: “Their response will not be with reasoned argument, proof for same sex marriage from the Scriptures, the church fathers and the tradition of the church. This is not only because there is no such proof, but because they have abandoned the whole idea of objective truth long ago.”

Now, everyone knows that’s untrue. The Christian case for gay marriage has been elucidated over and over and over and over again, with reason and with reference to Scriptures and the tradition of the church. Even secular writers, like Damon Linker, and orthodox Catholics, like Marc Barnes and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, get that the current push for gay rights unfolds from the basic precepts of Christianity.

If writers like Longenecker want to disagree with the logic that reaches the Episcopal Church’s progressive ends, fine. We can have a conversation. But if they want to pretend it doesn’t exist, if they just stick their fingers in their ears and say lalalalala… I can’t hear you, what’s the point of talking to someone like that?

3. What’s the Point of Talking to Someone Like That?

Sigh again. The point of talking to someone like that is that the example of my Presiding Bishop demands it. Seriously, how can I read Curry’s words and not feel a responsibility to stand with him in rebuke, and both forcefully with all the compassion I can muster, make and remake the arguments that folks like Longenecker want to pretend are not there?

Curry is a perfect example of why my heroes have always been Episcopalians.

 4. A Pattern Language

On a different note, yesterday Rod Dreher pointed out this piece by architect Christopher Alexander. If you’re not familiar with Alexander’s classic book A Pattern Language, definitely check it out. One of my wife’s professors made her buy it in college, and it has been one of my favorite books on our shelf ever since.

Why do I like it so much? I don’t know. A Pattern Language is about, as Dreher puts it, “which architectural patterns produce buildings that please us.” It’s sort of a doorstop-thick Elements of Style for designers, full of bold-type commands like “Wherever paths run along the edge of buildings, build arcades, and use the arcades, above all, to connect up the buildings to one another, so that a person can walk from place to place under the cover of arcades.” Or, “Build waist-high shelves around at least a part of the main rooms where people work.”

I guess what I like about it is what Alexander identifies in this new essay: behind all of these “rules” and commandments is an idea that we can experience the divine in the physical. It’s a sense that Dreher calls sacramentalism, and it’s a notion that always enchants me, whether it comes from Andre Dubus writing about the sacredness of making sandwiches for your daughter or from Casey Cep writing about writing:

One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths.

At least three redbrick or plate-glass academics had (to Charles’ Oxonian disgust), over the years, published papers on the local folksongs, in which they’d insisted – mistaking correlation for causation where it served their prejudices – that it was to the Fitzjames Stuarts that the Woolfonts and District owed the asserted fact that, of the three songs most often recorded by Victorian antiquaries as being sung there, two were notably Scots: ‘Lady Maisry’ and ‘Friendless Mary’. (The third was ‘Dashing Away With the Smoothing Iron’. In fact, the actual residents were well aware that ‘I am a rover’ had been more popular yet, and ‘The Man That Stole the Butter’, and ‘The Old Farmer and the Young Wife’, and the inevitable ‘The Farmer’s Boy’ and ‘The Vly’; and were better aware yet that farmer’s daughters and all manner of poaching songs, odes to highwaymen, and outright bawdry, had been sung much the more, but had been sniffishly not recorded by respectable Victorian antiquaries.)

All the same, Charles being Charles, there were of course to be the usual observances in ten days’ time, and everyone who could claim or invent a Scots great-grannie to be there. As His Grace and Mr Viney and Cook plunged into the settling of details, Lady Crispin, as annually, sighed. No doubt Lachlan – the Police and Crime Commissioner –, and every part-Scot in uniform and within reach of Wolfdown (which, Salisbury Plain being what it is, was an extraordinary number of them), and the appalling number of chiefly or baronial Scots who choose for some reason to live in the West Country, and all the rest of the hardy annuals, should as aye descend upon them, to gorge their way from broth to cranachan and pretend to enjoy haggis, and drink whisky and toast ‘the leddies’ (Charles of course giving either the Address tae the Lassies or the toast to the Immortal Memory, or, in specially unlucky years, both, although, thought Lady Crispin roundly, she was damned if she were to be roped in to replying to the Address) and swathe themselves in tartan.... The extent to which Charles enjoyed Burns’ Nicht was directly proportional to the extent to which his sister-in-law loathed it.

His Grace was not a man whose mouth suffered much from mealiness. Nor had he much faith in ‘monitoring’ and ‘special measures’ and softly-softly approaches when a public or quasi-public body had erred: certainly not when no responsibility was taken, no consequences were imposed, and no personal accountability exacted, and everything petered out in vague pro forma regrets, no sodding resignations or sackings, and the widespread employment, as a squid might deploy a screen of ink, of the passive voice.

Nora Standeven mightn’t be aware of it, but she was quite likely to find herself, doubtless alongside Dr Emily, marching in the next ducal crusade.

Charles was indeed making certain of this year’s Burns’ Night; and was to have Lachlan stop for tea on the Monday: to go over that man’s being detailed this year to give the Address.

When, however, the Police and Crime Commissioner should have had his tea, Charles did rather intend to mention in passing another matter.

If no one else intended to exact justice upon and require responsibility of the NHS Trust which had so fatally buggered up its job in the area, His Grace damned well meant to do. Through, if necessary, a private prosecution for manslaughter by gross negligence, charged against the Trust and its senior managers under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. And he’d like to see the CPS try stopping him, or taking over the case to burke it. (Charles had more time, more money, more tenacity, and better lawyers than had the Government, after all. And knew it.)

There were moments at which Charles duke of Taunton rather clearly betrayed an hereditary tendency to Personal Rule; and moments at which he was quite extraordinarily like the great Lt-Col. AD Wintle MC (‘19 June 1919: Great War peace signed at last … 20 June 1919: I declare private war on Germany’).

Dukes, as a rule, have (and very rich dukes, such as Charles Taunton, and Cousin Kit Trowbridge and Warminster, and of course Gerald Westminster and Andrew Bedford and dear old Stoker Devonshire, very much have, quite as much as do Lords Cadogan and Portman have) legions of highly trained managers, accountants, solicitors, and agents. Charles himself had these, in serried ranks.

But – Charles being Charles – he was not himself idle, he was not disposed to leave matters of business to those hired to execute these, he was utterly assured he knew better (and was right nine times in ten, the tenth time being always the start of an almighty smash and upbuggering), and he left his people remarkably little to do save to execute his wishes and, one time in ten, clean up after his catastrophic cock-ups.

Certainly his day was proceeding along highly typical lines.

The first order of pre-brekker business, in light of the weather, was a general and circular email giving instruction and warning. There had been wintry showers and sleet the night preceding; there had been frost; there was frost yet to come; and, for all the hopes of clear, if cold, weather during the hours of daylight this day, there was a slight chance of further, and icy, precipitation, snow, sleet, and icy rain. Charles knew perfectly well that parents, and the railway, and farmers, and everyone concerned, were as well aware of this as he; but he couldn’t not point it out, with detailed suggestions upon mitigating the consequences to child and beast and field. Moreover, Network Rail were enforcing temporary closures West of Swindon over the weekend to come, for work on the permanent way; and the W&CR had an obligation to take some diverted traffic under such circumstances. He’d ring up his co-chairman, Tom Douty, after breakfast to go over the plans there: Sir Thomas Douty Bt was a widower, nowadays, as His Grace was a bachelor, and neither was of an age to have a lie-in (it is the young who surrender to sleep with the avidity of a lover for his beloved, not realising in bone and gut how fast the days fly and the hours of light, and how soon the final sleep and night may come): Tom, thought the duke, should doubtless also be up and about early, seeking, as widowers and bachelors do seek, work to fill the lonely hours.

The second duty was to send his morning emails to three several Gafcon primates and the ABC, in conclave at Canterbury, with the Anglican Communion in the balance. Charles was not merely a churchman, nor merely a distinguished historian and a Fellow of All Souls: he, as a Stuart duke (whatever the side of the blanket) took a sort of hereditary proprietary interest in the C of E. That his correspondence was tolerated (and to an extent welcomed), and replied to, by its recipients was owing partly to the Old School Tie, in Cantuar’s case, and partly to his being a noted churchman and a distinguished historian and a Fellow of All Souls, but mostly to his being equally incisive, fair-minded, and vexing to all concerned. (He did not bother writing to any of the North Americans: he’d said all he had to say to them in his recent public remarks, widely reported, that their lofty dismissal of the concerns of the Global South was simply the usual Leftist racism and Coca-Colonialism, and that it was unseemly that they, whose largest worries were First World Problems and fear of being tutted at by callow undergraduates on Tumblr, should presume to lecture bishops and archbishops who, with their flocks, went at daily risk of arson attacks, suicide bombers, and beheadings by Boko Haram and al-Shabaab. There was, in truth, little point in his corresponding with Canadian and Yank prelates after he’d said in so many words that they were simply ‘white-splaining’ when they hectored the African archbishops from their positions of naked privilege.)

Contrary to the assertions of the ill-disposed, Canon Paddick did not in fact serve as the duke’s personal chaplain: very much to the contrary. And he had gently but firmly told Charles that, if the Primatial Conference were to result in the North Americans’ being sat on the naughty step, the parishes were not, whatever Charles wished, going to combine the choirs for a Te Deum: Purcell, Handel’s ‘Utrecht’, or Sullivan’s ‘Festival’. Charles, who knew when he was on a hiding to nothing and in any case preferred actual victory to its mere ornaments, had settled down and accepted this – although, as he sent his last email on matters ecclesiastical, he did suggest to one of the African archbishops that a Te Deum was quite in order, and he, Charles, should be happy to recommend any musicians wanting....

The campaign is not yet over, but a battle has been won.

Despite what the ACNA is claiming, we have not been suspended, we have been only sanctioned.