For those of you who’ve been holding your breath to see what the Diocese of Chicago decides at its Diocesan Convention, you may as well exhale now. The closest we came to controversy was a motion to study the possibility of making reparations to descendants of American slaves, for which there was a little resistance.
Oh, we talked about sex all right; some few delegates were dissatisfied with our bishop’s vote in support of Gene Robinson, the gay new Bishop (Coadjutor, meaning “Gene has to wait till the present diocesan decides to really really retire, or die, or whatever”) of New Hampshire. There was a motion to censure our bishop, and several people took the floor to protest his stand (and many more to support him). The motion was defeated on a pretty decisive vote. Then someone moved to affirm the diocese’s allegiance to the Anglican Communion, and the motion was discussed for a while before it was overwhelmingly passed.
Two observations on all this: One, the votes themselves weren’t as significant to me as the business about them. While there were scattered moans, objections, light applause, and so on, most of the speechifying took place as it would have on almost any other motion. Only one or two speakers were addressing people to change their minds; the rest were stating very definitely and publicly their strong feelings on the issue (without much of a veneer of attempted persuasion). Now, I wish we actually had had an exercise in deliberation on the topic — a disputatio, if you will — but that would probably ask too much of an assembly already sick to death of the whole matter. Maybe the diocese could arrange a careful, mutually-respectful, humble panel discussion among people who are willing to admit they could be wrong.
Two: Speaking as one on the “liberal” side, I’m annoyed from hearing people who vote against the Robinson consecration suggest claims and consequences that weren’t made and don’t follow. One speaker this afternoon persistently accused “liberals” of feigning surprise that the world-wide church wasn’t on board with this consecration — but who ever said that? Only an arrant fool would have been surprised, and no one I talked to in the weeks before and after the consecration was so absurdly out of touch with reality. Then also, people say that the American Episcopal Church has withdrawn from communion with the rest of the churches — again a crude misrepresentation of what has happened. Yes, the US church has gone ahead with a gesture that gives offense to many other diocese and provinces around the world; but the US church has given no indication of its unwillingness to share communion with these aggrieved others. If there’s going to be a breach of communion, it will have to be initiated by the other dioceses. (Some dioceses seem to have set up “If . . . then. . . ” resolutions — but the action to break communion still originates with the diocese that so moves, not with the US church that remains eager to sustain positive relationships with other national and regional churches so long as the US church can maintain its regional theological integrity.)
Posted by AKMA at November 8, 2003 09:00 PM | TrackBackThanks for the link to the Dominican brother's thoughtful talk at Yale. His patient description of truth seeking, including the term a healthy disinterestedness, reminds me of one of my favorite scriptural admonitions, from Phillipians, where the writer urged his readers to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.
In your sermon posted earlier in the week, you warned against binary distinctions, and I feel like almost all of the arguments against the ECUSA right now are full of such distinctions, about God, about reading the Bible, about certain Bishops, about people educated in the 1960s and 1970s, and about gay people (just to list a few that have been used repeatedly).
Each of those distinctions come with built-in argument stoppers, which I suppose is what schism really means, that we disagree so much that we cannot continue talking to each other, or abide each other enough to worship God together as a church.
But it also reminds me to reevaluate my own distinctions, fears, and hurts, how I interpret scripture, what I think about communion with those that cannot accept parts of American culture that I value, particularly concerning women and gay people.
I hope that there will be some creativity as people reflect on these issues, beyond the why I am right and they are wrong reflexes that many of us feel on either side (or sides). And that a wave of reactions from this period will include some fresh thinking, arguing, and understanding as we muddle through at this hard period.
Sorry for the long comment, but your post on the diocesan convention struck a nerve at my own frustrations and concerns about this time of troubles.
Posted by: Don at November 9, 2003 01:20 PMFather Adam:
I have a few thoughts on the matter. Please do not take them as harmful in intention...they are just thoughts/issues that came to mind as I read your post. THey are thoughts I and others have had that have not been spoken to.
I am fully aware the the U.S. Church says it is in full communion and seeks to remain in positive relation with others.
Did the U.S. church by its actions (not words) not give the itention that it might perhaps be unwilling to share communion with the aggrieved others by knowingly following through and supporting an action that the Lambeth resolution (what was taken to be the mind of the CHurch) made known would cause impared communion and worse?
If we say we are in communion, what does that really mean? Are we not accountable for our actions within this communion? Do we not at the least need to admitt that we valued our own theological integrity more than we did that of the Lambeth resolution? Do we not need to admitt that on some level we valued our local church to a greter level than we do the global communion on this partiular point?
I find it a hard statement to defend that the US Church has given no indication that it is unwilling to share communion. Our actions indicate otherwise. While I do not mean to imply that we will not seek to remain in the communion or work towards full communion again.
Most of the Anglican Communion sees our actions as the breaking of a covenant. 'We knew about it and we did it anyway.' THat is something I think we need to own up to if we are to work towards unity.
I also don't mean to negate our actions. Perhaps they were necessary. Perhaps they were the movement of the Spirit. But they do have consiquences that we will have to face if we are to move forward in the communion.
Thinking about what my Grandfather used to tell me, "A man is only as good as his word." I do not think we can speak unity and act individually without losing the trust of others. (Even if in our own minds we do not think we have done so...others in our communion say we have and if we seek that communion we must answer the charge.)
My apologies if you found this offencive. Again it is not my intention to cause illwill. My intention is to gain a fuller understanding of our common life.
Pax et Bonum
Jeff
Craig's Rule of Heresy: The heretic is always willing to remain in communion with the orthodox, and 99% of the time an observer unfamiliar with both sides can identify which is which by that fact alone.
Posted by: Craig at November 10, 2003 01:31 PMJeff Reich--despite his frightening spelling problems--is asking important questions. He is an honest man, and he is on the right track.
It's sad that nobody in the "liberal" camp seems willing to even address the kinds of questions he's asking.
Congratulations, Jeff.
Posted by: Susan at November 12, 2003 08:07 PMAKMA,
When you deny that there is a breach of communion, I think you misunderstand what the dustup is really all about, and that your ecclesiology is poor. It's not about Robinson's lifestyle, it's about his teachings - and the teachings of the Episcopal Church. And excommunication doesn't happen because of administrative decisions. When heresy happens (certainly when it engulfs an entire Church), the breach of communion has already occurred. Any administrative decision just recognizes and puts a seal on it.
I've elaborated my thinking about this here. Read it if you care to.
Posted by: Christopher Jones at November 13, 2003 07:25 PMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Elizabeth at January 12, 2004 10:43 PMLet's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
Posted by: Thomasina at January 12, 2004 10:43 PMSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Julius at January 12, 2004 10:43 PMEach Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.
Posted by: Timothy at January 13, 2004 09:46 AMBut variables get one benefit people do not
Posted by: Howell at January 13, 2004 09:47 AMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Rose at January 13, 2004 09:48 AM