"No Anglican Covenant!"

Several days ago, I sent the following email to Lionel Deimel in appreciation of his essay "Reflecting on the Archbishop’s Reflection":

Lionel, I very much enjoyed your reflection on the reflection. That we are in agreement in all that you say, no doubt, added to my enjoyment. You gave me not a few smiles as I read through it.

I believe that the Episcopal Church will not sign on to the covenant. I shall be greatly disappointed should that happen.

12 years ago, when I joined the Episcopal Church, I did not pay much attention to the affairs of my own diocese, much less the national church, and even less the Anglican Communion. Anglophile that I am, I thought that it was nice to be part of the Communion, but the association affected my life in my parish church only marginally, if at all.

Not until the turmoil that resulted from consent to Bishop Gene's consecration did I begin to pay attention to church politics. At times, I feel nostalgia for those times when I wore my blinders, lived in ignorance, and paid little attention to issues in the larger church.

Thanks for taking the time to write your take on Rowan's reflection.

Blessings,

June Butler (aka Grandmère Mimi)


Then, in a follow-up email, I responded to Lionel's comment below:

"I am wondering if it isn’t time to oppose the covenant in principle. I am not so sure The Episcopal Church will reject the covenant, though I am convinced it should."

Lionel, yes! It's time to oppose the covenant across the board. I'm not sure that TEC will reject it, either, although I don't see how, in good conscience, we can sign on without being hypocritical. Too many are going along with the process. The ABC details the aftermath of the covenant even before the final draft of the covenant is complete. I fear that TEC's signing on to the covenant may come to seem inevitable.

We saw what happened with the Windsor Report. As Bishop Martin Barahona, the primate of Central America said:

“The Windsor Report,” he said. “It’s just a report. When did it become like The Bible. The Covenant. Why do we need another covenant? We have the Baptismal Covenant. We have the creeds. What else do we need?”

I have his words on my sidebar, and I read them often. I want a plaque for my blog that says, "No To The Covenant!"

Blessings,

June

And lo! It came to be! Thank you Lionel, thank you, thank you.

And you should all go read Lionel's essay at the link at the beginning of the post.

Thought For The Day - Cynthia Gilliatt

A quote by Cynthia Gilliatt

re: Rowan

"Orotundity does not equal profundity."

Thanks to Ann.

APA Exclusinve From Our On-site Reporter

Dennis has left a new comment on your post "Gay "Reparative Therapy" Doesn't Work":

hello from the APA convention! I'll bet that we are having more fun than you all had in Anaheim last month!

Great decision, eh? One of my instructors is on the Council and was able to cast a vote for this resolution. Need to find him and say thanks.

The funny thing about this decision at this convention is that there hasn't been a lot of talk here about it - it was just assumed that it would pass because it was the right thing. No real protests even (though they were expected). There were a couple of guys with handwritten signs (repent, and other related messages) out on Front Street in front of the Convention Center (centre?) earlier today I heard, but I never saw them. The only thing I saw out there all day were the canteen trucks selling hotdogs and falafel.

Wouldn't it be nice if at church conventions it could also be assumed that the right thing would be done and thus be a non-issue? Of course I am proud of the APA for this decision.

The big topic here remains finding a way to push for the Council to draw up rules that no psychologist can ever help the government torture. The medical association has so far been unable to stop physicians from participating in executions, perhaps we can stop psychologists from helping in torture.

I'm off to see Toronto's Chinatown now. It is a full day of presentations here tomorrow and I have to rest my eyes before the PowerPoint projectors start again. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate PowerPoint?

And when I get home I still have a million boxes left to unpack from the move!

He reports; you decide.

Another Anniversary

Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration, and we remember with great sadness the bombing of Hiroshima.

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mrecy.

Today is also the seventh anniversary of the now well-known, but ignored at the time, Presidential Daily Briefing, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

Bush was at the ranch in Crawford and remained there throughout August, cutting brush, jogging, celebrating his birthday, and reading books. What's the big deal, right?




Edited and reposted from last year.

The Three Legged Stool reminded me of the anniversary of that terrible day.

UPDATE: Please read Elizabeth Kaeton's post at Telling Secrets on the feast day and the anniversary.

From Senator David Vitter

Dear Mrs. Butler,

Thank you for contacting me in opposition to a public health insurance plan. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue, and I agree with you. (My Emphasis)

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that the Obama health care plan will cost more than $1 trillion over the next ten years and will still leave 34 million people uninsured. Other independent studies show 120 million, or 60 percent, of Americans who currently have health coverage, would lose it and would be forced onto the public plan. Also, the CBO Director stated that the proposed plan would hurt the already weakened American economy, creating an even greater national debt.

Like you, I understand that Washington-run health care would decrease access, quality, and choice in health care for Americans. Health care decisions are best made by patients and their doctors, not by bureaucrats and politicians in Washington. Important, life-saving surgeries and procedures are often delayed for people living in other nations that have government-run health care. I support and want health care reform, but cannot support a Washington takeover of health care that decreases access and choice and results in delayed and denied care. Rest assured that I will continue to work in the U.S. Senate on legislation that promotes health care choice for Americans in a free market.

Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this important issue. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future about other issues important to you.

Sincerely,

Senator David Vitter
United States Senator

Of course, I wrote to Vitter demanding that the public option be included in the health care bill, and I reminded him that his duty to his constituents trumped protecting the profits and CEO bonuses of the health care industry. I added that, although the industry pays him big bucks in campaign contributions, his responsibility is to the people who elected him, who are in dire need of help.

My question: does it do any good at all to write to Congress critters?

Feast Of The Transfiguration

ANGELICO, Fra - Transfiguration - 1440-41 - Fresco,
Convento di San Marco, Florence


Readings:

Psalm 99 or 99:5-9;
Exodus 34:29-35
2 Peter 1:13-21
Luke 9:28-36

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

2 Cor. 4:5-6


PRAYER

O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.


Twice I have visited the Convento di San Marco in Florence, and it's like stepping into heaven. It's the old Dominican monastery, which was once the home of Fra Angelico (and Savonarola!), and which is now an art museum. It's a gorgeous place with frescos painted on the walls and a glorious art collection hanging on the walls which are not covered with frescos. Each monk's cell has a small fresco painted by the good brother for the purpose of meditation.

The museum library houses beautiful illuminated manuscripts.



Illuminated Manuscript - Gregorian songs

Florence is perhaps my favorite city in the world. My middle name is Florence. Coincidence?


Wiki has a nice display of pictures of the building and the art work in the museum.

Top image from The Web Gallery of Art.

Manuscript from The Museums of Florence

Paradise - Story Of The Day

I could never live in
Paradise, she said. I don't
look that good naked.

From StoryPeople.

Gay "Reparative Therapy" Doesn't Work

From the NY Times:

The American Psychological Association declared Wednesday that mental health professionals should not tell gay clients they can become straight through therapy or other treatments.

In a resolution adopted by the association’s governing council, and in an accompanying report, the association issued its most comprehensive repudiation of so-called reparative therapy, a concept espoused by a small but persistent group of therapists, often allied with religious conservatives, who maintain that gay men and lesbians can change.
....

The report breaks ground in its detailed and nuanced assessment of how therapists should deal with gay clients struggling to remain loyal to a religious faith that disapproves of homosexuality.
....

“Both sides have to educate themselves better," Ms. Glassgold said. “The religious psychotherapists have to open up their eyes to the potential positive aspects of being gay or lesbian. Secular therapists have to recognize that some people will choose their faith over their sexuality.”

Good, but not surprising news, indeed.

Promoted from the comments:

Obie Holmen has left a new comment on your post "Gay "Reparative Therapy" Doesn't Work":

Al was an old-timer in my Lutheran congregation in Lake Woebegone country of central Minnesota who had been raised Catholic but became Lutheran when he married Lois. He had received his elementary education in a Stearns County parochial school taught by nuns in full habit way back in the dust bowl days of the thirties.

“Whack”, he said as he jerked the ruler in his left hand. “Whack”, he said again, demonstrating how the nuns would slap him on his left hand when they would catch him scribing his abc’s with the wrong hand. “I would do my best with my right hand,” he said, “but I couldn’t help it, I always went back to my natural left hand.” With a laugh, Al wrote his name in chunky block letters with his right hand before signing in flowing strokes with his left hand.

Father Pemberton's Sermon

From Changing Attitude:

Jeremy Pemberton preached about the Archbishop of Canterbury's Reflection on General Convention in Southwell Minster last Sunday morning. He says that he has never had such a deluge of positive comment after a sermon in all his years as a priest. The comments came from members of the mostly fairly elderly Minster congregation - comments like: at last, thank you for saying what we needed to hear. The sermon is reproduced below.

I won't post the entire sermon, just selections. You can see the whole grand sermon at CA.

I want to try and do, as Paul put it in our epistle, a little bit of speaking the truth in love this morning. I want to talk about sex and unity.

There – I thought that might get your attention! The reason I want to is that this epistle is a great call to the Church to live out her vocation in unity – and we live in a Church that is dangerously riven by disagreements. Paul is calling the Ephesians to living a worthy Christian life together – and the means to enable that are the unity of the Christian community and its generous sharing of the gifts it has been given by God. It is a wonderful picture of mutuality and generosity and of many being built up – an image of a rich diversity creating something true and beautiful for God. The church’s unity is to be preserved by humility, forbearance, gentleness, patience and love. Her strength will be shown by her ability to face and speak the truth as together her members grow up into Christ, the source and goal of her life.
....

I don’t know how well you have been following the controversies of the past six or so years. They have all ostensibly been about the rights and wrongs of homosexual relationships, and particularly those of clergy. Two events triggered the present disagreements, which threaten the unity of not only the Anglican Communion, but to a certain extent the Church of England itself. In 2003 Dr Jeffrey John, then Canon Chancellor of Southwark Cathedral was nominated to the see of Reading – one of the suffragan bishops of Oxford Diocese. He was a gay man with a partner, with whom he now said he was in a celibate relationship. Storms of protest from prominent conservative clerics and laypeople focused on the facts that he was still in that relationship, did not repent of having had a sexually active one, and had written in support of permanent, faithful and stable gay partnerships. He withdrew his acceptance of the nomination – and is now Dean of St Alban’s Abbey.

In the USA, the voters of New Hampshire Diocese of the Episcopal Church elected as their bishop Canon Gene Robinson, a divorced father of two, who was now in a long-standing partnership with another man. The election of bishops in the Episcopal Church has to be confirmed by the other bishops giving their consent. In this case these consents were forthcoming – not least because the other bishops could not see any way in which the electoral process has not been followed scrupulously, and Canon Robinson was, as you know, consecrated.
....

We live in a world where widespread virginity before marriage is a fairly distant memory – even for most Christian young people. Contraception, not least the pill, changed social attitudes for ever. Fear, a great motivator to chastity, has been removed. Lots of young people get married these days in their late twenties and early thirties, and most have had one or more quite long-term sexually active relationships before they met the person they now intend to marry. I can’t honestly remember the last time I saw a marriage application with two genuinely different addresses on the form.
....

And what has the Church of England to say? Nothing but: get married! No one bothers much talking about living in sin any more – indeed, only last week a new liturgy was published (with some conservative grumblings) for a Wedding with the simultaneous Baptism of the couple’s children.
....

Paul, writing to the Ephesians, places great emphasis on the ethical actions he wants the Ephesians to demonstrate: being loving, forbearing, and exercising humility and gentleness. Isn’t it time that we rethought our sexual ethics so that we placed a greater emphasis on the quality of the actions that people engage in and take some of the focus off the formal state they inhabit? In that way we encourage people towards responsibility, permanence, fidelity, even if they are not ready to marry yet, and away from exploitative and careless sexual behaviour.
....

Again, what are we to say about the attitude of the Church towards homosexuality? There is no doubt that society has undergone a huge revolution in attitude towards this relatively small minority of the population.
....

The church, meanwhile, is tearing itself apart over this very issue. The last substantial piece of teaching was eighteen years ago in 1991. The House of Bishops statement Issues in Human Sexuality said –

"that what it called 'homophile' orientation and activity could not be endorsed by the Church. “…Heterosexuality and homosexuality are not equally congruous with the observed order of creation or with the insights of revelation as the Church engages with these in the light of her pastoral ministry.”

Nearly a generation on from that guidance the observed order of creation has revealed hundreds of species where a number of the creatures can and do regularly form homosexual partnerships. There is so little in Scripture about this whole area that enormous tomes have to written to uphold an interpretation of no more than six odd verses scattered about the Bible that would ban homosexual relationships entirely.
....

Moreover, the Church of England has managed to think and talk its way through to a new perspective over a question of sexual ethics, while maintaining its unity. That is precisely what we have done over the question of divorce.
....

Very slowly and painfully, and with great attention to the pastoral difficulties that this policy was creating in a society with significant numbers of divorced people not only on the streets but also in the pews, the Church has revised its understanding of marriage, divorce and remarriage.
....

Paul wanted an extraordinary quality of relationship – a unity that transcended their differences – to characterise the way the Christians of Ephesus grew together. No one is imagining, certainly not him, that this was easy. Forbearance is one of the qualities he singles out to achieve this, and humility and gentleness. We face a world of sexual living that is very very different to the world of fifty years ago. I wonder if it would be possible for the church to find a way to speak differently into this world and encourage the qualities of living that will lead people, heterosexual and homosexual alike, towards the fullness of life that God wants for them. But that is, perhaps, only possible if we exercise a forbearance, a gentleness and a humility that so far the official pronouncements of our church have been unable to get anywhere near.

Jesus said, in everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. Matt 7:12

May God give us grace to exercise gentleness and forbearance, and to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us. Amen.

The sermon is excellent, and I found it difficult to select only parts of it, and you see that I included a great deal. Fr. Pemberton's sermon gets to the heart of the matter which causes so much turmoil in the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, and the Episcopal Church in the US and points us in the direction of the way out. Please read it all at CA. It's very fine.

Thanks to Lapin for the link.

Welcome Back, Father Jake!

Jake Worldstopper is back blogging again. And just in time. We need his voice around and about in Anglican Land.