Eyes on the Floor

Posts at Episcopal Café from General Convention

postings are in reverse chronological order

Title IV - Moved and Moving

B033 - A Festering Wound

Bo33 and Elephants

Process and Story

Title IV 101

Reflections from General Convention

Learning from the Floor

A rather gloomy deputy from The Diocese of the Hundred Acre Wood attempts to move an amendment on the floor of the House as part of a fun exercise in the legislative process during orientation on Tuesday. Cinderella and Captain Jack Sparrow joined the cast of deputies from the Disney Province of The Episcopal Church.

Now just who said Robert's Rules of Order are boring?

Watch for my upcoming reflection from Tuesday over at Episcopal Café.

Wisdom for General Convention

As I prepare to fly to Anaheim first thing Monday for my first "official" involvement in the General Convention of The Episcopal Church, a few tidbits of wisdom have spoken greatly to me in recent days. Here are two. . .

The first is an admonition for all of us offered with Tobias Haller's usual succinct wit:

One of the tragedies of institutions is that they so often betray their mission to preserve their structure.

Can't wait to see ya' in Anaheim, Tobias!

The second nugget of wisdom, while longer, offers an insight with which I am wholly sympathetic. In a way, it sums up why I have largely stopped opining on the formation of a new North American "province" hostile to The Episcopal Church out of various splinter groups. And it is offered by one of my favorite people in all of the Anglican Communion, Jenny Plane Te Paa, whom I look forward to seeing in Anaheim, even if only from afar:

I have, on one hand, become especially afraid of those very few bishops and archbishops of this our beloved Communion who have demonstrably indicated their unwillingness to serve the common good, and also in a sense to betray their own baptismal and ordination vows by refusing to participate in eucharistic worship with other baptised Anglicans in their insistence that God loves only some, and who further insist that there is indeed a portion of humanity who are not worthy of full respect, dignity or inclusion.

I have not, on the other hand, been unduly distracted by the clamour of these aggressive alarmists because, as one immensely privileged to move around the Communion, what I also bear witness to serves to relativise everything, and so it is with absolute confidence that I can say there are far more Anglicans getting on with the pressing business of being God's mission people than there are those fretting over whether or not inclusion is a gospel imperative.

I have believed and have been saying for some time now that for the sake of the Communion it is imperative for us all to look beyond the vitriol, the hysteria, the noisy gongs, instead to notice anew all that has and all who have actually remained constant, to notice anew all those whose dedication, sacrifice, service and commitment to God’s mission has not altered and will not ever be altered one tiny bit no matter how many threats, claims and abuses are being made at the level of male church leadership struggles. I have been encouraged to look again at the exemplary work and witness of many thousands of unsung Anglican men and women, young and old, lay and ordained, those whose lives of selfless mostly voluntary service, will not and cannot ever be disrupted by the prospect of schism, by legal claims and counter claims or by indecently ferocious doctrinal arguments.

from Episcopal Café

If you’re gracious enough to still be reading my occasional posts these days, you'll find a lot more from me and a sea of insightful fellow bloggers over at Episcopal Café quite soon. Thanks to Jim Naughton for generously welcoming more of my ramblings! For more local folk (or local at heart), check out, too, the Diocese of California's General Convention site.

Blessings all, and pray for everyone gathering in Anaheim, that the truth may be told with a grace that only the Spirit can bring and that Christ may move among this portion of the Body for the sake of all God's beloved children.

More Lessons in Faith

Listen to the audio

Readings for Proper 8

Our gospel this day is a remarkable passage, as it poses to us two memorable stories of healing -- one nested in the other. I don't think it at all a mistake or even a moment of sloppy literary skill that poses the scene in the crowd between Jairus' request and Jesus arriving at his house. Mark, for all of this gospel's efficiency in disclosing to us who Jesus is, wants us to sit and pray with this remarkable contrast of narrative -- to take in the incredible disparity of position between Jairus and the nameless woman in the crowd, and the one thread that connects them: the thread of faith. There is a profound lesson there: one of deep grace.

So many who approach Jesus for healing in the gospels demand some action from him, whether it's instruction, a visit, or a prayer of the Son of God. In this way, the contrast between Jairus, a faithful leader of the local synagogue, and the woman suffering for so long at the margins of her community, could not be more striking. Jairus is presumably respected, so much so, everyone in town turns out to see what will be the outcome of his daughter's illness and how Jesus will respond to his request. Everyone knows Jairus’ name. But the woman who suffers from hemorrhaging, rendered constantly ritually unclean and therefore likely an outcast, has no name and is virtually invisible. What they share is a common vision that they are now rendered powerless: Jairus by his daughter's grave illness; the woman by her having spent everything on physicians who could not help her.

Both learn that faith's day is truly when we find ourselves up against the ineffable mystery of our constant vulnerability. . .When we are most open to God because all our human power is rendered useless.

Yet there is a peculiar and fascinating edge the woman seems to have in this over Jairus, for she is the one who receives from Jesus nothing less than commendation for her faith. She is the one who demands essentially no action of Jesus, takes an enormous risk by merely reaching out her hand, forges relationship with the divine with a humility that should, in many respects, silence the lot of us. Jairus' daughter will be raised up, too, of course, in a great public spectacle. But the woman lost in the crowd is the one who possesses the faith that has made her well, a faith truer, deeper, and broader than the well-healed and well-positioned. When she comes to Jesus with fear and trembling, it might be because she fears to be scolded or worse for making Jesus unclean with her touch. Or perhaps because she has been an opportunist, seizing the moment of the pressing crowds and the hope stoked up around Jesus, Jairus, and his sick daughter. Or perhaps it is simply fear of reaching out without permission or even acknowledgment. Or perhaps it is because at last she has come face to face with God and turned herself utterly over, undone to the core and at last re-made from the inside out physically, spiritually, and emotionally by grace.

Those of you who were here last week may remember Jesus scolding the disciples, even, for their lack of faith as they were tossed about in a boat by the storm. Yet again, by contrast, we witness this nameless woman and see her faith commended. It seems that she stands, in Jesus' eyes, head and shoulders above the rest. And with that, we are reminded that our God sees the world turned almost 180 degrees from our perspective. The least powerful, the most in need, are those most noticed by grace, most vulnerable to it, most ready to embrace it. Jairus needs to be told to continue -- to stay the course of faith. The woman needs to be told nothing.

So then, what is faith? Far from simple blind assent or setting aside intellect, faith is, of course, founded ultimately in relationship. But it is the final hope, too, of those who are the least among us. It is the complete undoing of all sense of power over ourselves, and a giving up of everything to a God -- however dimly we may perceive that God -- who will. . .

Well, who knows what God will do?

From this woman we learn what it truly means to fear God. Not so much to fear God's wrath as some might have us. But to fear God's love. A radical love that does not simply demand a little or even a lot, but everything, down to our last shred of hope. And then remakes us and restores us to a vision that only God could hold: that God holds for all of us and all of creation until time is no more, death is undone, and we behold our Maker face-to-face.

Portia and Prop 8

The hollow case for Proposition 8 won a hollow victory today in California - one that I find positively Shakespearean the more I reflect on it. Remember Merchant of Venice? Set aside the rank anti-Semitism of the play with me for just a minute and recall Portia's clever solution to Shylock's sadistic collateral from the merchant Antonio for his failure to pay a debt:

PORTIA
A pound of that same merchant's flesh is thine:
The court awards it, and the law doth give it.

SHYLOCK
Most rightful judge!

PORTIA
And you must cut this flesh from off his breast:
The law allows it, and the court awards it.

SHYLOCK
Most learned judge! A sentence! Come, prepare!

PORTIA
Tarry a little; there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

The Supreme Court of California, in a subtle but brilliant decision, ducked the veiled threat of recall by Prop 8 supporters and avoided taking the blood of tangible rights and privileges from same-sex couples. And I mean that covenanted blood protected - if not by marriage for those fortunate in timing, then by domestic partnership laws already offering equal protection.

There's more than a bit of divine humor in the Portia-like decision. Prop 8 supporters knew a direct attack on rights and privileges of couples would never fly in the polls -- even less so in the courtroom. So they settled for the idol of the term "marriage," but without real substance save perhaps social recognition.

That is now the true moral disappointment for couples seeking equal protection, at least it seems to me: the loss of the social recognition of the term "marriage." But time, the arc of justice, and possibly even the divine sense of humor are on their side. Separate but equal is a legal foundation of shifting sand. Legal "marriage" will be theirs again in the long run.

Prop 8 supporters may cheer over their "pound of flesh" and the slowly separating pottage they have unwittingly wrought with no fewer than three legal classes of protected couples in California: those "straight" and married, same-sex couples married between the last court decision and the passage of Prop 8, and those receiving rights and privileges under domestic partnership laws.

But the cheers ring hollow, because the "pound of flesh" is less substantive and more a mere ghost of definition under law. It has no tangible substance in California except a social projection without distinction of rights and privileges. . . a dumb idol, legally speaking, and perhaps morally and spiritually, too.

The hollow case has become the hollow definition.

Don’t look now, but Prop 8 supporters, for all of their money and efforts, have secured a Pyrrhic victory – one that has eviscerated their cause as they are shepherded into a cold, narrow definition of their own legalism just as Shylock was.

Thankfully, God's grace is more generous than Shakespeare. But I have to chuckle while standing in solidarity with my LGBT sisters and brothers.

Portia would be proud...

Updates:

Bishop Marc Andrus responds
Zoe Cole offers more legal perspective on the decision
Will Scott offers moving personal witness