David

When he was in his teens he lined up

his money in columns

and on his bedside table

to keep him warm at night.

At twenty he strode around

the globe keeping his feet

firmly on the ground and

his eyes fixed on the future.

And at thirty he turned to study

stately homes and old gravestones,

the archaeology 

of penury and wealth.

Forty felled him with passion:

he threw order out the window

drowned in bed and said

in that moment he was happy.

But fifty found him

meditating on the stream,

on the fluid transience

of loss and permanence.

So sixty saw him in the garden

cultivating roses and

reflecting on the delicacy of life,

its beauty and its thorns.

Seventy was sweet: the body

stumbled a little but beer

was good and the food

they cooked tasted of love.

Eighty was a slow decade

spent contemplating death

and curating peace

in the storehouse of his soul.

At ninety he recalled

he had once been a child

so invited himself to parties

and was rowdy.

Anglican Divorce

An excellent and brief summary of TEC's divisions from the New York Times:

LAURIE GOODSTEIN

A Divide, and Maybe a Divorce

[Extract]

In many American churches, the divide on homosexuality is neither generational nor geographic, unlike the North/South split over slavery. Homosexuality is not the cause of the divide, just “the last straw,” said John L. Kater, a lecturer in Anglican Studies, at the Church

Divinity School of the Pacific, in Berkeley, Calif., a liberal-leaning seminary. The underlying differences are over the basic understanding of tradition and Scripture. The conservatives say they are something sacred and fixed, while the liberals say they can be open to interpretation and responsive to new information.

That approach has shaped their responses. The liberals insist that what defines Anglicanism is theological diversity, and the conservatives claim Anglicanism requires a commitment to doctrine. The liberals are saying, “Can’t we all just get along,” while the conservatives are saying, “Can’t we all just get in line?”

Hardly a Christian spectacle, the rivalry has been more like a log-rolling contest where the conservatives and the liberals are battling to push each other off a spinning log, while trying to make it look as if their adversaries voluntarily jumped. Now, with the ultimatum, the liberals may need a lot of deft footwork to stay on the log.

The branches break

We have come, I think, to the parting of Anglican ways.

The House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church (TEC) have declared: enough is enough. They refuse to allow unaccountable Primates to dictate terms; they refuse to countenance any longer the intrusion of other Bishops into their jurisdictions; they refuse the deal offered (or demanded) at Dar es Salaam; and they refuse to embed in TEC structures discrimination against people on the grounds of sexuality. [Thinking Anglicans, amongst others, has followed the story in detail.] It has to be said that the Bishop's statement still needs ratification in the American synodical process but it seems unlikely that this will not happen.

The first reaction is, I think, to give thanks to God. Conservatives and liberals are generally welcoming the end of prevarication, if for different reasons. LGCM has issued an exultant press release (can't see it on their site yet).

But it will take a while to see how things pan out in the global game of poker that our Primates are playing - using as chips the members of the Anglican Communion. (You can see this in the way the numbers of adherents are attributed to each Primate or group of Primates as though they all agree with their leader and the group with the biggest pile of members at the end of the game is the winner.)

It may be that TEC's stand - especially if supported vocally by other Provinces and Dioceses - will force the conservatives to retreat. Can the Anglican Communion claim unity if TEC is asked to leave? Can the international 'Instruments of Unity' survive without TEC's money? Will Canada, Scotland, Wales and others join them in saying 'if TEC is pushed out we go too'? If so, it is unlikely that the rest of the players will want to force everyone to show their hands.

Or, perhaps, it will work the other way. Perhaps the conservatives now scent victory. After all, TEC was given an ultimatum and they blinked first. From the conservative point of view TEC has now made explicit that it stands on the side of 'culture' and against biblical truth. They have revealed their hand and they held no high cards. Will the conservatives therefore force their exclusion from effective participation in the Anglican Communion? Will the conservatives in the US formalise their division from TEC, pending only law suits and financial settlements?

Either way the statement of the House of Bishops is likely to shift the politics significantly and, in my judgement, the chances of a formal split are now higher than before. For this I do not thank God: divisions in church structures and conflicts between Christians (and history is full of them) are inherently derogations from the unity that God seeks for us all.

I guess the CofE will try to stay friends with everyone - and may not be able to. Perhaps it will be time to choose which team it belongs to. On the other hand, knowing the CofE's infinite capacity for playing cards all through the night on the grounds that tomorrow is another day and you never know what that might bring, I think I'd be surprised.

TEC's stand may result in new options within the CofE. There is a growing prospect that conservative congregations might seek pastoral oversight from conservative bishops outside the CofE (as even the most reactionary flying bishop may be seen as tainted by association with the House of Bishops' stance on Civil Partnerships) . Perhaps TEC will offer a parallel possibility for liberal congregations. But I think this is improbable short of complete melt-down: congregations will find it hard to let go of parish churches and clergy will not relish eviction from their vicarages.

Nonetheless the ecclesiastical landscape has changed unexpectedly and the future is even less predictable than it was.

Anglican Ecclesiology, and mine

I suspect I'm fast heading away from the dominant note in tomorrow's Anglican ecclesiology.

I think this note is: the higher up the hierarchy the closer to divine authority.

On the contrary, I believe in the people of God - the ordinary people in the pew, the not sure and the over-definite, the tired and enthusiastic, and especially in the patient, quiet seeker after God. In the people I know and the millions I don't.

What we believe matters vitally. But the credal what of what we believe is only part of faith. Faith is living as though we believe the creed - the unqualified throwing of ourselves into living in the truth of the Christian faith. Our relationship with God is in its making, in its realising, not in disembodied statements. Our discipleship lies in living out credal faith as though it were true; and in doing so we realise its truth.

Which means such faith is always (this side of death) provisional: it is constrained by our limited vision, our limited capacity to act as though God were God and all creation were God's, our frail faith. It is limited too by logic: no human act (or statement) can ever be complete - it's meaning is only knowable in retrospect and can only be known in the web of all knowledge (speech) and always retains ambiguity, its causes and consequences can only be partially assessed.

This is a picture of Christian life in which the given data of faith (Creeds, traditions, patterns of worship, customs of prayer, moral standards) meet the transitory, wobbly, ambiguous mess of daily life of ordinary believers. It is in this process that the Christian faith is given life and, like all life, inevitably grows and changes.

And I think that apprehension of God is not focused in the few but is distributed amongst the many, and therefore so too is authority in faith. I entirely accept the need for a structure of ministers (and I think what they do and how they do it is more important than names and labels) and I would argue that they, and academics of all relevant flavours, should have weight in the continuous discernment of what is appropriate in Christian living. Ultimately, however, judgement should - I think - rest with the whole Church, not with slices of it. We need to re-vitalise (or re-invent) the doctrine and practice of reception.

Therefore I wish to assert an ecclesiology grounded in God's faithful people, not in Primates, Instruments of Unity, Bishops or Covenants. Authority is distributed, and so too is wisdom, discernment, knowledge, and faith. I wish to assert an ecclesiology of pluralism, of the recognition of internal conflict as normal, of complexity, uncertainty and provisionality, and of ordinary living faith in an intimate as transcendent God.

Which scarcely fits the desire of parts of the Anglican Communion to simplify, to demand immediate conformity to certain ways of doing things, to agree common global standards of behaviour, to set out a contract by which we can all be Anglicans (as if we weren't already).

And anyway, a hierarchy which leaves its followers behind is somewhat risible.

I bought an antique scythe

It's a long time since I posted anything, and much longer since I wrote a poem (other than haiku). So this is, I hope, a sign of a return to more writing after a long, dry period.

I bought an antique scythe

I bought an antique two-handed

agricultural scythe. A joke:

I looked as risible as death

in the small shop’s mottled mirror

and remembered through my child’s eyes,

crow-sharp and credulous, watching

two men ecstatically swaying,

to the swing of the wheat as it fell:

an easy labour, not scything

but smoking, talking men’s talk, spitting

on stones. This is no time for grief;

I have lost the loss of the scythe.

The curved snath, weathered and bent round

generations of peasants, tall

as a reaper, the curlew blade

dulled, like history, from disuse.

Eyes never saw what my memory recalled

collaged it from folk song, old film,

willed-dream: mowing is mechanised,

misbeliefs purchased with credit.

I shall scour the sweat from its shaft,

burnish the blade and sheath its edge,

fix it to a wall, exhibition

of beyond recollection or,

more daring, set it over a door

dead-locked against the past;

and accidents.

Through a Glass, Darkly, Jeff Sharlet

This article was published in Harper's magazine, though I first saw it on the Revealer.

I found it a fascinating and well-written and disturbing account of US fundamentalist attitudes which both help show some of the differences between US Christian fundamentalists and other species of fundamentalisms, and some of the features common to the genus.

The article is part of a forthcoming 'narrative history of fundamentalism'. Sharlet seeks to set fundamentalism in American history, and also shows how the fundamentalists re-tell history to ground their own account of the present.

Two (separate) quotes:

'Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god?'

His thesis is that fundamentalists are not newcomers but 'the natural temperature of the nation'.

Later in the article he recounts,

'Rusty and I talked back by the literature tables. He had something he wanted to explain. He had neglected the twin sins, he said, the two wicked acts that fundamentalists believe to be the collective responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. "Child sacrifice"-by which he meant abortion-"and sodomy. Any nation that condoned those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from happening? It will be reduced to rubble."

'He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the "blueprint of God's Word." '

Those who know God's blueprint are the most dangerous: they are scarcely containable by what other people would call rational means. Nor can they see that they have set up an image of God, a limited version of the Bible, and have made that their God; technically idolatry.

Beowulf

Holiday reading: Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.

It was a tremendous read - I read it out loud (mostly to myself) - a wonderfully powerful account of the hero Beowulf and his three battles against monsters. I loved the idea that Grendal's mum was more dangerous than Grendal himself.

I also enjoyed the glimpses into an other world: of formal boasts, of status based in the capacity to give, of the culture of the mead hall.

I was also intrigued by the Christianity of the writer. It seems a fatalist faith: that God is all-encompassing and nothing happens without God's permission or action. Therefore victory is to those whom God favours. Yet God may equally withdraw his favour - he weaves his war-loom and, as the threads are placed, so goes the outcome of the conflict.

Underneath the story is a background of insecurity and violence which presumably accords well with a fatalist faith. Such security as there is is less in gold than in land - but tenure is not secure. Nor can the hero expect old age and a pension. In a passage Heaney quotes in his introduction:

He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain:
it would soon claim his coffered soul,
part life from limb. Before long
the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.