Reflections on the Seventy-fifth General Convention of the Episcopal Church

REFLECTIONS ON THE SEVENTY-FIFTH GENERAL CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

For several days after returning from Columbus, I continued to feel tired, drained—and strangely dis-spirited. I had, and have, an abiding sense of doom that I am finding hard to shake.

It is not that I was taken by surprise by events at the Convention, or that there were no good things about it. In fact, all of the things I have written in my earlier articles about General Conventions and the state of the church proved accurate for me. Perhaps that is one source of my malaise. There is something more, though, a deeper realization that crept into my consciousness late in the session, that has me wondering.

First, however, the positives, and the experience of the event. We Episcopalians do two things extraordinarily well: hospitality/fellowship, and worship. Those were the strengths of GC 75 for me.

I was amazed how many people I have known in former segments of my life who turned up there unexpected. I had fine times reminiscing with people from Alabama, General Seminary, the Maryland Eastern Shore, and the various folks who have sojourned in West Virginia but transferred out to other places over the past decade. It amazed me how one can be separated from someone for fifteen years, then meet and take up the conversation pretty much where it left off at parting. That is how I experience my relationships in the church: friends for life. Placement on the great theological divide of the church at present has little to do with this. There is so much more to our relationship, so much more to talk about, that the subject of controversy and division hardly needs to come up.

Daily Eucharists were a welcome respite, and I fed deeply on them. With several thousand in attendance, we made a mega-church, and that was a different and interesting worship experience for me. (Not, though, something I would enjoy all the time.) I appreciated the painstaking, almost painful attempts at diversity. Something--whether scripture, music, or sermon--was in Spanish every day. We had lessons in a couple of American Indian tongues, one in Japanese, a bit of French. We had a guest celebrant from the Old Catholic communion of Utrecht, who prayed a portion of the Eucharistic Prayer in his native Dutch (and who joined our deputation for dinner one night). We had a woman bishop as celebrant (Geralyn Wolfe) Tunes came from a number of styles and traditions. The organ sounded wonderful, but there was other instrumentation as well. Every day brought a different, and superb, choir and solists.

The table fellowship was inconsistent, in that only a small core group were regulars at my table, with one-third drop-ins each morning. Yet even in that imperfect arrangement, we found the opportunity to become surprisingly close and supportive of one another.

I found particularly moving the sight of the baskets of large round loaves of bread being processed from the altar back to the communion stations. So much bread, for so many people. I know that the thousands gathered there were not all of one mind on many things. And I know that a portion of our bishops, deputies, and visitors were not there at all, for they had withdrawn themselves to celebrate a smaller, purer, safer Communion on their own, unsullied by the diversity of the larger body. But those gathered in Hall C were palpably “one body, one spirit in Christ.” Daily Eucharist gave the Convention the aspect of spiritual revival that it must have if it is to be authentically of the church.

I appreciated, too, the prayers in legislative session, especially halting whatever we were doing at noon for Noonday Prayer. We needed the reminder that we were a church body in synod, not merely a congress.

The great high point of the Convention would have to be Sunday afternoon, when the House of Deputies got word that the Bishops had elected Katherine Jefferts Schori to be our next Presiding Bishop. The anticipation was great. Several thousand extra people had gathered in the visitors’ sections behind the floor of the House, with its 800 plus deputies and several hundred alternates. When the President announced Bishop Schori’s name, as one person put it, “the oxygen was immediately sucked out of the room by one large collective gasp” of all those gathered. What I saw was a universal dropping of jaws, but with smiles. We had been warned not to make demonstrations, and people tried to honor that, but there was a high-pitched murmur of excitement and joy, nevertheless.

Usually, whenever something extraordinary happens, there are people who say, “Well, that was exactly what I thought.” But not this time. Nobody expected this! I don’t know if I attribute the election to the working of the Holy Spirit or not (never being one to underestimate the working of Politics), but I can say with great conviction that the Holy Spirit was present with us when, moments later, the new Presiding Bishop was escorted in to be introduced to us. The outpouring of joy, thanksgiving, and sheer celebration was overwhelming. The Presiding-Bishop Elect could not have been more poised, gracious, and reassuring in her brief comments to the House. God help her, she will have her work cut out for her!

But while the glow of that experience remained with us for a while, I must say that the sessions of the House of Deputies were, for the most part, a trial and a disappointment for me, precisely because we do operate so much like a congress. I recognize that, especially with so large a body, it is imperative to have rules and procedures for the orderly accomplishment of business. I realize, too, that it is only human nature that there will be some people who are convinced that no decision could possibly be wisely made until all have had the benefit of their erudite comments over a microphone. But I submit that the business of the church is, and must be, different from the business of a parliament or a cat fancy club, for we are not so much about the business of decision as about discernment. I found discernment to be the one activity that our process is least accommodating to.

For one thing, we take up too many resolutions at one sitting. There is just no way one can consider them all prayerfully. Many of them have no opposition, and many of them are of no real consequence. It seems to me that those ought to be handled by some interim authority rather than the full Convention.

The amendment process is another area that needs fine-tuning. If we had copies of a proposal somewhat more in advance, those who have a better idea could be better prepared to offer amendments. Then, I think it would be wiser to have ALL proposed amendments in front of us at once. Rather than voting them up or down one at a time, often losing something of value in the process, we could winnow out weaknesses and accumulate strengths until we arrived at one resolution that really says what the body believes it needs to say. Would this process be time-consuming? Probably—discernment is like that. But for me, it would be less mind-numbingly boring than the repetitious and contentious debate, and it would offer the Holy Spirit much more opportunity to get a word in.

The debacle over the wording of A161, on the Election of Bishops, is a prime example. What was originally planned to say “we urge...very considerable caution in the nomination, election, consent to, and consecration of bishops whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church…” unaccountably became “we are obliged to urge…to refrain from…” by the time it came out of the Committee. Even that was not enough for the Diocese of Fort Worth, which offered as an amendment a complete rewrite, which said, “effect a moratorium on the election and consent to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate who is living in a same gender union….” That amendment was ruled to be out of order, but by that time, the allotted period for receiving amendments was over, and there was no opportunity to request a return to the original wording, which, I believe, most Deputies had been prepared to accept, however reluctantly. Therefore, the committee’s revised wording was voted down by the Deputies, leaving us with no response at all to that essential section of the Windsor Report, the rules not allowing it to be brought up again without a two-thirds majority, which we did not have.

Then came the unseemly intrusion of the Presiding Bishop, who called an extraordinary special session of Bishops and Deputies so that he could introduce a replacement resolution (allowable since it came from the Bishops, not from us). It is called B033, and it says we “urge…to refrain from” again. I do not believe that this resolution would have passed, even with the P. B.’s strong urging, and some strong-arming by some of the bishops, had not Katherine Schori come to the House of Deputies to request, respectfully and compassionately, that we comply. At that point, a majority did approve the resolution.

I changed my mind to support the resolution, and I was the only clergy member of the West Virginia deputation to do so. My reasoning came down to this:

• If the P. B. felt so strongly that he needed this resolution, it must be because of some compelling reason, such as very strong pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
• For Schori to become involved as she did, the pressure must be strong, indeed.
• What if, I reasoned, the Archbishop has informed our leadership that without this resolution we are OUT—out of Lambeth, out of the conversation, out of the Anglican Communion?
• What if, with this resolution, our bishops get invited to Lambeth, where they can at least enjoy British cooking if not their reception at the Conference, and where perhaps a few of them might get the chance to say something insightful, whether they are listened to or not.
• It would be a shame to elect Bishop Schori to lead us, and then not give her the one thing she asked for, a chance to continue the conversation for two more years.

So I caved. Our clergy deputation still voted no, but the resolution carried in both

orders. (This situation carries some ethical ramifications, which I will consider in a future rambling.)

Later, I came to realize that it may well be that this vote by the whole Convention really matters as little as my own vote proved to. If it satisfies the Archbishop, he is probably the only one it satisfies. The inexorable process of divorce (or separation of conjoined twins, as our scientifically-minded P. B-to-be describes it) continues.

And that is why I am still a bit blue. As I have said all along (hoping to be wrong), it is not a question of if but of when. And the issue is not really, any longer, about Gene Robinson, but about, as Bishop Klusmeyer puts it, “who gets the silver,” or to use Bishop Schori’s image, which twin gets the organs. She wants to use this borrowed time to ensure that both twins are viable at separation.

As I said earlier, God help her!