The afternoon looked like rain; the skies were grey, and trembling. “Hey, did you know today is Ash Wednesday?” a white hipster shouted into his phone, as I led a procession of fifteen men and women dressed in black cassocks and carrying smoking thuribles into a plaza by the subway near my home in San Francisco’s Mission District. “Yeah, no shit.”
Time is measured by a threefold division, past, present, and future. In all three we receive the munificence of the Lord. If you consider the present, it is through Him that you live; if the future, your hope that your expectations might be fulfilled in founded on Him; if the past, you realize that you did not even exist before He made you. Your very birth you have received as a benefit from Him;
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“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters”—the very beauty of this picture may serve only to hide from us the depths of its meaning. We seem to see the shepherd walking before his flock through fields decked out with green and gold and all the glory of a generous God,
Justice Department lawyers are surely not to blame for the fact that the Marriage Act, by Judge Tauro’s count, implicates 1,138 other “federal laws tied to benefits, protections, rights or responsibilities to marital status” each one representing a way in which lawfully-married couples in five states and the District of Columbia are deprived of the same rights (and responsibilities) as their opposite-sex counterparts.
Rep. Peter King’s hearings on what his website calls “al-Qaeda’s coordinated radicalization and recruitment of people within the American Muslim community,” begin on Thursday. The destructive, demagogic potential of these hearings has been widely noted. Yesterday both people in the streets, and people in the White House expressed their concerns about King’s plans.
“The government of Pakistan and the great majority of its population are, in effect, being blackmailed. The widespread and deep desire for Pakistan to be what it was meant to be, for justice to be guaranteed for all, and for some of the most easily abused laws on the statute book to be reviewed is being paralysed by the threat of murder.”
Catholic ecclesiology certainly lends itself to holding sensitive information in few hands, meaning that crucial, institution-defining decisions are made by a tiny number of people, who often have an interest in minimizing the appearance that anything is wrong. What do we do to minimize the instances in which this happens in our own Church?
Last week, Bonnie Anderson wrote a column for Episcopal News Service. Her essay developed ideas she had expressed in her closing remarks to the Church’s Executive Council in mid-February. These feel like important contributions made at an important moment, and we’d like to slow things down a bit today on The Lead and give them their due consideration.
I walked up to the altar I found the cigarette butt. It had been mashed into the top of the altar burning a hole through the linen into the wood. For some moments I was the proverbial liberal who had been mugged. I was angry with what I was seeing. I was angry about this random act of vandalism.