A very emotional day today, which has left me wrung out. I have a news story up over on our main site, edow.org, but it is written for a general audience, and may not tell you blog visitors much that you don’t already know. We’ve also posted a copy of the letter assented to by about 20 liberal bishops. I say assented to rather than “signed” because the bishops demonstrated their assent by standing after it was read in a closed session of the House of Bishops this afternoon. So I have few names to offer.
Working with the drafting group on that letter (Bishops of Chicago, Newark, Northern Michigan, Rochester, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming) kept me busy for most of the afternoon, and has also delayed my process my thoughts and feelings about what took place today.
I am not feeling the outrage over Resolution B033 that I’ve heard from some of my friends here, and read online. This may be because I lack the energy for it. Or it may be that I don’t think this resolution, much as I dislike it, does much more than articulate an emerging understanding in our Church—that we are unlikely to muster the political will to consecrate another openly gay bishop any time soon.
It is important to remember that the resolution doesn’t bind bishops or Standing Commissions, and thankfully, it doesn’t even mention nominating committees and electing conventions which, of course, it couldn’t bind either. That said, it sure does make it extremely unlikely that could muster sufficient consents if a gay candidate were indeed elected.
The resolution—which, in case you are just joining us—calls upon “Standing Committees and bishops with jurisdiction to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.” It would not have passed without the support of our PB-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori. She spoke in favor of the resolution in the House of Bishops and then, in an unusual move, was allowed to speak in favor of the resolution the bishops passed when it came to the House of Deputies.
I have to admire her willingness to take a stand that has probably cost her some support among the folks who were cheering the hardest for her on Sunday. That takes moral courage. (You can argue, I think, that the Convention did not do a morally courageous thing by passing the resolution because it doesn’t cost the straight majority anything to attempt to appease the Communion by voting to set back the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the Church. But I don’t think you can argue that she didn’t do a morally courageous things by supporting the resolution because she has put herself at risk, and will, I think, pay a political price for it.)
Even as I admire her resolve, however, I wonder at the wisdom of this decision. We’ve already seen that it hasn’t appeased the bishops of Network dioceses who continue their troublesome practice of insisting that they are somehow responsible for all those who are in theological agreement with them, even when those folks who live in other bishops’ dioceses. And I don’t foresee Peter Akinola coming over to give us a great big hug any time soon. But this resolution just may be enough to keep us in conversation with a sufficiently large segment of the Anglican Communion to make membership in the Communion seem worthwhile.
The House of Deputies, I think, felt stricken by this resolution, especially those deputies who voted to support it—and most especially those gay and lesbian deputies who voted to support it. (It was affirmed by 70+ percent of the deputations in both the clerical and lay orders.) In the House of Bishops, on the other hand, a healthy minority of members felt that Presiding Bishop Griswold had run a bit roughshod in what he admitted was an attempt to secure legislation that would at least keep open the possibility that our bishops will be invited to the Lambeth Conference in 2008.
I am grateful that nothing the Convention has done compromises our ability as a Church to minister to gay and lesbian lay people, but sorry that we did not signal more vigorously our desire to include them fully in the Body of Christ – right now. We spoke a lot this week about the message we were sending to the Communion. I hope I don’t seem to be discounting the importance of that communication when I say that it isn’t the Communion that sits in our pews on Sunday mornings, or comes to our committee meetings and potluck suppers on Wednesday nights. What we did today probably turned off some people our Church had previously turned on. I hope when they get a chance to know Bishop Jefferts Schori, and watch us struggle to be true to our consciences in our treatment of gay and lesbian Christians, we can win them over once again.