Former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and the Diocese of Massachusetts honored the Rt Rev. Tom Shaw on the occasion of his retirement. From the Diocesan site, “Massachusetts celebrates 20-year episcopate of prayerful “provacateur” Bishop Shaw:”
The Rt. Rev. Frank T. Griswold III, the former presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church, preached a sermon during the morning liturgy under a big-top tent, and described his brother bishop and friend as a potter, provocateur and, above all, a man of prayer.
Griswold recounted how the announcement of Shaw’s unusual first-ballot election on March 12, 1994, had been received by the House of Bishops–on retreat at the time with Shaw, its chaplain, in North Carolina–with a burst of “wild applause and cheers…that someone they knew so well, and appreciated so deeply, would now be among their number.”
Griswold went on to acknowledge the difficult circumstances of Shaw’s abrupt entry into office following the suicide of his predecessor, Bishop David Johnson, in January 1995, and how the subsequent years have been about both diocese and bishop shaping and molding one another “according to St. Paul’s notion of the church as Christ’s risen body constituted by the relationship of its diverse limbs one to another.”
Photo from Diocese of Massachusetts Tracy Sukraw