On the 12th of September in 1964, a small Southern family gathered with their parish priest at St. John's Episcopal Church in Laurel, Mississippi to baptize their newest member, the first grandchild born into that family. The priest (a Godly man who has since gone on to his reward for fighting the "good fight of the faith") poured water over my head and baptized me in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. He then made the sign of the Cross on my forehead with chrism (holy baptismal oil) and, giving me my name, declared that I was "sealed and marked as Christ's own forever." I am not sure that the Church realized that day exactly why they were getting.
But this one thing I do know. I was receiving my identity. For other than my own family (and even when they did not), the church is the only institution or group of people that has accepted me fully without question. I am fortunate in that I was raised in the Church in which I would travel through my spiritual journey. I know many people who, dissatisfied or alienated from the church in which they were brought up, had to go and find their own parish home - or even their own religion - as adults. There has never been any doubt that the Episcopal Church is where I belong. That is not to say that the Church is perfect, for I often find myself angry at some of the things I see happening in the Church. Neither do I agree with everything that she teaches. Far from it. However, there is room in this Church for diversity and there is room for dissent, in spite of what the reactionaries would have us believe. Right or wrong, I truly believe that the Episcopal Church tries to accept all. It's the attempt that counts, at least for me. Even if the attempt fails, the willingness allows for a second attempt that just might succeed.
And for this, I find myself being witness to the division of my beloved Church by schism. By newcomers who have infiltrated her parish churches in an attempt to remake her into their own vision and for their own selfish purposes, by foreign prelates jealous of her wealth, by her own bishops who are charged with her unity and her mission to preach her Lord's Gospel, all of them encouraged by other "Christians" who would have otherwise been satisfied to just see her die because she does not preach or interpret Scripture as they do; at the hands of these, I have watched my Church torn apart and made to be a scapegoat for all of society's ills, all because she dares to envision a new way to preach the Gospel to a starving world that has remained anemic by much of the spiritual junk that has been (and still is) tossed to them by non-Anglican branches of the Church.
Looking back on my spiritual journey through the Episcopal Church, I realize that I have also witnessed the transformation of my Church from the elitist church of the Establishment that she was on the day of my baptism to the progressive, socially active Servant-Church that she is today. I must admit that some of these changes have been difficult even for me to swallow. I worry about some of the theological reasoning that I have heard expounded by some priests (and even a few bishops too!) that do not stand the test of orthodoxy. I find it difficult to understand why some find it so offensive to refer to God as Father, or even as Mother, but prefer to further alienate people from their Creator by eliminating personalizing gender-specific pronouns; I'm astounded that this argument is even an important one! I am concerned about the entire generation of Episcopalians who have come to this Church seeking a spiritual home and partners in the spiritual journey but who have never properly received the catechism of the Church (relying instead on the woefully inept three- or four-hour long "Inquirer's Class" model that has been adopted by the Church over the last few decades), only to realize halfway down the path that they really don't know or understand everything it is they say they believe or to come to the frightening realization that their personal beliefs and that of their adopted Church do not agree!
The list can go on and on. Yet, in spite of all this, I would rather have my Church as she is today than she was on 12 September 1964. Steeped and saturated by jealously guarded traditions that were used as identifying characteristics rather than instruments of faith and religion for which they were originally intended, the Episcopal Church of 1964 was a proud institution, an old relic of an old way of being the Church. As such, she was chided and mocked by a changing world that viewed the Church as the "Frozen Chosen" and the "Republican Party at Prayer." Somewhere along the way, however, a few foresighted Episcopalians watched as their Church became increasingly irrelevant to a changing society and culture and realized that if something didn't happen soon, the Episcopal Church would no longer be able to do what she was sent out to do by her Lord - to be a witness to the Gospel and to offer the world the grace of the Eucharistic table as a place at which God's people could find rest and spiritual nourishment on their journey through this worldly sphere. These visionaries realized that if the Church did not deliver that Message to the world into which she was sent, it would lose every other opportunity to fulfill her mission. They knew all too well that a Church that did not reform herself often, to remake herself in every generation, was doomed to lose her purpose and significance as the moral voice of her time and place.
And so, the Episcopal Church began its most recent reformation process (sometimes called the Post-Industrial Reformation, the Post-Modern Reformation, or simply the 20th Century Reformation). Building on the precedence and reformation traditions inherited from previous generations of Christians who were faced with the task of keeping their Church relevant to a changing society, the Episcopal Church emerged from the comfort and warmth of her tradition-laden cocoon and remade herself into a viable, relevant, and meaningful Christian body that served the society and times in which she found herself by preaching the Good News to a generation that had become hungry to find some sort of spiritual purpose and meaning in their lives. The Church did this in spite of the fact that much of the rest of Christianity reacted to the uncertain realities of the modern world by retreating back into its cacoon of tradition so that they could pretend that they were in a simpler, more familiar world, content with the delusion that what the world really needed was not a new way to hear the Gospel but to retreat back with the Church to older ways, established traditions, and values that no longer worked.
For their progressive reform, the Episcopal Church was branded by the Reactionary Church as liberal, apostate, and revisionist. For her crime, for daring to look boldly forward rather than retreating backwards, the Reactionary Church would have nothing less than the Episcopal Church's demise. Today, I witness a Church battered, bleeding, broken, vilified, and divided, "despised and rejected among men" because she dared to face up to uncertainties and new realities without fear and with confident reliance on the guiding direction of the Holy Spirit. |
