I have been remarkably remiss in my bloggerly duty. There's this Episcopalian convention just two minutes from my place of work and I've not spent one lunch hour there for porpoises of live-blogging. (And no I did not pay Gregg for the Welbornian Haloscan link. Nice of him though.)
I meant to rectify that matter today and so I wandered o'er there about 11:30am. I felt the excitement that conventions naturally confer, representative as they are of fascinating little subcultures with their own tics and language and rituals. This one is interesting on its own merits because the issue is of a titanic kind: the clash between those for whom Scripture is relevant and for those whom it is not. (If you think I'm kidding, read this.) What makes it so fascinating is that this is not a debate between atheists and believers, but between self-professed believers within the same communion.
During my fifteen minute sojourn I saw many Episcopalian priestly types. I also saw two who looked exactly like Franciscan monks. One of them turned left and stood in a line for internet access. Would've made a good picture.
A sign notes that former U.S. Senator J. Danforth is speaking here tonight. His journey has been an interesting one. My understanding is that he was one of the most influential senators in seeing that Judge Clarence Thomas, a proponent of natural law, made it to the Supreme Court. But Danforth has gone all NY Times on us, denouncing religious conservatives in that paper. Which reminds me of something. I noticed a university parking lot the other day with a tremendous number of handicapped spaces. And I experienced a cognitive dissonance in seeing a culture (ours) that thoughtfully provides handicapped people with mandated spaces close to buildings but which also allows the killing of unborn life in the womb. What's going on?
What's going on is that we are in favor of doing good as long as it costs us nothing or little. For the ambulatory, it costs nothing to walk a few extra steps. But to save a child's life, it costs a woman nine months of labor. And while a handicapped person didn't choose to be handicapped, a pregant woman chose to get pregant by having sex. But this is our culture in a nutshell - one that will do the right thing if it's costless. One that will go to war if it costs few American lives or doesn't drag on too long. One that will be pro-life as long as there are no ramifications to - i.e. if cloning could save a life than cloning is okay. One that will produce an Episcopalian church that might fracture over the issue of the biblical injunction against gay sex because that costs. (Gosh that was preachy. And certainly a self-indictment besides given that often I take the easy way out.)
I ultimately found little I could report, being that I did not have credentials, media or otherwise. There was a guard posted outside the door of one large gathering and I felt the sting of discrimination as I didn't have one of those convention badges around my neck. I saw people in groups of two or three or four and had a sudden urge to eavesdrop.
There was one venue without a guard posted. It was a woman's conference and the speaker was deriding the lack of presence of 'women at the table' in our country. She said, "My first question with respect to the war would've been: 'How many will die?'". (I hope Condie Rice counted as a woman at the table.) I listened for about five minutes and it was all a call for more earthly power for women and I was not the least bothered by it because this is truth in advertising. If you're an Episcopalian woman this is likely what you believe. (What's interesting is how the whole thing has changed over the years. From an interest in the outcome in the issues to an an interest in who is making the call on issues. It's become more a naked interest in power than merely to do good. Power acquired not as a means to an end but an end itself. Of course, they would say that they can't accomplish the ends without themselves because women see the world differently (well, isn't that gender discrimination?).)
But I expected that. This where disaffected Catholics can and probably should go. As one commenter said on Amy Welborn's blog: "The 'liberal' wing of the Catholic Church will often claim they have no home in the Church. Well, they do have a home and it is called the Episcopal Church." In the end, people who are interested in power for power's sake will not be interested in Catholicism because the Church is not for that purpose. As then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:
There is an ideology that fundamentally traces all existing institutions back to power politics. And this ideology corrupts humanity and also destroys the Church. Here is a concrete example: If I see the Church only under the aspect of power, then it follows that everyone who doesn't hold an office is oppressed. And then the question of, for example, women's ordination, as an issue of power, becomes imperative. I think this ideology produces a totally false point of view, as if power were the only category for explaining the world and the communion present in it. If belonging to the Church has any meaning at all, then the meaning can only be that it gives us eternal life. We are not in the Church in order to exercise power as if in some kind of association.
No comments:
Post a Comment