| This past weekend 140+ college students from MD and Del gathered together for a weekend called Regenerate '06. What an amazing weekend it was. We covered many topics this weekend from spiritual discipline to missions. It was a time away from the day to day world and I, along with several of my good friends, spent the weekend regenerating. I can't express my thanks to God enough for this past weekend. We all also owe a huge dept of gratitude to all of the volunteers who came to work at the camp to make it possible. So THANK YOU!
This week I read an article about the church that is honestly, sad. It really contrasts this past weekend. It's a bit long but I think it's worth the reOctober 25, 2006
Jordan Hylden writes:
Seeing
as how I am a new Episcopalian and still learning about my church, I
attended a public address given a couple weeks back by Bishop Gene
Robinson at General Theological Seminary, in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. There was a pleasant reception before his remarks, supplied nicely with wine and hors d’oeuvres
platters and attended by a quietly chattering crowd of 60-year-olds
outfitted by L.L. Bean. Sad to say, I did not know a soul there, and
mostly stood off to one side, listening to people talk about things
like the new art galleries over in Williamsburg. One gentleman politely
asked me if I was there because of my “orientation,” to which I
responded that I was in fact simply there out of curiosity. Later on I
reflected that my response could have been taken several ways, but, as
it happened, there was not much time for reflection, and I along with
the L.L. Bean folks soon went inside the chapel for the evening’s talk.
The chapel of course is a beautiful structure, built one
hundred and twenty years ago in the English Gothic Revival mode with
donations from the Morgans, Pierponts, and Vanderbilts, and featuring a
magnificent reredos
behind the altar that tastefully reflects the gender equality that
subsists among the saints in glory. It did not take long for the nave
to fill up, although, unfortunately, it took longer for the event to
get started, which gave me ample time to flip through the pewbooks.
(The African-American hymnal looked to be quite good; the feminist hymnal,
however, seemed filled with titles like “In Praise of Hildegard We
Sing.”) I had nearly gotten to the point of thumbing through the BCP
church calendar when the Very Rev. Ward B. Ewing, dean of the seminary,
rose to give the welcome, which of course was quite warm. Following him
was Christine Quinn, the first openly gay speaker of New York’s city
council, who reminded us all that “If you believe in yourself, if you
define yourself, if you love yourself, you can overcome any odds that
anybody puts in front of you.” This met with loud applause, after which
we all sat quietly in our seats to consider how the glorious company of
the saints had believed in themselves.
The bishop himself
was next. He began by thanking Ms. Quinn for her wise words and
reminded us that most places in America—like Iowa, Georgia, or New
Mexico—were not like the Chelsea district of Manhattan. Indeed, I
thought. But that should not deter us, he said, from going out into the
rest of the country to take back religion. For years, he said, the
Church had been the world’s greatest oppressor, until finally, in the
1960s, people began to wake up and set things straight. People started
to realize that what the Church had taught all along about lots of
things just wasn’t true, and so they started acting prophetically as a
voice for change. That, he said, is the true mission of today’s Church:
To find out where God is already at work outside the Church and to join
God there. Because I did not grow up in the Chelsea district of
Manhattan, this required a bit of sorting out in my mind, but
eventually it all seemed to fit. “The Church is the world’s greatest
oppressor,” I reasoned, “but God is at work outside the Church, so our
mission as Christians is to work to change the Church until it becomes
like, you know, those places outside the Church.” It still seemed like
I was missing something, but I figured I could think about it later.
Bishop
Robinson’s talk was, on its surface, all about LGBT inclusion, but he
said it actually was about much more than that. At its most basic
level, it was about the end of patriarchy, which to him explained why
he met with such opposition. The audience nodded approvingly—civil
rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the sexual revolution were all
part of a single struggle for liberation, from the Man, or something
like that. Freedom, justice, and sex were all the same thing! I liked
this idea. Being an Episcopalian, I thought, was going to be fun.
But
if that was the good news, then what came next was the bad news. Many
people, he warned, will be hurt and confused by our prophetic struggle
against patriarchy. Some of them will probably even leave the Church.
And, what’s more, we won’t even have the same relationship to something
called the “Anglican Communion” anymore. This all sounded worrying.
But, the bishop said, that was just the price we would have to pay for
doing the right thing. If people were hurt and confused, or if they
left the Church, then we would just have to deal with it later. He
reminded us that Jesus was the ultimate example of someone who did the
right thing and paid a price for it. He told us how, when he was made
bishop, he had to wear a bulletproof vest and have an armed guard
standing by, and how they had made special plans if he had been shot to
take him into another room and make him a bishop before he died. He was
being modest, of course, but we all thought he had been very brave. And
although I had been worried at first, I started to feel sort of tough
and rebellious. Maybe, I thought, I could be as brave as Gene Robinson
some day. I stopped thinking about those people who would be hurt or
confused. They would just have to get with the program.
Next,
it was time for the question-and-answer session, and I was lucky enough
to ask the bishop about something that had been bothering me. “Do you
think,” I asked, “that conservatives from places like South Carolina
and progressives from places like New Hampshire should stay together in
the same church?” Bishop Robinson gave a surprising answer—yes, he
said, they should stay together, because part of the genius of
Anglicanism is keeping everybody together no matter what. The audience
members puzzled over this. On the one hand, being tolerant and
inclusive people, we didn’t want to tell people what to do or push
anybody away. But on the other hand, wasn’t taking back religion from
the conservatives the whole point of all this? Aren’t the
conservatives in the Church the world’s greatest oppressors—just the
people we’re fighting against? This seemed strange to me, but I
supposed that maybe it would be all right so long as the conservatives
stayed in far-off places like South Carolina, where they belonged.
Although, I didn’t think that everyone in the audience liked the
bishop’s answer, and I wasn’t sure that I did, either.
Finally, it was time for one last question. A gentleman in the back stood up and asked, “What do you think we need to do to save General Theological Seminary?”
This came as quite a surprise to me—how could such a nice seminary need
to be saved? But apparently it was true. Bishop Robinson, who was on
the board of the seminary, said that the building plans would have to
go forward if the seminary were to be saved. I wasn’t quite sure what
that all meant, but later on I found out that the seminary was almost
bankrupt and wanted to knock down its library and put an apartment
building there instead. It seemed to make sense, although it was very
sad—it explained why there was so much old scaffolding on the buildings
(sort of like the Cathedral of St. John the Divine up on Morningside
Heights), and why there were plastic sheets on the library books to
keep them from getting wet when the roof leaked. But that wasn’t even
the saddest part. It turned out that the seminary’s neighbors in
Chelsea weren’t letting them put up the apartment building. They
thought it would be too noisy and ugly, and they wanted things to stay just the way they were. The neighbors, it turned out, didn’t much like the seminary at all. They had even organized petition drives and protests to tell the seminary so.
I
didn’t understand any of this. Before I had felt all tough and cool,
fired up and ready to take religion back from the conservatives, but
now it seemed like even our friends in the Chelsea district
of Manhattan didn’t want us anymore. “How could they do this?” I
thought. Many of them were gay, and we were sticking up for them! We
were doing the right thing! Acting prophetically, no matter what! It
was all very sad, and I started to wonder if anyone cared about the
Episcopal Church anymore. People had started to file out of the chapel
by this point, and I started to follow them. As I did, I overheard a
young man about my age say to his friend, “You know, I agree with his
politics and everything, but I’m not religious, so this wasn’t all that
interesting to me. I bet my dad would have liked it, though.”
I
was pretty depressed, and I started walking glumly back to my
apartment. On my way home, I passed by an old Episcopal church that
seemed sort of different from normal churches—it didn’t say anything
about services, but there was a back door open, with loud music playing
inside and a bunch of kids standing out front. I looked closer, and
realized what had happened. Why, it had been turned into a nightclub!
Loud and exciting music thrummed from inside the sanctuary, where young
people like me were dancing and drinking and having a good time. I
thought back to what I had learned earlier that night, about how
freedom and justice and sex were all the same thing, and how being the
Church meant joining the world in the struggle against patriarchy.
Finally, I started to feel good again. It was going to be a tough
fight, but there would be lots of fun along the way. I smiled, looking
up at the nightclub-church, and thought that maybe we were starting to
get it right after all.
Jordan Hylden is a junior fellow at First Things. |
