My Wonderings

I am a cradle Episcopalian. This is a term some use in an elitist way, similar to FFV (First Families of Virginia).  It connotes a legitimacy, an authority, a  really real-nes. After serving on numerous Episcopal church staffs, there’s an additional connation to which I associate the label — a sense of stuckness, a rigidity, a conservative ecclesiology uninterested in new perspectives. And God forbid someone suggest to a cradle Episcopalian that the baptismal font be moved to another location in the church.

As a cradle Episcopalian, I was naively comfortable with my unquestioned, theological perspectives until I went away to college and met some evangelicals in Campus Crusade for Christ. They wanted to know if I was saved; if I knew Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.  I was baffled that my membership in the Episcopal Church did not satisfy their soteriological criteria.   Apparently, I needed to recite a formulaic prayer and if I didn’t remember the exact day that I had uttered this prayer, then I could bet my bottom dollar (or worse, my eternal life) that my name was not written in The Book. It didn’t seem to be relevent that I regularly prayed to God or received the Eucharist as if I thought Jesus was my Lord and Savior. That didn’t count.

By this time, I had eighteen years of experience as a girl, playing with other girls, and I knew that the strong and mighty of the playground could be quite tyrannical and gnostic about the rules that granted admittance to the In Crowd or relegated one to the Out Crowd of the stupid and uncool. Basically, I was being taught a theology of God-As-A-Mean-Girl. But what did I know? I was afraid I had been delusional in my snobbish sense of status or stuck in stupidity and it was possible that we cradle Episcopalians weren’t as theologically with it as my evangelical, mostly non-denominational or Baptist friends. So I wrote that prayer down and recited it very carefully, word-for-word, every dot and tittle attended to deligently. [Don't even get me started with how I learned how many water molecules a valid baptism requires! and yes, I got that checked off my Things To Do list as quick as possible.]

Years later, after spending time getting as many people off the divine hook with my handy-dandy prayer and 4 spiritual laws, I found my way back to the Episcopal Church. Imagine my surprise when I heard, right there in the middle of the liturgy of Baptism, very BillBright-ish language. Apparently, the Episcopal Church had been ‘with it’ all along. Of course, that didn’t resolve the problem that it was mostly little, tiny episcopalians of cradle-age that were being saved by these words; words being said by someone else on the behalf of another. By this time, I was comfortable trusting the authority and traditions of the Episcopal Church. But I wanted to know exactly what we believed the divine rules to be. And not just about salvation. I wanted to know the rules about what we can or cannot say about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; about sin, satan, sacraments, truth, confession, forgiveness; about speaking in tongues, contemplative prayer, social morality and social justice.  I didn’t want to be caught short by the next inquiring evangelical, or fundamentalist, or pentecostal.

I wanted to represent the Episcopal church well. So I started asking … and I started hearing, over and over again, “read the Book of Common Prayer.” As a recently re-re-baptized, re-re-born, re-convert, I was more than a little uncomfortable with the fingers pointing me to the Book of Common Prayer rather than the King James. But that’s who we are! Literally. My advisors were telling me to go to the prayer book because of the ancient and abiding principle, lex orandi, lex credendi, what we believe is what we pray. At first, this was not very satisfying. I wanted something strongly confessional in nature. I wanted something very black and white, very simple and very straightforward. But the Church, in her wisdom, knew better.

What the Church knew and had prepared through her liturgy, traditions and sacraments was that eventually I would need the mature solid food that is the ambiguous, paradoxical,  yes – and nature of theological truths.  The Episcopal Church (Anglicanism) was born out of the tension caused by the extremes of catholicism and the extremes of protestanism. She knew that it was wiser to wax poetic when talking of things divine and mysterious and beyond comprehension. She knew that in every sentence uttered as Truth there is also a grain of  ’not so’.  So can we say nothing or anything about something as important as God and salvation and eternal life?  How do we speak of such slippery stuff? My seminary professor, Dr. Bill Green, said, with just a tip of his tongue in cheek, that we should always ’sing’ the creeds to keep us from ever forgetting their non-prosaic nature.  Otherwise, we find ourselves in cross-hairs of the heretic police.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, found herself in the cross-hairs recently when she said:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.

I was listening to her address live via the internet and when I heard this I thought, “Halleluiah! There is a God!”  Then I thought, “Praise the Lord, maybe there is some theology out there that I can hang my hat on.”  Then, I thought, “Hell yeah, mamma said it ‘cuz it needed to be said.” Then, I thought, “Oh shit! It is about to hit the fan.”  For this and a few other reasons, the Presiding Bishop is getting vilified by the religious right. It’s the fear of that vicious and vitrioloic attack that has kept me silent in the past. But I am so grateful for her courage to speak out and risk sharing her understanding of the truth that I feel compelled to hereby, metaphorically, stand beside her and proclaim “Amen.”

Let me assure —  real quick and right now — to anyone who is ready to quote verses from the Book of Romans at me, that I, too, appreciate the authority of the Bible.  But we have to quote the entire Bible because the entire Bible is the story of salvation, not just Paul’s Roman Road.  And that biblical story is a story about a people’s salvation, not an anthology of individual salvations strung together like a pearl necklace. It wasn’t Mr. Abraham’s salvation that mattered so much. It was the entire nation of Israel. It mattered so much that narratives about it were remembered and passed down. It mattered so much that Jesus is proclaimed savior of the world.  It mattered so much that learned people would devote a lifetime to studying it.

It is the theological doctrine of salvation is called soteriology. It is big. It is complex. It is a doctrine that has developed for centuries and continues to develop. St. Paul was not the first soteriological theologian. He inherited some good material from Isaiah. Athanasius, Augustine, and Anselm did some pretty impressive thinking on the subject before Luther nailed his salvific thesis. And with all due respect to my friends of the reformed tradition, the subject of salvation was not closed on the Wittenberg door. Barth, Bultmann, Gutierrez, Kung and Moltmann are just a few worthy examples of the exemplary thinkers on the matter. And not one of them ever concluded that the Answer was as simple and as easy as swearing an oath-like-prayer. Nor did any of them imply that this was an individual, personal or private matter. There certainly is an element of  individual choice and free will that is relevent but it isn’t the only thing that is part of this subject. The entire created order is part of the subject.  Faith certainly is a critical element, but so is grace. Works may not be the sole criteria, but they are certainly a part. And part of the work we are called to do is to think and to think as well as we can, so that at the end of our days, we might hear the One who created us thoughtful folk say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” In the meantime, go “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” And I mean that in the poetic, lyrical, sing-y way that also includes me, and others, those who have gone before us, and those who have yet to come, working, collaborating together, God’s earthly think tank.

One of the most heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching aspects of hospital chaplaincy is watching the panic-stricken face of an elderly person who suddenly and unexpectedly loses their spouse of, say, fifty some-odd years. There is a moment in that early stage of the grief process that the survivor realizes that they don’t know how to live without their companion or even if they want to live. I don’t mean in the sense that the pain is so great that life is unbearable. That is a horror shared by many different types of survivors in sudden death situations. I’m talking about a realization that dawn on widows who have lived so long and so richly at the side of a life-partner, that their entire world-view is dependent upon their mutual perspective. I’m not talking about when a survivor becomes aware that there are certain life functions that they now have to learn, such as balancing the checkbook or doing the laundry. Though, that is a real and difficult aspect of loss. I’m talking about a dawning realization that one no longer knows how to be without the other.  I’m talking about something on the level of breathing; of involuntary biological systems.

When I first became aware of this dynamic I was awe-struck by the power of a love that is so pervasive and long-lasting. I was awed by the psychological defenses that are necessarily built up to protect one from ever imagining life without their lover at their side. These widows were all smart, grounded, psychologically healthy people. They knew that no one lived for ever. They had watched their friends die and their friends survive. But they didn’t know what they didn’t know. It is an impossible knowing in a love this profound. When I first became aware of this dynamic I was afraid to look at it, afraid to be in its presence; because I, too, could not imagine for them a future. I was afraid I would fall to pieces and add to their pain. But I could no more leave them alone or pretend I didn’t notice what I saw. I just had to take a leap of faith and go over the edge.  And when I did step into that scary, frightening free-fall space with them, I stepped in to the Kingdom of God.

I stepped into that absolute future, the sphere of the impossible, terra incognita. This is the realm that God beckons us to join her; where you must leave all your known resources at the door. In this kingdom, there is only room for faith, hope and love. None of our past experiences or knowledge can help us here; for each time we enter, we must go empty handed. For we cannot truly know hope if we have not known hopelessness; we cannot recognize love if we have never known utter disregard; we cannot know faith if we’ve never known doubt. It is in this absolute future where the wild things are. It is in this land of unlikeness where Beauty falls in love with the Beast, where things that were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new. It is where the Impossible becomes possible. It is where the lion lays down with the lamb.

Have you ever had to walk into this Impossible Future? When? What happened? What did you find there?

What other images (songs, photos, art, literature, poetry) can you share that helps us to understand this Absolute Future from the foreseeable kind of future?