By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

For many years now an important spiritual resting-point in my life has been the annual day of quiet reflection in honor of Evelyn Underhill, sponsored by the Evelyn Underhill Association at the Washington National Cathedral. It is always held in mid-June, on a Saturday close to the day when the Episcopal Church calendar observes Evelyn's feast day, June 15. It is a beautiful time of year on the Cathedral close, usually with lovely weather, the roses blooming in the Bishop's Garden, quiet places to walk and pray on the grounds or in the Cathedral. Always the day has included several hours of communal silence, punctuated by a leader's reflections on some theme from the writings of this 20th century mystic, spiritual director and retreat leader.

Evelyn Underhill’s gift to the Church may best be summarized by the title of one of her early books: Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People. The first book of hers that I really read was called Life as Prayer, a volume of occasional talks, now out of print. I keep returning to two essays in this volume. "The Spiritual Life of a Teacher," an address to church school teachers, seems to me to speak equally to the vocations of teacher and parent, two callings that I have always sought to weave together in my own life. “Life as Prayer,” the title essay, speaks to the way that I have experienced the mystery of intercessory prayer, and prayer in community. More widely available is her little book The Spiritual Life, a series of radio addresses offered on the BBC in 1938. There she speaks of the connection between the call to the interior life and the Church’s vocation to serve the needs of a suffering and broken world. Evelyn’s writing invites people to adoration, communion and cooperation with God, and depicts prayer as an immersion in God's love, an activity natural to human beings formed in God's image, and an exciting journey. "The life of prayer," she writes, "is so great and various there is something in it for everyone. Or again, it is like that ocean of God in which St. Gregory said that elephants can swim and lambs can paddle. Even a baby can do something about it. No saint has exhausted its possibilities yet." (“Life as Prayer,” p. 175)

In “The Spiritual Life of the Teacher, her wisdom extends not only to teachers but to mothers and fathers and mentors of all kinds:

In one way or another, you are required to be pupil-teachers, working for love. You must learn all the time, and give all the time; freely you have received, freely give. That is your Charter. Only do see to it that you fulfil the condition in which you can receive. The most up-to-date and efficient tap is useless unless the Living Water can come through and does come through.

Or again, further on:

God is always coming to you in the sacrament of the present moment. Meet and receive Him then with gratitude in that sacrament; however unexpected its outward form may be. (Life as Prayer, 185)

Here and elsewhere in her writing, this voice of quiet, grounded spiritual authority has named my experience. It is a joy to find in Evelyn an apparently "normal" person, an upper middle class, educated, married woman, like myself in some ways, whose work names and invites others into the depths of the life of prayer, grounded in what she describes elsewhere as “that deep place where the soul is at home with God.”

Evelyn Underhill is best known for her fat scholarly book, Mysticism, published in 1911 and continuously in print since then. It has always seemed clear to me that her scholarly work on the mystics grew out of a deep need to integrate her own spiritual experience with an intellectual understanding of human psychology and religious experience. Throughout her writing, she insists that the experience of the great mystics of all traditions is actually an experience available to all human beings in some way or another, that the greatest mystics' experience differs from that of the rest of us "in degree, not in kind." Most important, the life of prayer is never separate from our daily work in the world. Rather, if it is healthy, prayer calls us to participate in some way in God's ongoing effort to heal and redeem all that is broken and hurting in the world. In "Life as Prayer," she writes of prayer as a "mysterious, and yet very practical, work”:

A real man or woman of prayer, then, should be a live wire, a link between God's grace and the world that needs it. In so far as you have given your lives to God, you have offered yourselves, without conditions, as transmitters of his saving and enabling live: and the will and love, the emotional drive, which you thus consecrate to God's purposes, can do actual work on supernatural levels for those for whom you are called upon to pray. One human spirit can, by its prayer and love, touch and change another human spirit; it can take a soul and lift it into the atmosphere of God. This happens, and the fact that it happens is one of the most wonderful things in the Christian life." (55)

I return often to Underhill’s writing, fascinated by this intensely prayerful woman, who wrote articles, books, and letters of direction and led retreats at a time when there was no real category to describe her vocation. The voice that comes through her work reveals a personality that was consecrated, alive, ardent, joyful and very insistent, a strong personality, absorbed in the love of Christ, yet with a homey, conversational style that is engaging. I always feel that strength of personality among us when we gather for this Day of Quiet in Evelyn Underhill’s honor. Though the meditations we hear are based on her work, ultimately the gathering is not only “about” her. Rather, in coming together we accept an invitation to enter the life of prayer in community.

Even though I usually have a leadership position now, that June quiet day has become for me a time of re-rooting, reconnecting to my own deepening experience of God's presence in my life. It is a time to rest with others in what Evelyn somewhere calls "that deep place where the soul is at home with God."

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt (Kathy) keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area, and teaches courses in literature, theology and writing at Virginia Theological Seminary and the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Barbi Click

While the Anglican/Episcopal world sits all atremble, watching as the Anglican bishops speak out in Jerusalem of their own disenfranchisement and waiting with excitement or trepidation the upcoming Lambeth Conference, life as a lesbian Episcopalian goes on. Funny how that happens in so many aspects of our lives. That which seems earth-stopping for one is just another moment in time for another.

Were I still in the Diocese of Fort Worth, I am sure that the gathering of those at GAFCON and at Lambeth would matter a great deal more. Yet I am not in Fort Worth any longer. I am in St. Louis and in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri. That does not mean that I care less, only that the world is different here.

One year ago, monumental things were happening in my life. As a member of the Board of Integrity USA and as a lesbian resident of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, I was invited to share my story with Phil Groves who was to be in New York as part of the Archbishop of Canterbury's "Listening Process". Mr. Groves headed up this endeavor. I was watching the Anglican-Episcopal world with a much greater degree of interest.

Yet at the same time, my partner, Debbie, and I were preparing to move out of our home of 13 years. As a result of our impending move, I was unable to meet with the invited group in New York. For the year past, Debbie and I had actively sought discernment for God's will in our lives. We wanted to live a life according to that will. It was no longer enough to exist within the confines of security. To wit, Debbie quit her job, we sold our home and small acreage, sold or donated a great deal of our material goods, stored that which we deemed irreplaceable, loaded up our eleven-year-old son and two dogs into an old motor home, said goodbye to family and friends and set off to see the Episcopal Church outside of The somewhat-less-than-Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.

Between July 2007 and February 2008, we traveled by car, by motor home and by airplane from Texas to Wyoming to Ohio to California to Missouri with many stops in between. We visited Episcopal parishes, Integrity and Canterbury groups and a couple of college campuses at their invitation. We heard the same question repeatedly: how did we take the steps that we took to walk in the faith that we walk? They wanted to hear how God called two moms and their child into this Church and this journey.

There can be a great discussion between the ideas of sacrifice and suffering. Some see what we have done as a great sacrifice. We see it, not as a sacrifice; rather, we would have suffered had we not done what we did. We had no choice but to step out and follow, for to have not done so would have resulted in great spiritual angst. We had no idea what God was calling us to do; we knew only that we had to move forward willingly to be able to know more. So, move we did.
Underlying all of this was the acknowledgement that I was being called into the ordination process. It took a great amount of time to understand and accept this. It is no small thing and far from simple to be a woman called into the priesthood in the Diocese of Fort Worth. Many know that hardship. Being a lesbian woman in a long term relationship made it an even more difficult thing. Being in relationship excluded me from the process within all the dioceses in Texas and many dioceses in this Church.

We know more now that we did before. We know that part of this pilgrimage in seeking God's will in our lives is truly about listening. We also know that it is not over. We are in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri at this time, awaiting further discernment. We are practicing our "listening" skills. We know that what happens in both Jerusalem and at Lambeth are important but that, regardless, life goes on.

As the Anglican world turns, we hope that it will step out in faith to listen – not to those who are talking for gays and lesbians in this Church; rather, that it will listen to the Holy Spirit which lies within the voices of the gays and lesbians themselves. Let us tell our every day stories. Let us share our stories of faith and just what these mean to not only us but to the Church at large. Just as we can learn from the journey of straight Anglicans and Episcopalians, so also can these learn from us. We have a story of love to share; we have a story of Good News. There is no sacrifice…only faith.

Barbi Click of Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis is vice president of the South Central region for Integrity.

By John B. Chilton

In the U.S., healthcare insurance is predominantly an employer-based system. In this environment it falls to the church to consider how and whether to provide health insurance to its active clergy and lay employees. At present within the Episcopal Church this is handled at the diocesan level. This legacy may flow from the decentralization of much of the financials in the Episcopal Church. Budget wise each diocese is a boat with its own bottom.

General Convention 2006 endorsed the Church Pension Group's recommendation for a church-wide healthcare feasibility study:

Resolution A147
Title: Church-wide Healthcare Feasibility Study
Topic: Employee Benefits
Committee: Church Pension Fund
House of Initial Action: Bishops
Proposer: Church Pension Fund Board
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resolved, That the 75th General Convention endorse the Church Pension Group’s proposal to conduct a church-wide study of the costs and issues surrounding the provision of healthcare benefits to all clergy and lay employees serving churches, dioceses and other church institutions and to report their findings to the 76th General Convention; and be it further

Resolved, That all dioceses, parishes and other church institutions are urged to cooperate with the conduct of this study by responding to requests for data regarding employee census and healthcare costs; and be it further

Resolved, That this study will include an analysis of the potential for a mandated denominational healthcare benefits program and other viable alternatives, culminating in a recommended solution and an actionable implementation plan.

Health insurance is one of those peculiar products where the cost to the provider depends on the characteristics of the buyer. For insurance providers to cover their costs they must pay careful attention to who is buying the product, and price it accordingly. For the same reason, when premiums are based on the health of the group there is the potential for cost shifting between groups to occur when groups are merged, harming the healthier group. Taking this down to the individual, if you are healthier than average, and you are given the choice to opt out, you might be bettter off going without insurance. Providers take this self selection into account in pricing.

At present, the denomination does offer dioceses elective (as opposed to mandated) healthcare plans priced according to regional costs, and the characteristics of the diocesan membership pool. (The extent to which this service by the denomination has been sought by dioceses has waxed and waned.) But many dioceses prefer to design, acquire and administer their health plan locally. Flexibility is one factor, but my presumption is that cost is the primary reason some dioceses find it is in their interest to go it alone. A mandated plan, by contrast would not allow dioceses to opt out of the denominational plan.

(Readers also may see the parallels between the Roman Catholic Church and the corporate model, and the looser form of hierarchy in The Episcopal Church. In a corporate model the corporation always has the option to decentralize acquisition and administration of employee health insurance to the local level or keep those decisions under central control. But as the Episcopal Church is structured it would take an act of General Convention to mandate the reverse, that is, a centralized clergy and lay employee health plan. Note that a mandate would have the curious effect of disallowing local exemptions from the health plan while the church has allowed local options on other issues such as women in the priesthood.)

The same tension exists within dioceses today where the parish (with few exceptions) is mandated to participate in the diocesan plan. Particularly in parishes with a large staff it may be the case that a parish with a healthy staff can find lower costs (for equivalent coverage) than it would be charged through the diocesan plan. When parishes are free to leave and reenter a diocesan plan, and do so according to the changing health of their staff, a great deal of animosity can result. And insurance companies are loath to deal with you when your eligible population is so ill defined, and self selects on the basis of changing need for health coverage.

GC 2009 is not far off, and the Church Pension Group has commenced its "church-wide study of the costs and issues surrounding the provision of healthcare benefits to all clergy and lay employees serving churches, dioceses and other church institutions" or, in short, Health Benefits For All Church Employees: CPG studies the feasibility. As CPG puts it:

The study will:

Evaluate how the Church provides healthcare benefits to active clergy and lay employees

Explore viable alternatives, including the potential for a denominational healthcare benefits program

Recommend a solution and a plan for implementing it to the next 2009 General Convention

The first resolve of A147 envisions benefits for all clergy and lay employees. This is a justice and equity issue: at present the church has found a way to provide healthcare coverage for active clergy, but not for many (full time) lay employees. The common situation today is for a diocese to mandate that clergy be covered, and to invite lay employees to participate if they or their employer pays the premium.

The pattern has been that many lay employees are not covered. The reason is that lay employees tend to be younger/healthier than clergy. Unless they themselves have medical problems they find the insurance overpriced because insurance is priced according the health of the participating group, not the individual. The result is that few lay employees participate because they prefer to have the cash to paying the premium (or what is the same thing, they prefer their employer give them cash equivalent rather than give them health insurance).

There are reasons, however, to hope a church-wide plan might reduce premiums so that clergy and lay employees would both benefit. These are what CPG calls the Driving Issues.

First, under a unified health plan the denomination might have greater bargaining power than any diocese can muster on its own. For some of our smaller dioceses small numbers is a reason they cannot negotiate good premiums. But what I've been told is that this is not a significant issue once your group is over 150 members or so. A mandate would allow smaller dioceses to join in the negotiating advantage benefit that larger dioceses already enjoy.

Second, it is anticipated that mandating lay coverage will change the composition of the insured pool. Preliminary survey results indicate that the lay group is comparatively younger and healthier than the clergy group. Thus, it can be true that while a lay person might not want to purchase insurance at a premium based on a clergy-only pool, that same person might benefit from purchasing insurance at a premium based on pooling all clergy and all lay employees.

A question that arises is, if mandating lay coverage makes so much sense (because it lowers overall costs of salaries and benefits to clergy and lay employees), why haven't dioceses done so on their own initiative? Could it be that no one wants to tell lay employees we're expanding your benefits, but taking the premium out of your salary? If so, then mandating inclusion of lay employees will lower per capita healthcare care costs, but church-wide total healthcare costs will increase as would per capita costs of employing a lay person. The incentive will be to cut employment of lay persons undercutting the benefits of pooling clergy and lay employees.

Finally, a church-wide plan could reduce the administrative burden by relieving "dioceses, parishes, and other church institutions of the burden of developing and maintaining health benefits programs." This benefit could be significant, particularly for smaller dioceses.

CPG has done a careful job of communicating its study's progress through its website, and through its periodical Flash devoted to the topic which is mailed to clergy and lay employees of the church. In the May 2008 issue of Flash (PDF) the CPG puts its cards on the table (p. 2):

After a great deal of research and analysis over the past year, we have come to the conclusion that a denominational health plan has many outstanding advantages for the Church. And various comments offered during conversations, emails, and interactions with the Church at various levels indicate that many clergy and lay employees around the country agree. Through focus groups, presentations, and one-on-one conversations – including the April meeting of the Conference of Diocesan Executives (CODE) and the recent annual Medical Trust meeting with diocesan administrators – the majority of employers, clergy, and lay employees have expressed agreement that a denominational health plan is the best approach to take.

What of the potential for pushback from dioceses that are doing well on their own? To limit tensions between winners and losers from a mandate, the current thinking is that premiums charged to the dioceses will be set based on regional demographics and regional cost of healthcare. The hope is that as a result each diocese would be at least as well off as it is going it alone.

The plan would require that dioceses treat clergy and ("full time") lay employees with parity. If the diocese requires parishes to pay, say, X percent of the premium for parish clergy, that same cost sharing most hold for full time parish lay employees. I would note that in the end, parity may be more apparent than real. Mandating a benefit might cause a parish to reduce lay employment, or to hold down lay salaries. And could a parish say we treat clergy and lay equally, but we require them both to pay 100 percent of the premium passed to us from the diocese? If so, then a parish might hold lay salaries the same, but increase clergy salaries to keep the latter as well off.

While the Church Pension Group is not saying that it will recommend a denomination healthcare plan, it is signaling that chances are strong that it will and that so far what it is hearing is a consensus across the church. It is giving us all plenty of notice that we should be thinking hard about whether this serves the best interests of the Church.

Dr. John B. Chilton is an economist on a busman's holiday in Orkney Springs, Va., home of Shrine Mont Episcopal Conference Center of the Diocese of Virginia. He maintains two personal blogs, The Emirates Economist and New Virginia Church Man.

By Ann Fontaine

Seven years ago the Diocese of Wyoming's Canon for Ministry Development, Lynn Wilson, wondered if we could offer Education for Ministry (EfM) via the internet to our isolated and rural churches and their leaders. I have been a mentor and trainer with EfM since the early days of the program. This was a challenge I could not resist. How could we replicate this small group experience with its transformative theological reflection and study? Dr. Norm Peterson, a mentor and Dean of Education at the University of Wyoming and I recruited our first class of students for a pilot project with Blackboard, the popular distance education program that most colleges use.

I thought it would be possible to carry out the program but did not believe it would be as good as face-to-face EfM. I could not have been more wrong. Now the online groups are spreading around the country with students from as far away as South Africa, Bahrain and Korea. Originally we thought it would be great for rural isolated students. We have discovered that it is great for those who travel for work, those who live in cities and don’t want one more night out, those who have children at home and snowbirds. The intimacy and depth of sharing is beyond my dreams. When we do find time to see each other in person – we are like old friends.

Other EfM Online mentors have had similar experiences. Jenifer Gamber, Diocese of Bethlehem, finished her 4th year in an online group then became a mentor. She writes:

Who could have predicted the impact the decentralized network of the internet would have by connecting individuals separated by thousands of miles, history, culture, and much more? One of the greatest joys of participating in EfM Online for the past three years has been hearing the stories and insights with people from all over the United States who have vastly different experiences. My first year one of the participants joined from her mission work in Brazil. A participant from Mississippi shared first-hand experience of the effects of hurricane Katrina. Even seemingly mundane differences, for example, the weather, (snowing in Casper, WY but 70 degrees in Bethlehem, PA in May) enriched our time together because we came to know how our differences provided both opportunity for seeking commonalities and for treasuring a diversity that deepened our understanding of God's work in the world.

Paradoxically, our separated-ness has created a kind of intimacy has provided a place for deep sharing. Perhaps it is from a deep yearning for connection or the safety of cyber boundaries. We have shared at deep levels of vulnerability and tenderness.

Another joy of EfM Online has been sustained conversations about our readings. Because we post reflections to our weekly readings on a discussion board, we have many days to consider one another's contributions before responding ourselves. It's like having a living, yet suspended, conversation. Issues of faith matter deeply; our conversations challenge and confirm; they sometimes present one with new ways of thinking and time to consider how to understand new ideas in light of my experience and positions.

A student from South Africa, in a group mentored by Kathy Araujo in Oregon, writes:

I've spent a big chunk of the weekend going back through all our postings in all the various threads this year--a big advantage over the face-to-face format, where all one has to rely on is memory and perhaps some journal entries.

Two big things jump out at me. First, I am struck by how much my reflections have been shaped by where I am and by my ex-pat experience. This is a distinct difference from the prior three years. …The fact that we were each coming to our EfM year from different places in the world, different places in our lives, and different points on our spiritual journey was probably the single most enriching aspect of this year for me.

The second thing that just zoomed off the screen for me was that at some point or another, every single one of us said to another one of us some variation on "you made me think" or "I need to give that some thought" or "I had never noticed that before" or "I've never thought of it that way" or "that comment changed me."

A student living in Korea, who finished the program in a group mentored by Jo Freeman, writes:

I am humbled and thankful that I could have the opportunity to complete EFM. I began in a TEE (Theological Education by Extension...as Sewanee called it then) class in the early 1980s. When I came to Korea I thought my chance of finishing might never come because there were no live EFM groups in Korea. I was so excited to find EFM online!

This year EFM has meant so much to me. Because of our studies, our reflections, our sharing, having to do the hard introspective work of writing the Spiritual Autobiography and other explorations of ministry, I now see my purpose, my world, my ministry and relationships in a much different way. There is new meaning and passion...and a heightened sense of how I am already following God's call for me.... and how I can continue to grow into what the next phase might be. I am so grateful to this program and to you for "herding us cats", and for your expert way of leading us into how to do TR.

Canada is using the program for its long distances and need for connection. The average age of participants in EfM Online is lower than traditional groups. More and more people are becoming familiar with online classes and use of technology to connect with others around the world. One student mentioned she would like to start a group in Second Life. Possibilities for community continue to grow.

Attention to relationships and guidelines for interaction are even more important in the online environment. Since we cannot see or hear each other we have to take care of what we say and let each other know when we are hurting or joyful. Body language is non-existent so we develop ways to compensate. On the other hand – signs that might create barriers like how people are dressed or how they look do not exist either. I am often asked how we can build community when we are never together in “real” – I say “come and see.”

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blog what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Donald Schell

Two days after walking, singing, and praying with eleven Anglicans and one Lutheran across a hundred and fifty miles of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, my wife and I flew to Malawi, Africa where we’re driving distances on two lane highways crowded with pedestrians, heavy trucks, and bicycles (often laden with multiple riders or huge loads of charcoal for market) to visit community-based responses to Malawi’s AIDS crisis. When we turn off the pavement, we bounce along dirt tracks to visit village home-based care (HBC) programs, orphan feeding programs, AIDS education programs, ARV (anti-retroviral programs), and other locally generated responses to the AIDS crisis. Our Spanish pilgrimage and African project visits feel like one, and music is part of what makes that so.

My wife Ellen is the International Programs Director for Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance. Her day-to-day work is communicating with Malawi leadership (typically via email) on project development. Annually she visits to talk with local coordinators who are skilled in program and capacity development and with them she visits as many projects as possible.

Today our plans have changed, cutting short our last day’s visits in the Lilongwe (central) region. The husband of GAIA’s southern region project officer died last night, so we’re driving down to Blantyre this afternoon for the funeral tomorrow. Sr. Gertrude, GAIA’s central region coordinator will join the wake before the funeral, a whole night of singing to send the deceased man on with blessing, an old African custom that fits well with Christian hope and practice. Gertrude is a Roman Catholic. Alice, whose husband died, is CCAP (Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian). I’ll wear my collar to the funeral tomorrow, as other Anglican clergy will. Baptists and Living Waters (African Pentecostal) Church members will join the singing. African Christians take easily to ecumenism. And tomorrow’s funeral will be full of singing. Mourning or joy, sorrow, or hope – African cultures greet all with singing.

Prayer and singing have greeted us at nearly every project we’ve visited. Four iterations of All Saints Company’s "Music that Makes Community” workshops – two in San Francisco and two in New York with another coming up in Iowa have me listening carefully for how people make the music we’re hearing.

Here’s a typical scene: a lead singer makes a quiet opening call and sets up a rhythm with her or his feet, the group responds with feet shuffling in simple step laying down a gentle but steady percussion. The leader then offers a strong call – singing out the central refrain. A couple of other leaders join in harmony and they sing it through to a moment of sung cue when the whole chorus joins in – sometimes forty singers. Leaders continue to improvise. The melodic and harmonic paths are known and give a frame for improvisation. The English words we hear are about our visit, about the work the people are doing together - caring for orphans or doing AIDS education, and they’re nearly always about the grace of God, and giving thanks. The music practices shared authority. Learning and singing are completely continuous. Harmonies weave men and women, boys and girls together.

In all the fractious debate in our Anglican communion, we have managed, at least sometimes, to remind ourselves that ‘communion’ isn’t something we make or earn. Sometimes, at least, we remember that communion is what we do together that makes us one. I hope bishops at this summer’s Lambeth Conference will remember that communion is neither an enforced human artifact of pure unity nor a reward for agreeing that everyone like us is right and everyone not like us is wrong. But can we find our way without singing together when music is an essential nutrient in the fertile ground from which communion springs? Does this sound like overstatement? I do mean it.

Walking the Camino we began each day with teaching our group (eight out of twelve of us speaking no Spanish) the Padre Nuestro, The Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. We found this a surprisingly grace-filled exercise in old-fashioned rote memorization. It gave us all a way to pray with our Spanish sisters and brothers when we attended pilgrim masses along the way. And our pilgrims prayed the prayer, phrase by phrase as they walked (and sometimes we sang too, even walking alone).

Singing (like our day by day memorization of the Padre Nuestro) offered us freedom and trust in a caring relationship growing from learning by imitation. Each morning before our daily Padre Nuestro, our group sang together, exploring treasures of hymnody that recall the way to God as journey and pilgrimage. We also drew daily from Church Publishing’s soon to be released Music By Heart, Songs for Evening Worship. Music by Heart is All Saints Company’s first published contribution to a church-wide and international recovery of music we learn by ear and by heart. In this we gratefully follow John Bell’s lead. From the Iona Community he and others in other settings are also at work building community by singing together.

In Music that Makes Community (with a conscious nod toward traditional singing and African choral folk music) we’ve worked with a group of musician-liturgists from around the U.S. commissioning, collecting and teaching people to lead congregations in the music that comes to us by hearing and imitation, listening that takes the mind directly to the heart.

But what has this got to do with communion? In his book Singing Neanderthals Stephen Mithen argues compellingly that melody and ritual gesture were the fertile soil of humanity’s primal communication and community. Speech began in tonal expressions of hope, request, urgency, frustration, command accompanied by demonstrative gestures. Primal sentences expressing desires, fears, requests, warnings, and exhortations were the sea from which living words and powerful abstract ideas emerged. There’s a good summary review of Mithen’s book on-line in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology – Mithen’s book fits beautifully with Louis Weil’s (Liturgy Professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific) observations, “Our bodies are the instruments of prayer,” and “The meaning of the ritual is learned in the experience itself.”

Human communication begins in singing together. Language, which began singing, has been our essential means of discovering and describing truth. Our church crisis is the crisis of a “not-listening process,” the opposite of singing together. Our divisions deny the personal and relational quality of truth. We’ve fallen to thinking with the mind in the head rather than in the heart. (“Thinking with the mind in the heart” is Parker Palmer’s insightful appropriation of the Eastern Church’s teaching in the Philokalia that true prayer begins when we pray with the mind in the heart.)

Music is communal, and making music together builds relationship (and shares authority among all who sing or play). I’ve heard this shared authority and community making in the kitchen at Wendel’s Guest House where we’ve been staying this week in Lilongwe. The guys in the kitchen sing and talk as they work, trading musical phrases, familiar songs, ideas, and gossip back and forth.

And every project we’ve visited – school, church, or village has greeted us with song (and often song and dance). Women, men, and children’s voices begin in simple response to a refrain, drums support and encourage, bodies move. Words and tunes are modeled by a leader, picked up by the group, and improvised. ‘We sing a song of welcome, welcome our dear vistors, welcome dear GAIA!’

Singing is a natural and graceful practice of community building and spiritual formation. Imitation and memorization give us a framework of relationship and a means of thinking together.

Where has music gone in Western and particularly American culture? Why do we imagine that there are people who can’t sing?

Our technologically shaped, individualized culture has forgotten that truth is ultimately relational. Could this relational (and musical) quality of truth be what makes the Nicene Creed more believable to some people when it’s sung together rather than when it’s said? Singing together enacts what the creed teaches – that God in Trinity is a perichoresis (the Greek word for a circle dance that the drafters of the Nicene Creed used to describe the personal and relational quality of the mystery of God).

At dinner here in Malawi we were talking with a distinguished Malawian physician who did her advanced training in the Great Britain. ‘People in Europe and America don’t seem to notice how fragmented their societies have become,’ she said. ‘Here in Africa we assume that we are in relationship with everyone. We talk. Your society is framed to minimize person to person contact, to make it all optional or by choice. One week in England I decided to see how little I could talk to people I didn’t know. I bought a weeklong bus pass that I had only to flash to the driver to get on the bus. I used the automated teller. I shopped for my groceries without saying a word.’ She wondered what we are doing when we allow ourselves to choose whom we will be human with.

So, we argue in written prose (not even using the melody of our face to face speaking voices). Do we actually believe we can enact church union without singing together, without the gestures and movements that make sacraments?

Unlike today’s church, Jesus didn’t think music was a decorative luxury. When looking for an image for an unresponsive generation, he pointed to the people in the marketplace annoyed with the children playing at ‘weddings and funerals.’ What sort of generation doesn’t welcome the kingdom? A commerce-preoccupied marketplace culture that can hear the prophet weeping and won’t mourn, and can hear the messiah piping and singing and won’t dance. It’s no surprise in Mark and Matthew’s accounts of the Last Supper, to hear Jesus and the disciples singing a hymn together before they went out to the mount of olives, that is, before their teacher went out to face betrayal, imprisonment, torture, and death. Seeing what was coming, Jesus didn’t offer his disciples a last word, after he’d taught and shared the meal again, he sang with them, making a community to gather God’s strength and blessing. Liturgical scholars tell us they probably sang Psalm 136 that night, a hymn of victory to mark the end of the ritual meal with a celebration of God’s unfailing love in the face of adversity.

Commands or exhortations to sing come up repeatedly (and emphatically) in the epistles – Romans 15:4-14; I Corinthians 14:15; Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:11-21; James 5:8-18; and the apocalyptic vision of God’s triumph in Revelation is also punctuated with song (Revelation 5:9; Revelation 14:3; Revelation 15:3). Two of the most powerful theological formulations in the New Testament – John 1 (‘In the beginning was the Word…’) and Philippians 2 (‘Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus…’) claim theological authority for the community’s hymns.

Music is relational and of the moment. Listening to one another as we sing, our music unfolds in time, in breath, and in rhythm. Timeless ideas, concepts without heart cannot live or build community. Truth that is not relational marginalizes and kills for the sake of ‘consistency.’ Our world came to be in song lines, hearing and imitating, call and response, and improvisation. Singing is humanity’s original listening process, knowing the other in love.

We can’t make music without sharing authority. Everyone contributes to a consensus of pitch and rhythm. Our primal language counts on my relationship to you and yours to me for us to work together. Any language in which I can be all alone in my right opinion or doctrine has severed itself from the human root of music and gesture. We may suspect the other churches in the communion don’t get our ‘baptismal covenant’ but it looks to me like our grassroots, democratic church, for all the important discoveries it HAS made about relationship and love, needs the nurture of much more African-style singing.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company, working for community development in congregational life focusing on sharing leadership, welcoming creativity and building community through music. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago.

By Richard E. Helmer

Now that GAFCON is under way and the machinations of schism roll forward, the Anglican blogosphere is replete with claims and counterclaims about its rectitude. With the widely publicized failure for archbishops to cross the Jordan on the eve of the conference, GAFCON itself seems to be the latest manifestation of an effort to stay in the news. Watching schism unfold draws reporters and pundits like moths to a light. And with them come the dollars from many with an axe to grind about the Church, theologically or otherwise. From that, in no small measure, GAFCON and its architects draw their power.

I was personally drawn to reflect when Mark Harris recently reflected on this piece from Pittsburgh’s Bishop, Robert Duncan, in an opening address at the GAFCON conference:

"Archbishop Williams remarked at the beginning of the Dar es Salaam Primates Meeting: ‘It is all a question of who blinks first.’ Neither the American orthodox, nor the Global South Primates, nor history would blink. Not then, not now. The so-called ‘blink’ has taken place, but it has taken place in the re-definition of the Lambeth Conference as a place of managed conversation, not conciliar decision, and in the recognition that to call the Primates Meeting together ever again would be to confirm that the Communion’s engine has shifted to the South. Re-defining the Lambeth Conference and not calling the Primates Meeting are exercises of colonial control. But the inexorable shift of power from Britain and the West to the Global South cannot be stopped, and some conciliar instrument reflective of the shift is bound to emerge as the Reformation Settlement gives way to a Global (post-colonial) Settlement."

As Mark Harris observed, these are words about power, plain and simple. Bishop Duncan knows that to appeal in this way to the leadership of the self-declared Global South and their wishes means appealing to wider experience of longstanding suffering. This suffering carries in it all the weight of centuries of the slave trade, racism, exploitation, imperial hubris, the shattering of community identity, and the degradation of perpetual violence bought through political oppression and economic ruin. I can’t help but wonder if he feels, by these words, he is following the Gospel imperative of helping empower the powerless – offering power to those who hitherto have had the back seat on the Anglican bus, along with the far back seat of the Global bus. As an added bonus, he can claim his own seeming powerlessness as a victim offered up on the horns of ecclesiastical presentment, portions of his diocese on the brink of following him over the brink into the chasm of schism.

The language of power seems to have become commonplace when The Episcopal Church’s harshest critics talk about the Anglican Communion these days. Bishop Martyn Minns said in a New York Times article about the upcoming Lambeth Conference that:

“It’s unfortunate, at a time the church needs clear and strong leadership, it gets two weeks of conversation.”

Are these just sour grapes from an uninvited bishop? Whether they are or aren’t matters less than this: these are really words about power. The leadership that Minns wants to see is about wielding power to reign in the heresies as he sees them -- heresies that he believes are undermining the Church so much so that he’s willing to risk his own irregular consecration and the properties of his former parish in a lengthy legal and ecclesiastical battle for control. Even though Archbishop Rowan Williams and the Lambeth design team, in their intentional decision to keep Communion legislation -- a form of creating and wielding power -- out of the upcoming Lambeth Conference, actually are helping return Lambeth to its original non-legislative purpose: “To enable the Bishops of the Anglican Communion to discern and share more deeply their Anglican identity and become even better equipped for their Christ-given task of being leaders in God's mission.”

But this is not merely to single out Bishop Minns, Bishop Duncan, or any other organizers of GAFCON. The truth is we all pine after the same thing: control over our own lives and ends. We worry sometimes that our powerlessness is a sign that we have been abandoned or at least challenged by God. That we are empty. That we have lost control. And that therefore we have been broken and betrayed. A statement of feeling abandoned given the House of Bishops shortly after Gene Robinson was narrowly approved for consecration says it all. It was made by Bishop Robinson’s seminary classmate, Bishop Duncan:

“This body has denied the plain teaching of Scripture and the moral consensus of the church throughout the ages.… I will stand against the actions of this Convention with everything I have and everything I am. I have not left, and will not leave, the Episcopal Church or my apostolic role as Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh. It is this Seventy-fourth General Convention that has left us, betrayed us, undone us. May our merciful Lord Jesus have pity on us, His broken bride.”

The challenge faced by those most discontented with the recent actions of The Episcopal Church and determined to wrest it back by any means necessary is in a large sense an articulation of a desperate sense of losing power, of losing control over their Church, or at least their own faith, if nothing else. There was a time when the Church either tacitly or overtly affirmed the faith they felt they had received. Now that a significant portion feels called to discern anew, in the light of fresh understanding from our tradition, scripture, and reason, a relatively small portion of this faith, the very foundations of what some of us have held are perceived as questioned, “revised” as the current lingo has us squarely pegged (labeling is yet another source of control, of power): “revisionists.” We shouldn’t wonder that a number of our brothers and sisters in The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada run headlong towards Anglican provinces that, by simple majority, support their “reasserter” claims and wish to consolidate power and authority around them.

Ironically enough, those of us who are supportive of the full inclusion of our LGBT sisters and brothers and their covenanted relationships in the sacramental life of the Church are seeking ways to help empower the historically powerless, the “least of these” who have suffered a long oppression and frequently a deadly silence. But in doing so, we have placed the source of personal and relational, if not simply faith power of some of our other sisters and brothers under threat. And, to our own peril, we have frequently in writing, speech, and action, attempted to capitalize on this threat and puffed up our own sense of self righteousness, our own sense of power by seeing ourselves on the right side of God’s grace.

Yet all of these questions of power as we continue to spiral around them, sometimes like sharks in a feeding frenzy, assume a basic premise that demands this question:

Is the Gospel fundamentally about power?

The theme of the narratives themselves seem from the very beginning to place Jesus outside the realms of earthly power, at once crowning him as king while simultaneously placing him amongst the “least of these.” Matthew’s family tree for Jesus, for instance, is filled with biblical reprobates and anti-heroes. He is conceived out of wedlock and born at the edge of the civilized world in a stable while the outcasts, marginalized, and foreigners come to worship him and herald his arrival. He follows in the footsteps of an executed prophetic cousin, preaches hope and brings healing to the forgotten poor, shirks invitations to be made a populist and powerful political ruler, and ultimately faces his own demise by giving himself up – weaponless and abandoned by his friends – to a cold and calculating authority wielded by the greatest power of the time, manifested as empire.

Ours is hardly the Gospel of power. In fact, the theme of the Gospel seems to warn us over and over again that the pursuit of power is the root of a great deal of evil in our lives and the lives of others. The Pharisees are repeatedly chastised for power gained through an obsession with pious acts and behavior. The Sadducees and elders are contradicted for their appeal to the powers found in carefully guarded textual analysis and protecting a religious and political economic system that continues to damn the least powerful to an unholy poverty.

Jesus collects to himself the least powerful, the outcasts, the sinners, the ne’er-do-wells in every sense, the pariahs of his day. And even the later theologizing about him in the oft-persecuted world of the early Church will opine of a God who relinquished power to become one of us, who gave up glory to become Christ for the sake of our salvation. It seems to me that this is the most that can be said about power in the New Testament: that to be allied with the coming Reign of God, power is best shared and even given up, especially to those who have none. And, ultimately, the journey into the heart of God has little to do at all with power, and a great deal more to do with that holy mystery called love: a love which demands that power be relinquished. Ironically enough, this with all of its missing manifestations seems to be close to the heart of the present malaise in the Communion. And yet we talk about it so little. Power by itself is a much more exciting study and practice.

So why all this talk of power at GAFCON? Indeed, what will the Global South do with it as they receive it, grab it, or simply isolate themselves from the rest of us and generate it for themselves? Will they do any better with power held tight than the North and West in our collective ages of empire, exploitation, and oppression? Will they stay at the table and wield a benevolent power if the Provinces of the Anglican Communion pass the vaunted provisions of the proposed St. Andrew’s Draft that give the power to declare Anglican provinces in our out? Will they declare rightly, in God’s eyes, that theologies of a particular kind may be disempowered to keep the powerful of the Church in control, cleansed and pure of the heretical? As many have already deserved, we Anglicans started trying to wrestle ourselves free of that notion, for better or for worse, nearly five hundred years ago.

“The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” Jesus said about power to a people in a culture and a time that dealt and conversed in terms of power just as much as we do in the present time. It’s an easy conclusion to draw: Jesus speaks to us with these words now.

It would behoove us all to truly listen.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer serves as rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. He has served in interfaith, ecumenical, diocesan, and national church organizations, including Episcopal Asiamerica Ministries , stewardship, and ethnic and multicultural church settings. He blogs regularly about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, and church politics at Caught by the Light.

By Kit Carlson

I have been eavesdropping lately on conversations going on around me in public spaces. Not out of some prurient interest (although I still play Harriet the Spy’s ‘diner game’ from time to time, listening to people behind me and trying to imagine what they look like, then turning around to see if I guessed right.), but out of another kind of curiosity.

Simply this: What ARE people talking about these days anyway?

Well, let me tell you, people are NOT talking about the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion, Gene Robinson or Rowan Williams. The names Jack Iker or Robert Duncan do not pass their lips. Nor does the name of Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Despite the furor on the blogosphere, or in our Parish Halls, or in our diocesan gatherings, the things that are of such deep and obsessive interest to us are simply not on the radar of the general public.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. While we may be generally known as “the church that’s fighting over gay bishops,” it’s not really at people’s top-of-mind awareness. Which leads me to believe that there is room for us to work, room for us to create an awareness of our denomination that would go beyond the bickering and legal annihilation we practice so enthusiastically.

What if we really COULD get people talking about the Episcopal Church? What if we could overhear folks in coffee shops and supermarkets, on line in the airport or riding on the bus, saying things like:

“You know that school was built by the Episcopal Church for our children … not the rich children, but our children, right here in the barrio.”

“I went on a mission trip to Haiti, and you should see all the things the Episcopal Church is doing in that country … the feeding programs, the sustainability projects, the schools, they even started an orchestra.”

“Well, I know the Episcopal Church will speak up for us against these developers.”

“I have a whole new sense of my purpose in life. I have to tell you about my church and how God has changed me … yes, my church. It’s that Episcopal Church on the corner.”

It’s something to hope for, and something new to strive for. In the meantime, I think it’s helpful to listen. To hear what people care about, are curious about, are enraged about, are tickled about. To hear the voices of people going about their everyday business, chatting about their everyday concerns. That business, those concerns are of deep and abiding interest to the God we serve. Perhaps they are even of more interest to God than the internecine battles of our tiny denomination.

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich., where she blogs at Saints Alive!

By Luiz Coelho

Fifty years ago, in most of Brazil, it was still common to see people watch the sunset sitting on a comfortable rocking chair on the porch of their houses. Families and neighbors were usually invited over, and food and refreshments were widely available. In more urban scenarios, people would bring tables and chairs to the sidewalks, and chat before dinner. After the Second World War, these moments had an important effect: they helped build communities, often composed of people from different backgrounds and ethnicities, and offered hope for a better future.

On colder days, if the weather allowed it, hot coffee or black tea, accompanied by a few slices of carrot, orange or corn cake, was just enough to bring families around the outdoor table, and soon neighbors and friends would join them. They would eventually bring more snacks, and conversation would go on until it was time to go inside and have dinner. On hot summer days, hot coffee was replaced by cold juices and mate, a special Brazilian tea cherished by many in its cold and sweet form. Sometimes, this happy encounter would be followed by a garden dinner, which could go on for hours and hours.

As a Southerner “by adoption”, I soon learned that some traditions are ubiquitous everywhere, especially when it comes to “Pan-American late afternoon environments”. Some of the foods were probably slightly different, and mate was surely replaced by intese doses of freshly brewed sweet tea on the rocks. However, the feelings and bonds of affection were the same, and long nights of laughs and conversations helped foster the sense of community here and there, especially at a time when the future seemed to be uncertain.

In churches, similar events also happened. From “dinners on the grounds” to Shrove Tuesday pancake suppers, food, community and conversations have always been part of our Church life. The rich noise of children running around the parish hall and vivid conversations between parishioners of different sorts still can be heard in many of our Churches across the world. In many places, however, this community life centered around food and conversation is dying, often substituted by an innovative “consumer Gospel”, which produces short term growth, but in the long run has increasingly contributed to empty houses of worship.

Sadly, I do not belong to the slow sweet tea generation. Raised in a middle class apartment, I did not have the possibility of playing with neighbors on the street and hearing my mother's call to come inside for dinner. To be true, I barely knew my neighbors' names. Only in the summer, when I would spend some free time at my grandparents' cottage, did I have the opportunity to enjoy the slow life of “the good old times”: playing with their pet (a dog named Perigoso - “Dangerous” in English – who was anything but dangerous), helping my grandfather harvest fresh vegetables, playing with the neighbors' kids, jumping in trees and getting dirty. And, at the end of the afternoon, we would always drink refreshments and chat for a while in front of their house. The neighbors were always invited to join the conversation, after all, everybody was part of a “big family.”

That's how Churches are supposed to be: a big family. However, the “community” aspect of church life is emphasized in our “modern” world less and less. Many search committees now expect priests to be much more like business administrators who are able to celebrate a quick liturgy rather than spiritual leaders called by God to announce the Good News of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, with a schedule filled with committee meetings, there is little time for visiting the sick, talking on the phone with parishioners or even enjoying a cup of coffee or a glass of sweet tea at the end of the afternoon.

Parishioners also have less and less time for Church affairs. Sunday school is rarely heard of in some places. Coffee and refreshments, usually served after the main service of the day, are taken “to go” as people run to their cars, ready to drive to the nearest restaurant. There is little time for weekday activities, including longtime parish programs and traditions, which risk being extinguished within a couple of generations.

It is necessary to reclaim the “spirituality of sweet tea” in our world: the long talks, the hugs, the common meals and warm conversations. Yes, the world has changed, and the Church inevitably has to adapt to a fast-paced society. However, the essence of Christian community life cannot change. Some regard it as the strongest aspect as the early Christians' most impressible aspect and wherever it still persists, the Church is strong and active.

Maybe it is time, then, to use community life as a tool for church growth and evangelism. Younger generations, often so technologically savvy, lack the “people” aspect of daily life. If the Church will provide a warm and welcoming environment, where all are known and cherished by their brothers and sisters in Christ, it surely will be able to reach the unchurched. Our Episcopal/Anglican identity provides a solid and traditional liturgy, complemented with a comprehensive and inclusive theology. When allied with intentional Christian community, which naturally flows from our liturgy centered around the Eucharist, Christ is made truly present among us and a conduit is created that enables people to find wholeness in God in Christ.

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

By Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick

It's three-thirty in the afternoon and as I sit down to a late lunch in my favorite midtown Manhattan coffee shop the man at the next table pulls a ringing cell phone out of his jacket pocket. "Hi, Brittany," he says, staring down at his lentil soup. "Can I call you back in fifteen minutes? I really wanted to take your call but I'm in a meeting right now."

We've all done it, right?

Still, digging into my chicken avocado salad, I was struck that it isn't professional or acceptable to admit that one is engaged in the simple human act of eating a meal. Dare mention that you'd rather eat your soup while it's hot instead of talking to a colleague? You're sure to come across as a slacker.

I imagined how a caller might respond to a few other replies.

"I'm in Downward-Facing Dog."

"I'm on the other line with my child's teacher."

"I'm praying."

"I'm sipping Scotch from the flask I keep in my desk drawer."

Okay, so the last one really is unacceptable. And yet why is it that we think of all of them the same way? Nobody wants to be that person in the office who always has a sob story and never gets the job done, but we've collectively gone overboard in the other direction. With workers chained to their cubicles as they compete in the 24/7 global marketplace, no wonder solitaire is the "most-used program in the Windows universe," according to Slate's Josh Levin, pointing out an interesting correlation: "Consider that the rise of FreeCell coincided with the erosion of coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, and lunch breaks." After all, nobody can work all the time. How did it happen that every human activity except working -- or at least appearing to work -- has turned into a source of embarrassment?

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the authors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, blame it on Sludge. Sludge is their word for the outdated beliefs about time and work dating back to the Industrial Revolution -- the daily judgments, spoken or unspoken, that label us as slackers or failures if we do anything other than devote all our energy to putting in time on the job. (Isn't Sludge a vivid name for the familiar old Protestant work ethic?) When we hide our real lives from the people at work, say Ressler and Thompson, it's because we're expecting to get Sludge hurled at us.

When we shift our focus from avoiding the dreaded Sludge to producing results, the authors say, we free ourselves up for rest and recreation and family and fun. Instead of doing time, we shape our day around specific goals and make it our business to bring energy and creativity to accomplishing them. In the process we recover our dignity and allow ourselves to be human.

A grace-filled approach, if you ask me. Imagine the day when each of us stops covering up and starts mentioning now and then that we do ordinary things like meditate and rest and eat lentil soup. Sounds like a recipe for cultural change.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, sees couples and individuals in her private practice. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By R. William Carroll

"Then promise me, if you should become queen, to GIVE ME YOUR FIRSTBORN CHILD. “

“Who knows whether that will ever happen,” thought the miller's daughter, and, not knowing how else to help herself in this strait, she promised the little man what he wanted, and for that he once more spun the straw into gold.

And when the king came in the morning, and found all as he had wished, he took her in marriage, and the pretty miller's daughter became a queen.

A year later, she brought a beautiful child into the world, and she never gave a thought to the little man. But suddenly he came into her room, and said, “Now, give me what you promised.”

The queen was horror-struck, and offered the little man all the riches of the kingdom if he would leave her the child. But the little man said, “NO, something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world.”

(For this translation, I’ve adapted a little.)

That’s not how the story ends, of course. The young woman gets out of this horrible deal by guessing that the little man’s name is Rumpelstiltskin. Not all the Grimm’s fairy tales end so happily. It is, in fact, amazing to me that we share some of these stories with children. Perhaps it’s a way to talk with them about the violence that pervades our world. Our world, after all, is one in which children are still bought and sold. In any case, these stories are no more violent than the popular entertainments that charm us today.

Bible stories can be similarly horrifying. Just look at a few from Genesis. Abraham offers his wife Sarah to a foreign king. Lot’s daughters seduce their father. Jacob steals Esau’s birthright, so Esau tries to kill him. Even stories like Noah’s Ark are hardly G-rated. Who can really dwell on the way it begins? Who could share that with a child? And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.” In the flood story, God proposes to kill’em all and start over.

Perhaps we have told this story to a child—even if we do race through it to get to the good parts. There are churches that relish the horror in this kind of story, and which are not afraid to use it to scare the hell out of kids, as well as adults. But we Episcopalians don’t tend to dwell on it. And properly so. We prefer the smelly menagerie, the bird with an olive branch, and the rainbow.

And yet, if the problematic beginning of this myth remains unspoken or repressed, the story is robbed of its power. We also fail to come to an adult understanding of it, since it is ripped out of its context in Genesis—a saga of creation, fall, and decline, as well as God’s unbreakable commitment to save the world. Repressing the story’s beginning also allows us to forget which particular sin it is that calls down God’s displeasure. It is the VIOLENCE of humankind that provokes the flood. We need to know that our violence is offensive to God. That it reeks in God’s nostrils. And that God is offended enough by our violence that, but for God’s goodness, God could be tempted to wipe the slate clean.

If we don’t hear this, the promise at the end makes little sense. Why else does God make a covenant with all flesh and set the rainbow in the sky as a sign of this relationship? Except to show us that God will never abandon us to the ways of sin and death. The remarkable thing in the story, which is like other flood myths of the ancient Near East in many respects, is this: God finds a way out of the cycle of violence, and promises never again to respond to our violence by destroying the world.

If we’re honest, we know that even a child is aware of violence. Unless of course we romanticize that child to the point of dangerous denial. In the schoolyard if not the family, the child is initiated into our rituals of domination, soul-murder, and exclusion. Even a child needs to hear that this violence is offensive to God. That God rejects this violence. And that God is not powerless to act.

Is there a danger in speaking thus of God? Does not the story project our own revenge fantasies on to God and involve God in the very violence it is trying to confront? Are we not in fact portraying God in an unworthy manner? Yes, of course. But there is an even greater danger in not speaking. All our words are inadequate. But it is only through stories—broken, human stories—that we can we convey something of the Holy One who creates and saves the world. And the realism of these stories draws us in and offers us new possibilities. The overall Biblical story, for all its contradictions and problems, testifies to God’s faithfulness, even when we have gone astray. We return to it again and again, so that we may wrestle with the loving God who meets us there.

I’ve dwelt a bit on the dark underbelly of Noah’s Ark, because I think an adult grappling with this story sheds some light on Paul’s theology of the atonement. The doctrine of Christ’s sacrifice is often presented, especially by evangelical Christians, as a kind of war between God’s justice and mercy. God wants to condemn the world and everyone in it, but saves a few, because Christ was punished in their place on the cross. The worst of the lot are the “five point Calvinists,” who believe that God died only for the chosen, the elect. The rest of humanity will burn in hell forever, just as surely as the untold multitudes whom God drowned in the days of Noah.

I believe this is blasphemy—which is untrue to Paul’s Gospel and fails to account for the point of the flood story. The problem with many so-called evangelicals is that they are not evangelical enough. The evangel is the Gospel, and it is good news for fallen humanity.

As in Genesis, Paul believes that God has found a better way out of the predicament of human violence and sin. Rather than purging the world of evildoers, God has chosen to make sinners holy through the death and resurrection of Jesus. God has chosen the one man Jesus, rejected and despised by others, so that in him, God might choose us all. As Rene Girard and James Alison have taught us, Jesus is the sacrifice who brings the whole system of sacrifice and victimization to an end. The message of Romans is about God’s righteousness and mercy, which restores fallen sinners to fellowship with God. It is a direct corollary of the “covenant with all flesh” that God makes with Noah and his descendents. God has always desired, as the prophet Ezekiel teaches, “not the death of a sinner, but rather that the sinner turn from wickedness and live.”

Jesus Christ is God’s human offer of mercy, in a world in which we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There is no conflict between God’s mercy and justice. They are one and the same, and they come together in the righteousness of God, which operates not by revenge but by forgiveness. The same forgiveness which Jesus lived out throughout his ministry. Could we choose to reject this offer and forever exclude ourselves from God’s presence? I suppose maybe we could. But I believe that, in the end, NO ONE ACTUALLY DOES.

There is Good News hidden in the doctrine of sin. Sin is the great equalizer. Sin levels the playing field and throws us back on God’s loving kindness. In Paul’s vision, Jews are no better and certainly no worse than Gentiles. In other words, insiders are neither better nor worse than outsiders. We have been called but not because we deserve it. We have been chosen—not for privilege but for service.

“For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.”

The Rev. R. William Carroll serves as rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio (Diocese of Southern Ohio). He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He co-edits The Covenant Journal with Lane Denson.

By Adrian Worsfold

Recent ongoing stories about church decline in the United Kingdom have raised questions again about deployment of human resources. Much of this is based around what the clergy is for and what it does, how it fits into society, and what it can do differently from other people.

The status of clergy has risen and fallen over time. At one time many a family of some land would put a son or two into the clergy, rather as others had a career in the military. What the clergyman did not get as a reward, he received in status. This was also a visible connection between class and clergy, and one reason why the Church of England found itself at some distance from the urban poor and indeed even the urban middle class.

One solution to the decline of religion regarding changing society and the decline of the status of the clergyman was to connect the clergyman with professionalism. By calling him a professional, the clergy hitched itself to a method in modern society of raising status.

In general, the professional receives specialist training that follows on from having achieved a necessary level of education. To some extent, the professional possesses a secret knowledge not available to others. That knowledge gives a surplus value that shields the professional from the changeable weather of market and labour economics. In order to enact that knowledge upon others, with either fees or no fees to the public (as in the National Health Service), the professional needs to be trusted. It is a key relationship. Professionals have clients not customers. This means the professional has a code of ethics. So important is trust, that the professional comes under a regime of self-regulation via the special participatory and regulatory group he or she is obliged to join. Indeed, joining such a group and being accepted as a member is a clear piece of evidence that the individual professional is to be trusted. The salary may or may not relate to the work; nevertheless there is a responsibility in the work and a reward that comes from the work in itself. The professional is a specialist, of course, whereas under the watchful eye of the professional association, it is up to managers to run the mundane aspects of the organisation within which the professional works. The professional may work alone or in teams, but they are always separated off.

Sometimes the professional nature of a group is under doubt. Do they really have knowledge that is unavailable elsewhere? Whatever, a profession creates entry-barriers and looks after its status. It creates restricted areas of practice, and seeks support in the wider legal system for such protection. It attempts to maintain at least a pretence that there is a distant connection with market forces, even though in reality such a claim to profession may be an attempt simply to skew a more beneficial market position.

Is today's clergyperson a professional? The connection has always been tenuous. One reason why a clergyperson might be is the relationship of trust and a client basis of an approach to him or her. This is why Roman Catholic Church scandals of clergymen and abuse have been so damaging. Nowadays in the UK clergypeople and churchpeople as much as anyone else need to be checked through the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) before coming near children. It is no longer so unusual to see a clergyperson end up on the sex offenders' register.

The next question is whether they have specialist knowledge. What is it that they have? Well it used to be theological training, as comparatively few laypeople had the university education and then years in a theological college for both specialist knowledge and practice. Nowadays many go to university, and quite a number will do some or even all the topics an ordinand might cover. On top of this, theological training and education is being given more to lay people as lay people simply do more of the work.

Some activities are reserved for clergy. Anglicans have rules and licences about who can do what in church, and the clergyperson is the one who does the Eucharistic service. There may be theological reasons for this, but from the point of view of professionalism it looks like protection for the sake of it. I come via a tradition where the layperson could do anything that the clergyperson did, and indeed they stopped ordaining clerics as a matter of course. I continue to see no reason why lay people properly prepared cannot do all the functions of a clergyperson. This might join my radical liberalism with Sydney fundamentalism, but there we are. Report after report about clergy and laypeople in the Church of England have envisaged more and more lay involvement with some radical solutions; in terms of money, it seems that the radical solution is to make people clerics but not to pay them. They may or may not have been to university; they may have a secular job or even profession, but they do some reduced training (more and more is distant training, not formation in a college) and then they are ordained and can do what other paid clerics do. They join the profession.

I take the view that this professionalism-chasing is all a red herring. A clerical person surely needs to act according to trust, but there is no profession in terms of a speciality. He or she is a generality, a viewpoint over all specialities, a worker among workers, and yet hopefully one who can find time (less so if unpaid) for the other. Such is a person for others.

However, increasingly such a person, not a professional, is a manager. This person does have to be the key paid person, even among the unpaid clerics. There is a special responsibility to carry the plant, equipment and people into some co-ordinated whole in any locality. This person should be the communicator and information conduit above and yet among all others (as well as the person who, pastorally, knows when to shut up and keep confidences - the two actually go hand in hand).

The reason for this is decline. I have noticed, since being in the Church of England again, just how often things that could be managed and co-ordinated are left to drift. Parishes that get joined together are often done so in order that some will close, by some sort of Darwinian process of the death of the weakest.

One may say, "What about bishops?" Of course, these too must be managers. But they are a supervisory management. They should indeed initiate and enact overall purposes and goals. However, increasingly in the UK we have "Minster Church" models of a central church where the staff congregate with oversight for other churches of an area, and here is where "management" must take place. Here is where the education and skills training can take place of local people, of setting up systems of qualitative evaluation, and of having the formal and informal meetings that set up those all important loops of planning and information.

The idea of the cleric as a professional, as a somewhat even lonely practitioner in one place and separated off, should be killed off. In a situation where five per cent of people attend church with any regularity, the team that does attend should be empowered, communicating and sharing. Whatever the diversity of personnel, and whatever variable theologies they have, when it comes to co-ordinated and practical output, good management should be able to produce a situation where, as the saying goes, they are all 'singing from the same hymn sheet'.

Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist), has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.

By Lauren R. Stanley

Quick: How many missionaries does the Episcopal Church have serving full-time overseas?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, don’t worry: Most Episcopalians aren’t even aware that the Episcopal Church has full-time overseas missionaries. Not because they aren’t paying attention, but because, sad to say, we don’t tell the story well enough (and by “we,” I mean the entire Church, top to bottom).

The fact is, the Episcopal Church has 70 missionaries serving full-time around the world in more than 30 countries. Each missionary is sent forth by the Episcopal Church of the United States, and thus represents not just his or her sending diocese, but the entire church.

The issue is not how many missionaries we as a Church have; there are far too few laborers in this field. The issue is how they are supported, or not supported, by the very same Church that is sending them forth.

(Full disclosure: I am one of those 70 missionaries, serving in the Diocese of Renk in South Sudan. This is not a letter from an unbiased observer, but from one who is affected deeply by the issues here.)

Each missionary gets some financial support from the Episcopal Church. Appointed Missionaries, who are commissioned directly by the Presiding Bishop, receive more than others, including stipends (which are small), transportation, visa fees, language training, and full participation in the Pension Fund, which depends on whether that missionary is lay or ordained. Volunteers for Mission receive health benefits only. Any shortfalls in expenses are covered by the missionaries themselves, who have to raise the rest.

The brutal truth is this: The Episcopal Church, which says that mission is its heart and soul, and both proclaims and encourages mission constantly, does not provide enough funding for the missionaries it has.

No missionary gives up everything the United States has to offer – jobs, security, safety and job benefits, not to mention such niceties as clean, running water, decent food, health care that you can trust, etc. – to make money, to live high on the hog, or to pump up the résumé. Being a full-time missionary overseas means living closely with the people of God as one of them, often in circumstances that would appall most Americans.

It is not easy to be a missionary overseas. It means leaving behind family and friends and jobs and security and sometimes safety. It means brushing your teeth using bottled water because the water you have will kill you, or cooking over charcoal stoves, or having electricity at most just a few hours per day, or bathing out of buckets, and then washing your clothes in those same buckets. It means setting aside the taken-for-granted privileges of the Global North to live as the majority of people do in the Global South.

Admittedly, few missionaries live on less than $1 per day, which is the truth for so many Global Southerners, but all live on considerably less than they would in the United States, and many missionaries live very close to the bone financially.

And yet, while the Episcopal Church proclaims that mission is at the very heart of our ministry, that same Church is not supporting those willing to go the farthest for the longest period of time.

Once again, by “Church,” I do not mean the “national Church” or “those folks at 815 in New York.” I mean the whole Church, the 2 million-plus members of this portion of the Anglican Communion. I mean all of us.

Earlier this year, the Mission Personnel Office in New York, looking at the budget that was set for missionaries, tried to figure out a way to make the pay system more equitable. In an effort to ensure that lay missionaries had access to the Pension Fund, it proposed that henceforth, all missionaries would receive full benefits and Pension Fund benefits, and that’s it. No longer would there be a differentiation between Volunteers for Mission and Appointed Missionaries; all would be treated equally in the financial realm. All other money – for stipends, living expenses, travel, visas, language training, etc. – had to be raised by the missionaries themselves. In essence, the Mission Personnel Office was trying to make the best of a bad situation. That plan, thankfully, has been removed from the table. The Standing Commission on World Mission now is seeking a different way to fund the missionaries more fully.

The question is, why was the Mission Personnel Office put in that position in the first place? Why isn’t the Episcopal Church more willing to fully fund missionaries, so that they don’t have to raise money to go off and answer the call God has issued to them? The Church allocates less than $1million per year for these 70 people. To fully fund them all – so that missionaries would receive full health and pension benefits, a stipend (which hasn’t changed in years, despite the constantly rising costs in living expenses), support, travel, visa fees, language training, etc. – would cost approximately another $1.8 million per year.

That sounds like a lot of money, and in overall scheme of the Church’s budget, it is. But if instead of looking at the “Church” as just those folks in New York, we looked at the “Church” as all of us, it would mean, literally, pennies per year per person. Really. Raising that amount of money would mean asking each Episcopalian in this country to give eighty cents per year just for missionaries.

The theology for sending forth full-time missionaries to labor in the fields is sound: Jesus said, “Go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel.” That wasn’t a suggestion; it was a command. He also was clear that the laborers deserve to be paid. And he did say that there aren’t enough laborers to begin with.

In these days of such great difficulties in the Anglican Communion, where we don’t always understand our sisters and brothers in Christ overseas, and our brothers and sisters in Christ overseas don’t always understand us, we need these missionaries more than ever. They are, in most places, the very face of the Episcopal Church. They are the ones who not only build the relationships with people in the pews around the world, they transform those relationships, and in turn are transformed by them. People living overseas, who may have heard that Americans are arrogant, or who have been told that the American church is the embodiment of (fill in the blank to your own satisfaction), discover, upon not only meeting but living with missionaries, that Americans are the same as them: beloved children of God. And that Americans, and by extension the American church, care about them enough to come be with them, work with them, worship with them, and if necessary, suffer with them. You want to change how Anglicans around the world see us? Send a missionary. There are many who are willing to go, if only the support existed.

So here’s what we need to do:

First, we need to make it known to one and all that the Episcopal Church has missionaries, and they are doing good work in all the world. Jesus calls all of us to tell the story, so let’s start doing that.

Second, we need to put our money where our mouths are. If we are going to proclaim that mission is who and what we are, we need to pay for it. We missionaries aren’t asking for the world; we simply would like enough money to live on, and to have our basic expenses covered so that we don’t have to spend all our time acting like members of Congress, constantly raising money just so that we can continue to do that which the Lord has called us to do.

And third, we need to send more people. Is it too radical an idea to ask each diocese to support, financially, one missionary overseas, perhaps just paying the stipend and expenses, while the national Church paid the health care and pension benefits? (That would cost approximately $20,000 per diocese per year – a lot for some dioceses, I know, but then again, aren’t we supposed to be all about mission?) A commitment to that alone would put another 30 (thirty!) missionaries in the field! Each missionary would then be assigned to a diocese, either his or her sending one, or another one, and would be in close contact with the people of that diocese on a regular basis.

Our mission as Christians is to go into all the world to preach the Gospel, and if necessary, to use words. If we are going to live most fully into this mission, shouldn’t we at least be willing to pay for it?

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is a lecturer at the Renk Theological College, teaching Theology, Liturgy and English, and serves as chaplain for the students.

Excerpted from The Episcopal Call to Love
(Apocryphile Press)

By Rob Gieselmann

The Darkness

There is such a thing as Original Sin, only it isn’t what you think. Original Sin is the pall of darkness covering our world.

We live in a room shrink-wrapped by time and space, enshrouded and governed by darkness (see Jn. 1:5). We breathe evil as oxygen in this dark place. It isn’t a choice. We are born into it. Division, hate, bitterness, war, sectarianism, racism, sexism, fear, doubt, even pessimism. Humanity cannot escape the evil. There is no health in us.

Indeed, there is beauty and wonder and love here, joy and family and closeness. But this Eden-earth is canopied as a rainforest. We see the beauty of Eden darkly.

God unbounded by time and space, God as ubiquitous, God living simultaneously in all places and at all times: that God as infinite light entered into the room of this world through the doorway of a virgin. God as the absolute of good and love and light voluntarily subjected herself (or himself, if you prefer) to, in Scripture’s words, the shroud of darkness, the prince of this world, the darkness personified.

God by incarnation submitted to the devil, breathed deeply the devil’s oxygen, was tempted in the wilderness to become one with the devil, and was, at the end of it all, murdered by the devil. Death strangled life; evil trumped love and entombed God.

The Christian message is stark, compelling, and horrifying. Absolute, perfect, and infinite good and love and light submitted by passive non-resistance to absolute, perfect, and finite evil and hate and darkness. To death. Good Friday became the devil’s holy day.

The Light

But Good Friday is not the endgame. Easter is. The expression of nuclear power as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII is exactly God’s plan, only darkness and not people is the target. It isn’t just that Jesus rises from the dead on Easter morning, death itself replaces Jesus in the tomb. As Paul writes, death is the ultimate enemy to suffer defeat (1 Cor. 15:26).

The power of the Christian promise is not that God is compassionate, nor that God is our companion when life gets tough—no matter how accurate both truisms might be. The power of Christianity is this: the darkness has been rendered a mere illusionist, acting by slight of hand. Fear is the only power darkness has left. Life and light and eternity bested darkness long ago; we are victors already. Life is ours now. Life through death. Easter through Good Friday.

And therein lies the horror: we live because we first die. I have been crucified with Christ, Paul writes, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith... (para. Gal. 2:20). Jesus, too, understands that we gain life only through death: take up your cross and follow me (see, e.g., Lk. 9:23, 24). In union with Christ we have imitated his death, we shall also imitate him in his resurrection (Rom. 6:5).

The ancient rite of Baptism incorporates this theology of symbiosis:

We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.. . . of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit (BCP 306).

Baptism is not some arcane rite by which otherwise innocent babies cursed with actual sin are cleansed and, as my seminary professor liked to quip, slapped into the Kingdom, saved from hell in the nick-o-time. Baptism isn’t a fire insurance policy, nor is baptism primarily about forgiveness.

Baptism is about darkness and light, death and life. It is about Original Sin, and its defeat as a power in our lives. But it is also about submitting first to death. We identify fully with and accede to the power of death at the cross exactly because we trust in God as Son submitting completely on the cross: Into your hands I commend my spirit. We give up the ghost, the sky turns dark.

Which may be why the priest marks the baptismal candidate on the forehead with the sign of the cross, Christ’s own forever. The cross is the mark of your death. You are no longer your own, you are Christ’s own forever—a dead man walking.

Following Jesus always leads to the cross, for God and good and others in the defeat of evil. He who will save his life will lose it; he who will lose his life for my sake will find it (Lk. 9:24). Every stitch of Christian ethic originates at the foot of self-sacrifice. Not self-preservation.

But the cross at baptism becomes the mark of life. My life, the one that is hidden with God in Christ. (Col. 3:3) I am alive because I have died!

Note the severe poignancy of Ash Wednesday. The priest marks the forehead with the same cross and oil as at baptism, marking the penitent simultaneously with death and life: You are dust, and to dust you shall return, and the unspoken reminder, you are Christ’s own forever. Again, death is life’s womb.

Original Sin. Original Sin isn’t some stain on the soul inherited from parents. Original Sin isn’t about what one has done or left undone. Original Sin is about the state of affairs—the condition of the world, the air we breathe. The air is polluted, and the condition of the world is dark. That Original Sin is sin with a capital “S,” and is about us—all of us, and not any one of us. Original Sin is collective darkness, the hardness of the heart of a humanity that long ago rejected its God. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in Eden literally or metaphorically, the result is the same. Humanity preferred, and most often still prefers, evil over good, the devil over God. War over peace. Death over life.

God as Son breathed evil as oxygen when born into this world, and so do we. From the minute we are born, we become polluted with the oxygen of evil that we breathe. We become estranged from love, estranged from life, estranged from good, estranged from God, and estranged from others. Our estrangement is also Original Sin, the state of affairs requiring the saving act of Christ. We need to be saved from the evil of isolation.

Baptism saves us (1 Pet. 3:21). Born again into Christ, into community, we are fitted and joined with others, into a living organism of love and acceptance. What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.

Love. Paul doesn’t write about the power of self-sacrificial love for the poetry of the words, but for a power-filled reason. The power of life is found in a love that does not insist on its own way; ...that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor. 13:4-7). Love submits to the Other, as Jesus at the Cross.

This love is the ultimate, and perhaps only, Scriptural imperative: [L]ove the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.... [L]ove your neighbor as yourself (Jer. Bible, Mt. 22:37). All of the law and the prophets hang, depend upon, and are interpreted by a love that becomes at least equal to, if not greater than, love of self.

The exotic beauty of love is rather simple. Love as light dispels darkness. Love is a positive force that overcomes. Love casts out fear. Love keeps Original Sin at bay.

The issue facing us, then, is this: what happens when we stop loving, when we stop being a community of love? What good is salt that has lost its saltiness? (Matt. 5:13). It is fit only to be trampled underfoot.

Rather than self-sacrifice forming our ethic, rather than love binding us, we in both the Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican Communion have formed ethic by argument, by besting one another, by being right rather than by loving.

It doesn’t matter whether the position one holds on the issue of Gene Robinson’s ordination and on homosexuality is technically and morally correct. It really does not matter. The reason it doesn’t matter is because we are asked by God to trust in Jesus as the Christ to be and act as the head of the Body, the head of the Church. We trust Jesus to take care of things, to bring things around to a right theology, and we trust Jesus because we are deeply aware of our own fallibility, our own humanity, that we’ve been wrong before, we’ll be wrong again, and in all likelihood, each of us is wrong now—at least in part. In fact, I guarantee it.

Even if, perchance, there is one of us who is not wrong technically on the issue, he or she is still wrong. As my parents used to tell me, you can be right as rain and still wrong. Remember, Jesus pointed to the sinner beating his chest for mercy as the one who received mercy, not the righteous Pharisee. It was the prodigal who received the Father’s love, not the good son. The good son couldn’t—he was self-consumed.

Which is why we yield. Which is why we trust. Which is why we submit as Jesus to evil, because yielding yields life. Death is life’s womb—we die to our own choices and opinions, in favor of others’.\28 Remember, he who saves his life will lose it. But he who loses his life for my sake, and for the kingdom, will find it—dead man walking.

If we don’t sacrifice self, we can’t call ourselves the Body of Christ. We have become mere table salt that has lost its flavor.

Jesus as Christ in love with a world enshrouded by evil came to destroy the shroud, to open the door to eternity and life and love. The Gospels aren’t wrong just because they are dualistic. The battle is still one of evil against good, of Satan against God, of death against life. The promise is that we are already victors. The curse is that we still see as in a glass dimly. The hope is that we don’t have to.

The Rev. Rob Gieselmann, a lawyer, has served at St. Luke's in Cleveland, Tennessee and St. Paul's near Chestertown, Maryland. He is rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Sausalito, Calif., and author of The Episcopal Call to Love.

By Kathy Staudt

In 1965 I visited Washington DC with my girl scout troop, and was taken on a tour of the Washington “National Cathedral, which was then a work in progress. I don’t actually have a visual memory of what we saw – except a sense that it was confusing and hard to