The presiding bishop's job is, at least in part, a balancing act. She walks the high wire with some grace. On one point here, I hope a little gust of spirit won't knock her off the wire -

Our Presiding Bishop says what we're facing now is, "...not a new challenge, but [one that] is exacerbated by the rapidity and pervasiveness of today's communication and the need to honestly confront the legacy of colonialism."

In a developed world where communities have been shattered into fragments by radical individualistic consumerism, embodied, committed relationships counter-cultural Good News, genuine Gospel healing and reconciliation.

Bishop Michael Ingham in Canada, John Chane, Tom Shaw, Marc Andrus (and others) in the U.S. show us (and I hope our Presiding Bishop) a way forward that includes honesty about the grace and renewal of love and community we are finding in blessing committed relationships (heterosexual and same sex) and encouraging that our church witnessing these promises 'do all in our power to uphold these two persons in their marriage.'

Honestly, that's where we are. Honestly it's the post-colonial point we ALMOST reached at Lambeth 1998 with the careful report of the study committee that saw global Anglicanism divided on divorce and remarriage, polygamy, and same sex relationships but found a balance point in acknowledging that as we tried to address the hard questions our cultures were asking about relationship that Anglicans across the globe all agreed that we were working toward and support lifelong committed love. A cynical power play at Lambeth 1998 gave us a very different statement, a dishonest one that some seem to now claim has the force of doctrine.

The report that was never let out of committee is still true. It's the pastoral and moral reality that we can only live into for learning if we're honest about it. Marriage and committed relationships are as varied and complex today as they were in the Bible itself. In the day to day, (and yes, Bishop Katharine) "life and death" world of relationships, it's strong post-colonial truth that none of us can live with 19th century patriarchal morals grounded in appearances, and none of us is fully clear about what our particular way forward in our many cultures asks of us.

Colonialism (like slavery and like entrenched patriarchy) binds both the colonized people and the colonial power (the slave and the owner, all women and men). Christianity came to Africa clothed in white Victorian respectability preaching a Gospel of freedom and personal salvation.

The Victorian version of Gospel did carry good news. It also contained the seeds of death. There are places in Africa where it's still judged unseemly to talk about HIV/AIDS in a sermon. With one of the worst epidemics in human history raging, that is a life and death choice, and the proper Victorian colonial respectability that mandates silence is itself obscene.

Post-colonial truth-telling challenges us to talk with our African sisters and brothers about the hard work we face together of sharing experience (the whole breadth of experience - graced, broken, or tragic) and joining together in local, culturally appropriate ways to discover and make a Christian ethic of sex and relationship for real men and women in their full complex humanity.

(I guess Rowan Williams'job is also a highwire act, but sometimes his approach seems to be to crawl along the high wire and when he slips to hang from it by his toes and hands).

Why is it always that we have to "honestly confront the legacy of colonialism" - but never "honestly confront the legacy of the Christian church as it has affected gay people throughout the ages"?

Sounds like the same old thing to me.

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