A Traditionalist

I note this week how hard it was to go home. Our unpaved country road's coated with ice especially at the crest of the second of two steep hills. While the woods retain their sparse winter beauty, the landscape's treacherous transformation from sanctuary to danger is disconcerting.

Standhill, our home, nestles half way between the small town of Guinea Station where Stonewall quietly succumbed to wounds sustained earlier in battle at Chancellorsville, and Prospect Hill, where the North unsuccessfully tried to flank Fredericksburg to the southeast in an 1862 drive toward Richmond. In the forests surrounding Standhill, ancient wagonwheel ruts are preserved in hardscrabble clay. An abandoned Confederate railroad line crosses over the northern base of the hill below. The permanence of this place and its history orders a considered life and presages reassurance of continuity.

Before the troubles in the Episcopal Church our parish perservered like a structural support beam that frames a sturdy yet charmingly untidy house. The old sacred space was home to much more than mere common community. Within those enveloping walls, church years played out, with I playing the parts of oldest living teenager and Mr. Outreach so much so that when I entered on Sunday, I'd inevitably hear someone shout, 'Hey, I've got a bag of underpants for you.' Others embodied the natures of wise man, clown, mother, artist, lector, cook, seamstress, and so much more, encompassing all the familiar Episcopalian actors. Four hundred souls, five hundred directions, yet one.

Like the ice that grips our woods, the church is now overcome and taken away. What storm can freeze the hearts of friends? How many times can you construct a vulnerable faith in the permanence of place and yet find the rug pulled out from under the foundation? Is there a price so dear to pay for the preservation of the comfort of familiar things? In pursuit of answers, I'm mindful of comments by two former Episcopalians. The first: "Nothing has changed but the leadership." The second: "Legislation imprisoning gays is not a showstopper."

'Ism's' and 'doxy's' hold colossal power to vanquish friendship. Contempt overcomes relationship. Inequalities are formalized in a short time, then nutured. Bad science confirms spurious assumptions. Government policies legitimized by Church enable legislation spawned by a shifting majority, fueled by sensation, that enshrines persecution as law. Those abandoned suffer not from ethereal problems of theology but from real violence, humiliation, terror, death.

Is it altogether possible to ignore the wider implications while parish life peacably continues? Is there any justifiable rationalization for a perceived advantage in a matter of competing regional faiths, or support of a concept, here a worldwide Anglican Communion, that's worth alignment with a power complicit in unwarranted imprisonment, torture or death? When the policy of appeasement failed in 1939, its chastended broken architect Neville Chamberlain spoke on the eve of war, "Now may God bless you all, and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting; against brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution, and against them I am certain that Right will prevail."

In the wake of Tanzania, we must first pay attention to Changing Attitude Nigeria whose very lives far beyond any notion of comfort are at stake. They say, "The Anglican Communion can never come to an integrated teaching on human sexuality until it has listened with open mind and heart to our experience and Christian testimony. We object outright to the idea that it is possible to divide our innate sexuality as gay people from what the church insists on calling 'genital activity.' Like heterosexuals we believe the love between two mature adults should be expressed in a faithful, life-long, partnership in which sexual expression is integral."

Within the broad front response to Tanzania, I agree most with Bishop Steven Charleston of the Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, "I would be willing to accept being told I'm not in communion with places like Nigeria if it meant I could continue to be in a position of justice and morality. If the price I pay is that I'm not considered to be part of a flawed communtion, then so be it."

When I'm compelled by business to leave Standhill, I use Richmond Airport. Rather than I-95 South, I drive Route 2, the Old Richmond Highway which transits small towns, rivers, forests and farms. One evening at sunset, a bald eage flew low over a bridge following a golden stream. I've found peace in Virginia, in my town, my church, my home. How do even these beloved things measure against justice? I take exception to the point of sacrificing them in opposition to those who say nothing's changed or that imprisonment of gays isn't a showstopper. It could only be so if you turn a blind eye to consequences of your actions. What's most ironic is that they who voted to leave and align with Archbishop Akinola of Niegera purportedly value consequences immeasurably, yet apparently ignore them, while those who've stayed in the Church can't evade them, and are condemned as liberals not concered with consequences at all.

When John Steinbeck's Tom Joad in 'Grapes of Wrath,' must leave his family lest he endanger them, he says, "whatever you do, I'm always with you. Head and heart. I'll be everywhere you look. Whenever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there...an' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in houses they build - why, I'll be there. See?"

Wherever there are persecuted, the poor, the hungry, outcasts, I'll be there. Whenever there is injustice and violence, I'll be there, to witness against the perpetrators and their followers, no matter how distant. I'll be with the Episcopal Church as long as it doesn't appease false prophets, retreat from hard fought gains or take too much longer to ordain full inclusion. I can not turn a blind eye for the sake of comfort and familiarity in order to accomodate oppresson for accomodation's own sake nor risk another rug pulled out from under the foundation of our hopes. Only when all our folks live, worship and prosper together, can we truly come home, and I'll be there. See?