What's the Rush?

I note this week Rian Malan's article in The Spectator concerning the election of one of Robert Mugabe's henchmen as chair of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. Let's examine the candidate's resume: 80% country-wide unemployment; 2200% inflation, so even if you had a job, you couldn't afford anything; millions facing starvation; 2 million deaths so far attributed to Mugabe's regime. Malan lets on that hyenas are developing a taste for the human flesh dumped in garbage pits. He concludes: "It seems to me that last week's events in New York render a terrible verdict on well-intentioned do-gooders and the climate of impunity they create for African dictators."

Do-gooder is a harsh label. I felt the sting when I was called one by the manager of a homeless shelter that catered to families after I opened one for addicts, ex- and future con's, plus assorted miscreants who aren't welcome in 'decent' shelters. To this day, I don't know myself if the charge might not be true; juding by our mortality rate, not millions over a decade, but 7 in two years, it's enough to make one wonder.

I do know that when of that name-caller's gentleman clients escaped to join my lot who live in the woods in tents, she called the police, demanding they shut down all of shanty-town so she could reclaim her prisoner, ooops, guest. You may, indeed, be able to count how many have died despite your efforts; there's no way to know how many lived - so, you do it anyway.

Woody Allen's Alvy Singer in Annie Hall admitted, "I may be biased, but it's for the Left." The celebrity quote contest winner of the week, John Lennon, of Liverpool, trumped Woody when he wrote, "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow." I confess I'm a serial do-gooder, yet I condemn the actions of the UN and the shelter Nazi with equal vehemence as counter to the raft of a gentle liberalism to which I still cling rather than drown.

What is there to depend upon? Justice? Yuxin Zheng writes in an AP article about a survey of 60,000 people in 62 countries. 10% paid bribeds to judges in 25 of them; in some African and Latin American states, the bribe rate is double that.

Our American system isn't always so hot either. My track record over two decades for finding lawyers to perform pro bono work for shelter guests: 0%. If it wasn't for hardy staff persistence in calling and re-calling court-appointed attorneys, and escorting clients to court, the accused warrant no attention; most are told to cop a plea despite their guilt or innocence.

If the magisterial grandiosity of the world's justice system is a bit lacking, can't we at least employ a consistency in our justifications, rationalizations, and explanation's - all the best -tion's, really. I note this week an absence of same in regard to the Lambeth 2008 invitations when the ABC nailed Gene Robinson, Martin Minns and Nolbert Kunonga to the same uninvited mast.

Let's see: Robinson is a duly elected bishop of TEC; Minns was crowned by Nigerian AB Akinola to manage the American branch of an unincorporated firm unrecognized by any party other than itself, and that's seized the property of a Church its members once took vows to protect; AB Kunonga of Zimbabwe is the lucky beneficiary and contented new squire of two farms appropriated by Mugage from their owners. You might say something about being crucified between two thieves, but I couldn't possibly (with kudo's to the late, great Ian Richardson); I'll sit here, rather quietly, working on one of those Golden Book puzzles you find at the dentist's office, circling the item that doesn't belong in the picture.

Akinola writes, "The withholding of an invitation to a Nigerian Bishop elected and consecrated by other Nigerian bishops will be viewed as witholding invitation to the entire House of Bishops of the Church of Nigeria." By God, he's right for once; he's proved Robinson's case. Otherwise, toss the consistency of language in the same bin containing the moldly debris of the magisterial grandiosity of justice.

Backtracking to last week's notation of Memorial Day, the New York Time's Adam Cohen traced the holiday's history. It started as a day to honor Union soldiers who paid the ultimate price for the abolition of slavery. By 1877, the NY Herald captured a new mood: "all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fougt seem dead." They do? Already? Oh, that's because both sides had a vested interest in discounting the civil rights of the new competitive labor force. By 1913, President Wilson proclaimed a "quarrel forgotten," moving ahead a week later to sign an order segregating Treasury Department bathrooms. These days, Memorial Day honors the sacrifice of Americans in preserving a mostly undefined generic sort of freedom.

Cohen ends, "Memorial Day began with the conviction that to properly honor the war dead, it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they fougt. The only honorable way to remember those who have lost their lives is to commenorate them out in the open, and to insist on a true account."

Connie predicts if a prompt Episcopalian-Anglican reconciliation occurs in our parish soon after a court-ordered property settlement, I will transfer out. I hope it's not true yet I can't discount the posssibility. As much as I once loved the people who've temporarilty displaced us by seizing a property we once held in common, if we re-unite without establishing the justice of the cause that created the split, elegized in the appropriate language, aren't we condoning the actions of the Anglicans by default; that if we are willing to resume our friendships, despite not granting inclusion, equality and civil rights to gays and lesbians, isn' that just as it was for those emancipated, no more than two decades after the Civil War?

I'm a bureaucrat by trade; let's look to the patron saint of office workers, that wily Church-builder, St. Cyprian of Alexandria. During ancient days of Christian persecutions and martyrdom, there were some who said, "I love the Lord and all, but being devoured by a lion.... a bit much, so would you mind terribly, if i ducked out for now, offered some 'Hail Caesars' up to the local Il Duce's, you know how they are, and catch up with ya'll a little later when things have cooled down?"

The question for Old Cyp, and the Council of African Churches (ironically), at their Lambeth, back in 251, was whether or not, and how, to welcome returning apostates when they popped their heads back in the narthex.

The Council decided they'd give it a shot, adopting these rules: the applicant completes a form (in triplicate, duly witnessed and notarized) and turns it in by the established deadline. When the pile of forms stands tall enough to make it worthwhile, the Council will go TDY (standard N. African per diem rates apply). The bishops don't gather too often, but their strategic plan calls for once, at least, every 3 years, pending the odd Barbarian invastion or fall of an empire.

This is very important: for those 3 years, applicants must sit in the last row of pews (I always wondered where Episcopalians picked up that habit) and look very penitent. If they get ahead of themselves, network, or otherwise try to pull a few strings, their application form goes to the bottom of the pile, and the whole process starts over. This is why Cyprian is my hero of the week - someone in the office once asked if it was my job to say no to everything. My response: "no."

As a minimum, reconciliation requires some acknowledgment, some pentitence, that pays attention to the suffering instigated by the separtists, but much more, first and foremost, secures a lasting peace by instilling a united invioable will for full inclusivity and equality; invokes a mandatory vow to never again tolerate intolerance; establishes for all time that we do not have to agree on doctrine to dwell in the house of God in good fellowship.

We don't prove ourselves Christians by rushing a reconciliation that doesn't incoporate the tenets of the struggle, and that signifies at the expense of the victims that it wasn't worth anything beyond reuniting people who just want to be friends again. Traditionalists who've plotted more authoritarian pathways for the Church will be gratified by the application of St. Cyprian's ancient patristic remedy for apostasy. Remember, above all, love the sinners of secession, hate the sin.