Saturday, February 24, 2007

Just Listen

Go listen to this. Listen to understand, not to debate.

I hear honesty. I hear someone I desperately want to trust.

I need to sit with this for awhile before saying more.

Thanks Ann and Lisa.

J.

7 comments:

  1. "I feel your pain," said the vicious slavemaster in Zanzibar, speaking to the young man just whipped for proof that he was virile and able to withstand all the brutality of the system. "This, I know, is very hard to accept."

    At the very spot that this vignette occurred well over 100 years ago, our PB knelt and prayed and thought. Can this be the same idea that was to ferment in her mind as she traveled back to the U.S.....and shared the Episcopal Church Center employees in this taped report, or was she still jet-lagged? I wonder? Are we gay and lesbian bishops, priests, deacons, and laity of the Episcopal Church just supposed to be patient...like the Zanzibar slaves? Say,wait another eighty years, like she mentioned they had to do? I don't think so!

    Is this what the Episcopal Church PB is really saying? If so, how ironic. How presumptious. How grotesque. How disgusting. I would be ashamed to be connected in anyway with a Church like this. Who even needs "religion" if it speaks like this?

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  2. I listened and thought I understood and trusted. Then I listened again. The second time I heard someone who desperately wants to believe that everything is going to be all right if we wait long enough for "conversation" to bring about "conversion". Then I remembered I'd heard it all before from the former occupant of the same office suite.

    The trouble is, nobody's really interested in listening. What's happening is the same sort of militant wedge issue politics that brought about the Republican takeover of Congress under Gingrich and the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist denomination.

    Go read this. Abp. Akinola demanding that the Church of England also repent and prove that it has ceased its acceptance of homosexuality and homosexuals by September 30, with the implicit threat to lead a global separation from the existing Anglican Communion (see http://tinyurl.com/2r4e5k -- reported on the Episcopal blog Episcope today, and also available at the Website of Nairobi's Daily Nation: http://tinyurl.com/3aeoz3).

    Our Katharine is impressive and persuasive and I also want to trust. It's just that nasty thing called reality that keeps getting in the way.

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  3. I would like to know exactly how the PB expects this 'conversation' is to take place in a nation where the bishop wants to see everyone taking a gay-affirmative stance thrown in jail and is advocating current legislation to do just that.

    (I really don't like seeing the conversations on Jake's Blog divided between two different systems.)

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  4. I listened to Katharine - I heard her saying - here is where I am today - talk to me. She is having a live call in show on Wednesday a.m. Hope everyone will participate - 45 minutes is not enough time but it is a start. I also heard her say whatever we decide as as a church -we will still work for a church where being gay or lesbian does not prevent one from offering one's gifts or being blessed.
    I think those of us committed to full inclusion need to be the non-anxious, no backing down presence. Show up, tell the truth, don't become attached in unhealthy ways. TEC needs to stick with where we are and in 2009 push the envelope some more. It is the combination of pushing with presence that makes change. We are not going away, we love you but this is where we stand, the ball is in your court.
    And no money for the "game" if we aren't a player. Money for relief and development but not for the ACC, Primates, Lambeth, etc.
    BTW this division of Haloscan and Blogger is sort of symbolic of the church.

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  5. Go to Louie's Do Justice series for some more comments - especially Laurie Gudim.

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  6. I have listened very carefully and non-judgmentally – twice – and I hear the same carefully worded and excellently modulated, passionless VOICE that echoed out over the crowd in the House of Deputies, and in the background I still hear the sobbing of those who took her at her word and let B033 go through – actually betraying themselves and their own brothers and sisters, selling them down the river because of that VOICE – and truly WANTING the best for her.

    And now the same VOICE gives us B033 writ massively large and utterly contaminated further by "no SSBs" and "Foreign Primates in charge of TEC internal policy". And it has exactly the same deeply sincere, "caring", and charitable tone.

    But there is no longer anything to wait for, because nothing more is coming – not for decades, not for generations, not for centuries. "Fasting" until we are all dead! If we follow the VOICE no one alive today will ever see the TEC return to its mission, restore its own charism, or be true to its own nature.

    What is offered is an horrendous mess of pottage. Does anyone really want to follow Esau????????

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  7. Even Jesus only fasted in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. Now we are to wait to be 'truly members incorporate in the Body of Christ' for how long? 40 years? 400? Once again, a last minute 'deal' has led to betrayal and abandonment of LGBT Episcopalians, our children, our families and our friends. I never asked to join the Anglican Church: I joined the Episcopal Church of the Untied States of America and owe allegiance to no foreign bishop.

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