Friday, June 25, 2004
Griswold's Thinking Again
Blessedly, it is a quiet morning in the ER and each of the trauma bays are empty. Doctors and nurses are milling around, telling jokes and stories, while NCT's restock the rooms. I am waiting to go to my first individual supervisory session at 9:30, which is a time for my supervisor and I to sit down and talk about how things are going I guess. As I wait, I was reading Presiding Bishop Griswold's recent Word to the Church, which is actually quite a few words. He highlights in it that portion of Acts 10, 11 that is the Peter/Cornelius/Spirit saga. "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." It is obvious, as you read, that what he is really talking about is the ongoing debate in the Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican Communion about the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of homosexual persons. He, of course, never directly identifies this. He may be talking about a number of other issues as well, but this debate seems to be in the foreground. The message he gives is all about love, or, as Jim Lemler would put it, [Begin sermon] "Blah...blah...blah...love." [End sermon] I really liked his point that the Father and the Son can be in communion with each other through the Holy Spirit because of their differences. There could be no communion if the whole body of Christ was a foot. Communion is dependent on difference. This seems to me to be the best part of his "Word" and is something to ponder. As we continue to struggle with these very real issues, some on one side of the line, some on the other, it would behoove us to consider the ideas of difference and communion. The words seems mutually exclusive on one level, and, on another level, reliant upon each other. Though I am pretty firmly on the right side of that line, my time here at Seabury has been instructive to me on how to live in communion with my brothers and sisters on the left side of that line.
-R
Blessedly, it is a quiet morning in the ER and each of the trauma bays are empty. Doctors and nurses are milling around, telling jokes and stories, while NCT's restock the rooms. I am waiting to go to my first individual supervisory session at 9:30, which is a time for my supervisor and I to sit down and talk about how things are going I guess. As I wait, I was reading Presiding Bishop Griswold's recent Word to the Church, which is actually quite a few words. He highlights in it that portion of Acts 10, 11 that is the Peter/Cornelius/Spirit saga. "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." It is obvious, as you read, that what he is really talking about is the ongoing debate in the Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican Communion about the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of homosexual persons. He, of course, never directly identifies this. He may be talking about a number of other issues as well, but this debate seems to be in the foreground. The message he gives is all about love, or, as Jim Lemler would put it, [Begin sermon] "Blah...blah...blah...love." [End sermon] I really liked his point that the Father and the Son can be in communion with each other through the Holy Spirit because of their differences. There could be no communion if the whole body of Christ was a foot. Communion is dependent on difference. This seems to me to be the best part of his "Word" and is something to ponder. As we continue to struggle with these very real issues, some on one side of the line, some on the other, it would behoove us to consider the ideas of difference and communion. The words seems mutually exclusive on one level, and, on another level, reliant upon each other. Though I am pretty firmly on the right side of that line, my time here at Seabury has been instructive to me on how to live in communion with my brothers and sisters on the left side of that line.
-R
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