mains3 "I would say: “Stay in the Episcopal Church as long as you can, until they push you out. We have a contribution to make. It is not a contribution we will make by ‘winning,’ for I think we have lost. But the ascendant party needs us, not just to feel that they really are ‘tolerant,’ but to somehow arrive at a finally catholic expression of Christianity. If we leave, there won’t be any ‘heavy water’ for purposes of gospel fusion; there won’t be any lodestone by which, one day, a course correction could be made. I feel like we are the lead, in the sense of the comic book ‘Superman’: the lead that may still protect them from the kryptonite of the world’s ‘never-failing stores.’ Without us, in other words, they will finally choke and tremble in the deadly night air, because the whole thing was derived, was ingested, from the world’s ideas – and those ideas change, like the weather. So, dear brethren and sistren, stay in, so long as you can.
“On the other hand, if they – the regnant Episcopalians – really won’t give you a shred of space, then, sigh, you will be forced out. Like the character Ripley in the movie ‘Alien,’ slip through the airlock and tie yourself up in the escape shuttle and push off into the great unknown. And if it really comes to that, then, and then only, watch that you allow no stowaway!…”
From the interview at posted by Fr. Harmon at Titusonenine.
Dean Zahl describes exactly how I often feel, i.e. that we've lost, that its only a matter of time, that the consideration of a vocation in the Episcopal Church is rather like looking at the cross on which one knows one will shortly be crucified. I say "often feel" because I don't always feel this way. At other times, and always among some, there is real generosity, openess, and vulnerability with those on the "other side." In any case we are called to know nothing but Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And if our proclamation of Christ crucified is accomplishible, by his grace, only through our superficial ruination, then so be it. I didn't make myself an Episcopalian; I have been placed here by Another. And this is where I mean to stay until I am no longer able to stay.
2 comments:
Here, here.
I agree with you wholly, in the same way, that while I am struck with the truth of Zahl's words, I don't always feel this way.
Of course, Zahl is an antinomian, and from what I have heard from him, his belief is that we will overcome without reiterating the Church's moral teaching. I have to hold that reassertion of the Faith has to include moral content, or we have a Gospel which does not require repentance, but some vague ideal of walking in the Spirit, which although I believe this important, it cannot be the sum total.
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