realignment

From Fr. Daniel Martins:

[The Liberals] are simultaneously correct and clueless. (If I knew how to say that in Latin, I surely would!) Yes, good order is being subverted. Duh! To stretch an overworked metaphor, Shall we take a vote by orders before we rearrange the deck chairs? A new thing is emerging, and order gets subverted when major change--yea, a seismic shift--is in process. Anglicanism is reinventing itself. (If I weren't so well-schooled in Anglican humble understatement, I might be tempted to say that God is reinventing Anglicanism.) The Elizabethan Settlement has frayed past the point of being restitched. We need--and will, I believe, get, and sooner than we might think--a new constitutional basis. Not all who call themselves Anglicans today will like what emerges. It will be different than the informal bonds of affection that, along with Wippel's, have held us together in the past. It won't feel like our grandparents' Anglicanism. There will be more uniformity of faith and practice. Provincial autonomy will not trump interdependence. Structures of authority will be clearer.

In the meantime, we wait, sometimes patiently and sometimes with great anxiety. It's like watching a sculptor chip away at a block of marble. We trust that there's a work of art in there somewhere, but we can't see it yet, and that makes us really, really nervous because we desperately want to know what it's going to look like.