We all need the Anglicans right now

There are days when I actually don't care anymore. About the Communion. About whether or not we're "Anglican" or not. About all the jots and tiddles that consume those consumed with the consuming saga of "As the Anglican World Turns."

On those days, I have lots of company. Titusonenine notes that "the buzz and news overload that those of us who follow the blogs are experiencing right now may be surprisingly limited in scope." For the truth is, the VAST majority of Anglicans -- whether they're in Nigeria or Northampton or Nebraska -- are going about their business, trying to love their neighbors as themselves and get their "inch at a time" done for the day.

Who cares if the Anglican Communion blows itself up? Honest to Pete not most of the people I talk to. Really!

And yet ...

And yet ...

And so ...

I was so very grateful at the end of a VERY long day to find the link to this article by Sr. Joan Chittister ... yes the very one whose "inch at a time" quote inspired the creation of this blog ... entitled:

"We all need the Anglicans right now."

.

Published today in the National Catholic Reporter you can read the whole piece here (and should!) but here's an excerpt:

The question the Anglican communion is facing for us all right now is a clear one: What happens to a group, to a church, that stands poised to choose either confusion or tyranny, either anarchy or authoritarianism, either unity or uniformity? Are there really only two choices possible at such a moment? Is there nowhere in-between?

The struggle going on inside the Anglican Communion about the episcopal ordination of homosexual priests and the recognition of the homosexual lifestyle as a natural state is not peculiar to Anglicanism. The issue is in the air we breathe. The Anglicans simply got there earlier than most. And so they may well become a model to the rest of us of how to handle such questions. If the rate and kinds of social, biological, scientific and global change continue at the present pace, every religious group may well find itself at the breakpoint between "tradition" and "science" sooner rather than later.

Theological questions driven by new scientific findings, new social realities, new technological possibilities abound. How moral is it to take cells from one person for the treatment of another if all human cells are potentially life generating? Is that the destruction of life? If homosexuality is "natural," meaning biologically configured at birth, why is it immoral for homosexuals to live in homosexual unions -- even if they are bishops? After all, isn't that what we said -- in fact, did -- when we argued "scientifically" that blacks were not fit for ordination because blacks weren't quite as human as whites? And so we kept them out of our seminaries and called ourselves "Christian" for doing it. Without even the grace to blush.

It is not so much how moral we think we are that is the test of a church. Perhaps the measure of our own morality is how certain we have been of our immoral morality across the ages. That should give us caution. We said, at one time, that it was gravely immoral to charge interest on loans, that it was mortally sinful to miss Mass on Sunday, that people could not read books on the Index, that the divorced could not remarry. And we brooked no question on any of these things. People were either in or out, good or bad, religious or not, depending on whether they stood at one end or another of those spectrums.

Clearly, the problem is not that definitions of morality can shift in the light of new information or social reality. The problem is that we don't seem to know how to deal with the questions that precede the new insights. We seem to think that we have only two possible choices: the authoritarianism model, which requires intellectual uniformity and calls it "community" or a kind of intellectual anarchism, which eats away at the very cloth of tradition in a changing world.

The problem is that threatened by change we are more inclined to suppress the prophetic question than we are to find the kind of structures that can release the Spirit, that can lead us beyond unthinking submission while honoring the tradition and testing the spirits ...

From where I stand, we need those who can develop a model of faith in times of uncertainty in which the tradition is revered and the prophetic is honored. Unless we want to see ourselves go into either tyranny or anarchy, we better pray for the Anglicans so that they can show us how to do that.

Yes, Sister Joan, pray for the Anglicans. Please. We need it this week. And thanks for reminding THIS Anglican why I care. So much. Even on the days when I think I don't.
.