Yesterday Jim Naughton spoke to NPR's "All Things Considered" about the announcement last week that the Vatican is setting a place at the table for "disaffected" Anglicans to come home to Rome.You'll want to click here to listen to the interview and hear Jim be his usual faithful, on-message-for-Jesus self, but if you need to save that treat for a little later, here's the core message we all would do well to internalize:
I think for Episcopalians, what we need to do in the wake of this announcement is to continue going out there and saying, look, we do offer very traditional liturgy, beautiful music, a style of worship that many people like. But we are a democratically governed church. We think men and women are equal at the altar, and we respect the dignity of gay and lesbian Christians. If that makes us outcasts, I think that that's a status that we embrace happily. So if what we're talking about here are people offering alternatives, I think Episcopalians offer that alternative to their Catholic brothers and sisters.
And (I would add) to ANYONE seeking a community of faith committed to traditional values of love, compassion, peace, justice and equality.
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5 comments:
Jim's comments are far more inviting that 'My grace's' saying that everything is an 'affront'.
word: tricken
How apt (not for Jim's words, no!).
beautifully said!
"[W]e do offer very traditional liturgy, beautiful music, a style of worship that many people like."
Just aesthetics. All mutable.
"But we are a democratically governed church."
And what does that have to do with determining the truth and acting in accordance with it? Especially in the realm of doctrine & dogma?
Democracy gave us Obama. It also gave us Nixon. Which was the more Godly choice? The correct answer is "neither one."
I heard the interview and the one with the Grand Poobah of ACNA. When the interviewer addressed him as "Your Grace" I almost lost control of the car.
Traditional liturgy and beautiful music, presented in a beautiful church, can bring transcendent experiences. One of Bach's biographers wrote that in his religious life Bach considered music as "an essential component of the religion itself, indeed one of its defining characteristics." Gregorian chant, Palestrina, Duruflé, Vaughn Williams, Lauridsen, Haydn, Handel, Mozart, “just aesthetics?” “All mutable?” Really?
I favor a democratically governed church over a patriarchal hierarchy, such as the Catholic Church, which protects criminals at the expense of women and children. Plenty of doctrine and dogma. Acting in accordance with the truth? Not so much.
Nor do I care much for the evangelical patriarchal model (the Grahams, the Crouches, the Schullers) which is more about branding and the cult of personality than anything else.
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