The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod;
Yet let us pray for but one thing -- the marvelous peace of God.
... William Alexander Percy (adapted)
One shoe has fallen, and the other is being assembled in Africa and Canterbury. How long will it dangle from the fingers of Akinola and Williams before we'll know if good Episcopalians have sold themselves and the rest of us out for... less than a mess of pottage?
I am so very angry that representatives of The Episcopal Church were so easily pressured by the current and incoming Presiding Bishops into reversing the prophetic stand against injustice which they had taken in the days just prior. What a difference a day or two makes! Now we wait to see if our capitulation will get us anything at all. How both ironic and right it will be if B033 buys us nothing! Buying approval from the big guns in the Anglican Communion at the cost of justice for queer Episcopalians would bring no real peace. Real peace -- God's peace -- comes from speaking truth to power, from making abuse visible and known, from not denying our brothers and sisters but rather taking the side of those on the outs, regardless of the pressure from those on the ins.
It's so easy for me to write this, to judge those who spent a solid week in that pressure cooker. I was back home in Boston, working my job, weeding my garden, feeding my cats, following the action in Columbus via the internet. I feel for all the deputies and alternates, bishops, priests, deacons, and laity who sweated and voted and debated and agonized and caucused and didn't sleep enough and wore clothes for second and third days and ate too many refined carbohydrates and injested too much caffeine and ended up coming home with... this. Yes, a female Presiding Bishop and defeat of A161, but then... thud. How awful it must have been to have to live through it, on site.
So, let's all eat our vegies and take our B Complex Stress Formula vitamins, get thoroughly hydrated, go through our stretching regimens, and then get back into it -- into the Gospel work we do at our home parishes and in the worlds local to us, but also into putting the backbone back into The Episcopal Church. If our relationship to the Anglican Communion is as the relationship one has with one's family, then let's cut through the denial and name the rhinocerus in the living room. Let's get back to finding that real peace, the one that comes from speaking truth to power, from standing up for the exile and the oddball, from putting those last ones first and reminding those who pride themselves on being first that, really, they're at the end of the line. It won't be restful, but that's where real peace comes from.
