The Bishops Meet

A couple notes about Lambeth

Warning: Anglican Wonkiness

This summer, Anglican bishops from throughout the world gathered for fellowship at Lambeth Palace, the residence of the Archbishop in London. The Lambeth Conference is one of the four symbols, “pillars,” of Anglican disunity, in place of a pontiff, a magisterium, or even a doctrine. It is first a body of people. With pointy hats. Formerly all men, but thankfully now including few dozen women.

There is controversy. At the last minute, the executive committee that organized the event scheduled a vote to affirm legislation about sexuality and scripture written in 1998. For many, this impending vote was an unpleasant and unexpected surprise, as over two decades parts of the world have settled with different views. For a good part of the west, it was legislation that had no magisterial or canonical authority, because that is not how our church is, actually, organized. The purpose of bishops for us is to have an obvious person to ignore when necessary, while also confining them with honorifics.

Of course, eyebrows the size of Rowan Williams’ have been raised. A church concerned with sexuality can seem either too hypocritical or socially irrelevant in one part of the world, and in another, it is against divine law to decenter the dimorphic nature of procreation. The liberation of desire is cast against the supposed demands of The Book. 

A few have asked, given the anticipated showdown, why have a conference anyway? Conferences may be boring and pointless, but in their simplest state they may help build and affirm our shared work across national boundaries, exposing one another to the multiplicity of God’s work within the varieties human experience. I suggest this is all that is necessary. Just build relationships and perhaps identify places of common interest among some of the subgroups. It’s enough. 

My facebook feed, aside from the consternations about marriage and identity, has been showing more photos representing episcopal collegiality than strife. Strife, of course, more easily commands our attention than people chatting about the Bible or sitting in silent prayer (boring!). Some bishops are refusing to take communion with same-sex partnered bishop, but as a scandal, it’s minor. Communion is a part of sacred time, so they’ve all implicitly had communion with the gays at some point whether they like it or not. And the reality is that once the world realizes sexuality and desire are much more complex than we can truly define, we will be distracted by some other issue.

The archbishop noted the reality: Anglicans think differently about what constitutes holiness. We are not a single church, but a communion of churches brought together by the accident of history and affection. There is no single “mind” of the church (or even within my own small, tiny, parish). I’m concerned with families and bridging local divides and housing and health care. Someone else is concerned with the liberation of desire. And others teach people to pray. 

While there may be many institutions that provide our prelates opportunities to meet, perhaps the communion should provide a regular school or retreat center where newly consecrated international bishops meet and pray in retreat for a few weeks to build solidarity. A single Lambeth “college” to deepen smaller groups. They probably already have such institutions, but I’ve not been invited to any.

I wonder if some of the consternation arises from technology and social media. Technology can prevent us from the actual work: which is more slow and steady than convenient. With social media, it hastens and simplifies, when we should be slowing down as persons. So voting, via electrical device, on any complex issue stultifies growth and understanding by it. It makes us aggregates of individuals rather than as persons part of a single body, implicitly concealing our interdependence. 

In my view, the interest in the church in sex was not, and should not be, first about desire. It may be about power.  Because the relationship of sex to infant and maternal mortality, violence, and the inheritance of property is deep, it will always take on a pivotal part of the church’s concern. But I suggest, perhaps we are distracted away from the heart of the church’s broader discipline of restraint, which should not be mistaken as defense of Puritan or Victorian discomfort about the mechanics of rubbing, but rather a question of how we are to distribute wealth (in scripture, “treasure”) so that people have enough. But unfortunately, the link between desire and the market, or Mammon, remains obscure, and it is not in the interest in anyone, or rather, most of us, to reveal it.