Holy Women, Holy Men

Blessed feasts of blessed martyrs,

holy women, holy men,

with affection’s recollections

greet we your return again.

Worthy deeds they wrought, and wonders,

worthy of the Name they bore;

we, with meetest praise and sweetest,

honor them for evermore.

12th-century Latin text,

translated John Mason Neale

#238, The Hymnal 1982

The 2006 General Convention, meeting in Columbus, voted to approve an "A" resolution from the Standing Commission for Liturgy and Music (SCLM) to substantially revise the Lesser Feats and Fasts book, the "sanctoral" or "Book of Saints" the Episcopal Church uses for it's, well Lesser Feasts. They then produced (as one member put it a tad condescendingly put it) what "General Convention wanted." They have proposed a massive reorganization of the Book, complete with a new name "Holy Women, Holy Men," based off of the lyric quoted above. It is comprised of 112 additions, several adjustments, but no subtractions. I was surprised by and then a bit turned off by the size of the change, but decided to focus my thoughts into one or two spots. I also kept many of my reflections to myself as I watched the discussion unfold on the blogosphere and the HoB/D list.

The response has been mixed. The Establishment Left of TEC has received this, predictably, with open arms. The Conservatives were equally predictable in their rejection. Apparently, "Let your yes be yes and your no be no" has been amended to end with "in a predictably automatic way according to camp." The rest of us, many of whom you will note over at the side of your screen, were mixed in our reactions. I had several little things that stuck in my craw, some of that will be below. Other people had other issues. So, after a while, I went through and I googled a few of the names I was unfamiliar with. I was underwhelmed by most but one or two stood out as particularly good and others as bad. What kept coming to me was the question of why so many, and why some of the people chosen. Rather than indulge in to overly wrought a discursive essay, I'll simply list and briefly explain some of my problems.

1. Saint John of the Cross: This is the most complicated of my objections, so I list it first. I'll start with my general queasy feeling towards "San Juan de la Cruz" being listed in the book. If we were to take the time to list any other saint by their native name it wouldn't bother me as much. As it is, it is just a precious little addition to make the whole mess more "multi-cultural." Second, the date, November 24th, given on the Calendar for John is unexplained. Admittedly, back in the mists of time that was the date for John's commemoration. His death date is December 14th, that is his commemoration in the Roman Catholic and other Western Churches. In the 19th century his day interfered with the octave of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and so was moved to the day that he joined the Carmelites as John of St Mathias. In the 1950's Rome saw that as silly and moved him back to his first date of commemoration. Why then do we put him there? Even the Church of England commemorates him in December. I would guess that this date matches Ye Olde Kalendar in the Anglican Breviary, one of the many Anglo-Catholic books which has enshrined the 19th Century as the epitome of the Churchs' life and history. No doubt that was one of the reasons, but I'll not lay money on it. Now, there is a perfectly good person in HWHM, Henry Budd, one of the first Anglican Religious in the US, if not the Communion. My question would be though, why not commemorate him on a date of "event" and not put John in his place with the rest of the Church? This isn't just a question of being picky for it's own sake, but rather for the sake of continuity, or dare I say, Catholicity. (I'll also add that I think the collect is trite and precious.)

2. John Muir: He was an agnostic if not an atheist. To be more exact he was raised in the Church of Scotland then in one of the Cambelite sects because his father didn't think that the CoS was keeping it real enough. Later in life he would reject the concept of God all together "as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penney theater." How is he an example to the Faithful? He is rammed rather uncomfortably in with Archdeacon Hudson Stuck who was an old time social reformer type and outdoors-man. He helped climb Mount McKinley and was active in passing labor laws and teaching discipleship as caring for one another. I haven't found much that identifies the good Archdeacon as an Environmentalist, but my research is incomplete. What I find objectionable is that a faithful Christian is given second billing to a man who had no such faith, no matter how admirable he may be otherwise.

3. Charles, King and Martyr: This is a reverse objection to the one above, but they are connected. Why, after all this time, do we not include him on our calendar? He is present as a feast on the calendars of many of the other Anglican Churches in the World, and he was a Christian faithful to the catholic faith he had received. He died, in no small part, because he refused to compromise on the good order of the Church and was executed by the Puritans because of it. That there is no room on our calendar for him, but there is for Muir is I indicative of part of the trouble. You see Muir is popular with the "cool kids" of the Establishment in TEC, but Charles II is not.

4. The Amazingly Elastic Standards: Here are the standards of inclusion on the Calendar as outlined in 2006. Here they are for the new book. Now, using the standards as given there why would, say Muir, a Cambelite Agnostic/Atheist get recognized when Charles II isn't? I'm being deadly serious here. Are we to assume that the Sierra Club is now a devotional society of TEC? Are we to discount the Anglican credentials of Charles and the fact that he has a devoted society that has lobbied for him, as well as a well defined devotion dedicated to his memory? This is just one example of the "cool kids" making a decision and roling with it. I could list Barth, Fannie Crosby, or Kierkegarrd as example of other faithful Christians who seem to not fill in all the criteria for the calendar but are there and people like Laud, Church, Charlotte Young, or Auber are not.

5. Those Who Have Left Us: HWHM adds three names that stood up and slapped me when I saw them. John Henry Newman, GK Chesterton, and Elizabeth Anne Seaton all left the Anglican faith for "greener pastures" in the Bark of Peter. I am deeply ambivalent about this, in particular with Chesterton who could be very sardonic about Anglicanism. Newman requires his own post.

A bit later I'll expand upon what i mean by "The Cool Kids" and my feelings about the elitism that runs around in our Church.

Episcopal "Reform of the Reform"

"The Episcopal Church is passing through a watershed era. I believe that as the Baby Boomers begin to fade out and Generations X and Y begin asserting our voices, yet more changes remain on the horizon. As these changes are coupled with the growth of information technology, emerging/evolving soical media, and widespread social changes, I think we’re only at the start of a larger, more complicated, more convoluted process than we may suspect."

Read the rest, here.

There are several things in this that I find to be very interesting. The first is the continued statement that those of us who come after the post WWII generation are different and have different needs and desires. One of the key things is that we have lost is any sense of history. We have stopped training clergy in many of our seminaries to be pastoral theologians and educators and turned them into a kind of Spiritual social worker. With the more heavy duty academic work also went an ability to be grounded in the continutity of the Church as a whole. The sloppy things that come out of clergies mouths should be a source of scandal for the Church. A generation of sloppy, amateurish theology and history from the pulpit is combined with a massive amount of bad "scholarship" about the History and life of the Church (Marcus Borg and his hip, yuppie Jesus for the new millennium being chief among them, but Pagels and her amazingly elastic Gnosticism comes in a close second) to make a messy situation.

Some of this is simply an inability of post-modernism to actually construct anything lasting or meaningful. The other part of this is that the post WWII generation tended to be disinterested in building in the Church as much as they were intent on destroying. Diogenies Allen said once that the birthright of the Church had been stolen and destroyed. Part of this destruction is so that those who came after could not return to the past to look for ideas. Rather, the past as drawn by the well meaning, but misguided, intermediate is all that is there, and this image is so incomplete that it is useless. Some of this is a function of a general disdain for History in general, and a substitution for "these are my thoughts on the subject" and a collection of caricatures designed to make the reader feel better about themselves.

What we need is a solid reclamation of our heritage and an insistence upon it as a starting point.

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/bishops/thew_forrester_election_report.html


The Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester cannot receive enough votes from standing committees in the Episcopal Church to be consecrated as bishop of Northern Michigan according to a tally kept by an Arkansas reporter who has been in contact with all of the Church's 110 dioceses as well as the Convocation in Europe.
The Diocese of Bethlehem's standing committee voted not to consent to Thew Forrester's election tonight, becoming the 56th diocese to withhold consent according to the reporting of Frank Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, who also reports online at Bible Belt Blogger. If his count is correct, Thew Forrester can only be confirmed if some standing committee's change their votes.
Fifty-six standing committees have withheld consent. Twenty-nine have given consent. Twenty-six have either not voted or not reported on their vote, according to Lockwood.
The Church does not announce the outcome of confirmation balloting until after the 120-day period in which consents may be received. Thew Forrester's consent period ends in late July.