World Without Transcendence – Getting Away With It.

It’s almost axiomatic that, in a world that denies transcendence, one will encounter many contrivances.  After all, something has to erect a facade to cover the gap the denial creates.  Here behind the lines, one encounters many such contrivances.  Of late, we seem to be buried in what are termed “reality” media spectacles.  They are, in fact, elaborately crafted and totally artificial.  It is revealing the label of “reality” has been attached to them.  Evidently, some people somewhere seem to have concluded that things have gotten to the point where no one would notice, or at least no one will point out, how absurd the use of the label actually is.

But every so often, truth and true reality break through — seemingly leak out of the container they have been sealed into, so the contrivances can have a clear field.  For a number of years, I worked in a public building owned by the federal government.  In the rotunda of that building, and other open areas, performances and displays of various kinds were fairly frequent.  These were venues the government had, effectively, readily available and at hand.  One such display was labelled as art.  There was welded scrap metal, soup cans (a bit of homage to Andy Warhol, it seemed), and paint splatters on assorted surfaces.  Good that it was free.  I couldn’t imagine too many people paying to see it.  (Of course, they already had, through taxation, but that’s another story.)  But as I wandered through the “artefacts,” truth leaked out.

A young woman came into view.  She was clearly a part of the community that was behind the display.  She turned, and started to walk in a direction that made her pass by me.  As she did, I saw she was wearing a rather large pin-on button.  It had a short, very relevant message: “Art is whatever you can get away with.”  The message, and the encounter with it, proved much more memorable than the artefacts.

When it comes to art displays, “whatever you can get away with” can be harmless though annoying at times.  But here behind the lines, with the denial of transcendence, it has become an increasingly pervasive and pernicious way of operating in more serious areas of society and human endeavour.  And it seems clear that there is, contrary to the old adage, harm to be done in trying.  Dostoevsky, through Ivan Karamazov, presented the premise that if God does not exist, all things are permissible or lawful (depending on how you translate the Russian).  Recent behaviour in places of power and control has been such that this premise has, effectively, been accepted and adopted.

The distance between everything is permissible and whatever you can get away with is so short that, but for the transcendent, the journey over the distance is inevitable rather than merely tempting.  And where brutal, anti-theistic secularism has sought to prevail, the inevitable has indeed come to pass.  Here in British Columbia, our auto insurance and licensing is in the hands of the Insurance Corp. of British Colombia.  One can be forgiven for being a bit concerned the licensing function has been moved out of government, but it’s only auto registration.  Or at least it was, until the outfit was handed drivers licensing too.  Now that is a lot of power, in the form of information, that is in corporate hands.  Governments are hard to make tremble if they want to go astray, and corporations are even harder.  About the only instrument available is the courts, and that is precisely what the corporation sought to undermine.  The corporation does not have either a fine record or a fine reputation.  Since it is a powerful corporate monopoly, that’s no surprise.  It gets taken to court — civil court — not infrequently.  However, it found a way to deal with that problem.

When you deal in car insurance, car licensing, and drivers licensing, you amass a lot of information.  The information is about most of the people in the province, and when you go to court, it will be those people who will be members of the jury.  However, if you have a huge bank of information about people who could be jurors, you could use it to assess who should, and should not, hear the case, with an eye to influencing the outcome in favour of the corporation through juror selection.  Any people the corporation has given a hard time to in the jury pool?  See they are not seated.  Check your records, and shape the jury.  Now a moment’s thought by all but the morally bankrupt will clearly indicate the utter corruption of such a tactic.  It is a misuse of information, and arguably obstruction of justice.  But where transcendence is denied, what is fair becomes whatever one can get away with.  And the corporation tried, and until very recently succeeded in getting away with it.  They have been caught, and a number of people have said the requisite “naughty naughty” comments about them.  But (forgive the analogy) the jury is still out on whether or not the corporation got away with it.  It will be instructive to see if there will be corrective discipline and needed reform, or mere cover-up.  Stay tuned.

But should we be concerned that a corporate entity, an insurance company at that, has played it fast and loose to gain advantages in civil court proceedings?  It’s not as if we were talking about the criminal courts, and government officials.  Well, in B.C., true enough.  For that, we have to go to Ontario.

In B.C., corporate functionaries misused insurance and licensing records in civil cases.  In Ontario, recently, we have learned that government prosecutors have misused police records in criminal cases to shape juries.  Think about it.  Rather than “12 good men and true,” 12 secretly screen individuals, selected by people who can, without explanation, challenge many potential jurors, have been deciding guilt and innocence.  The practice first came to light in Simcoe County, and was, naturally, branded an “isolated incident.”  That proved somewhat inaccurate, since a judge in Windsor had to declare a mistrial when the same practice was uncovered there.  Even in the criminal courts, the course of action was not predicated on a transcendent consideration of right and wrong.  What prevailed was the pragmatic consideration of “whenever you (think you) can get away with.”  Stay tuned on this one, too.  The Ontario privacy people are, so far, the only ones planning on looking into this one.  Good for them; so they should.  But if that’s the only response, well, can you say “cover-up” and “whitewash”?

Where transcendence is denied, nothing is sacred.  All things become perceived as permissible.  “Whatever you can get away with” becomes the order of today when planning how to proceed.  There’s a price to pay when you deny transcendence, and a couple of bills, it seems, have come due.  Their payment has been at the cost of the integrity of the legal system itself.  That’s a high cost.

There’s been concern — rightly so — about the actions of human rights tribunals.  Well, if the courts themselves are being subjected to these kinds of attacks from within by supposedly responsible and trusted parties, what, one must ask, can merely quasi-judicial bodies hope for?  Even a public inquiry into an airport death by Tazering was recently rocked when long withheld evidence of police intent can came to light.  Can we, in the present environment, expect anything different?  Can we expect change, without a change in the environment?  Is such an expectation of environmental change merely folly?  The evidence, in the form of the denial of the transcendent, suggests that perhaps it is.

And folly may well march on.  A major federal agency is out for business in a big way.  It wants to collect everything, from all taxes to municipal levies, by law fines, and traffic tickets.  Think of the information it would amass!  There is a big question here, and it is whether or not, right now, in the present moral environment, allowing such a huge, secret, and secretly accessible database to come into being would be other than an act of folly?  Would it not be better to wait until “whatever you can get away with” is not so attractive and frequently chosen a predicating factor in determining how power gets used?  After all, it is indeed good to light a match in the dark so one can see and avoid falling into a ditch.  But it is folly to do so if one smells gas, dark or not.  Here behind the lines, until we put to rest the attractiveness of “what ever you can get away with,” we had best tread very, very carefully.

Of course, we could restore much useful vision by removing the blindfold that is the denial of the existence of the transcended.

World Without Transcendence — One Flesh Torn Asunder.

Over the years, I’ve seen many interesting theories arise as transcendence is more and more denied here behind the lines.  Scientism (but not science itself) has provided some really strange answers to the questions of where did we come from and why are we here.  One of the ones that baffled and amused me the most was Carl Sagan’s approach to the questions.  In summary, he indicated it was all random chance; we are here for no particular reason, and it is wonderful and breathtaking that we are here.  He didn’t indicate why it was wonderful and breathtaking, mind you.  It just was.  Unfortunately, others have drawn more troubling and troublesome conclusions about some matters from which they have excluded the transcendent.  One of those matters is marriage.

Marriage has been, from earliest times, subject to regulation and control.  It is true that not all peoples at all times and in all places regulated and controlled it in exactly the same manner.  But some things were pretty constant.  Men married women, and women married man.  Marriage was always more than just a mere contractual arrangement.  Even when oaths of fealty provided for the cementing of relationships, marriage promises were something different in nature.  It was all part of an effort to honor and protect something that people have discovered was an integral and very important part of their human nature.  Protecting it with controls and regulations — laws — was a proper as providing protection for anything valuable.  Until recently, that is.

When people decide to exclude the transcendent from consideration, the rest of the trappings that surround the subject under consideration remain.  If the house burns down, the fence can remain.  If we saw a fence around an empty lot, we might wonder why it was put there in the first place.  What we are unlikely to conclude is that a lot is special because some folks put a fence around it.  When it comes to marriage, that’s just what seems to have happened.  According to the deniers of transcendence, marriage is an entity only because of the body of laws that exists surrounding it.  Take away the laws, it would seem, and to these people, marriage would not exist.  It becomes, therefore, merely a human invention, and merely an invention of lawyers and politicians who have come to hold positions of power.  Therefore these people have concluded that they can make of marriage whatever they wish, and they have proceeded to try to do so.  It would all be laughable, were it not for the profound damage they have thereby done.

The denial of the transcendence of marriage has had some shocking manifestations.  One would, for example, expect that those who claim to be Christians would have none of this debasement of marriage.  A majority of Christians view marriage as a Sacrament, and most of those who reject the concept of sacraments hold to be somehow sacred.  Yet we have a remarkable spectacle as the Anglican hierarchies of North America reject the transcendence of marriage.  In 2002, Canadian Anglican Archbishop David Crawley, told the CBC in a broadcast interview:

Well, the church can’t decide who gets married.  The government, the provincial government, controls marriage.  And when clergy marry people, they do so as agents of the provincial government, licensed agents.

The disavow hasn’t slackened.  Quite recently, a US Episcopal woman priest wrote in a discussion group:

Don’t equivocate on the meaning of “marriage.”… “Marriage” is a state institution conferring certain civil rights and imposing certain penalties for violation.  “Marriage” is a sacrament of the church, the ministers of which are the couple themselves….

On the showing of these utterances, even people who would have us take them to be Christians have turned their backs on transcendence, when it comes to marriage.  Do not been deceived by the word “sacrament” in the second quotation.  It identifies a human invention, by something termed the “church,” as distinct from a human invention, by something termed the “state.”  And it cannot even be stated that Anglicans are unique among those who claim the title of “Christians” who have turned their back on the transcendence of marriage, and treated as a mere human contrivance, like a corporation or business contract.  The denial runs deep.

So what are some of the effects of this disregard for transcendence?  Do we have to ask, really?  Probably not, but we can briefly go over some of them for an insight into what happens when transcendence is disregarded.  Legal constructs can be changed, and marriage changes have certainly been attempted.  It all began with the ready acceptance of divorce.  What we now have is a situation where to consider divorce a bad thing is to almost guarantee being labeled as some kind of an extremist nut (or maybe, shudder, a believing Christian).  Liturgies (well, so-called) have been devised for the occasion and process, so who dares suggest that the development indicates that something has gone wrong?

Years ago, a musical album had a song, “Married I Can Always Get.”  Gordon Jenkins probably had no idea how that would be realized.  For two to become one flesh, some element of transcendence is clearly needed.  Remove that element, and “Anything Goes” — to mention another song.  Serial monogamy ostensibly replaces fidelity.  But the illusion of replacement is actually a cruel one.

Divorce has become ubiquitous.  It has not become painless.  I know, and I daresay my readers know, many who have had them.  I do not know, and I daresay my readers do not know, anyone who has had one and not experienced pain.  I don’t mean just pain caused by the things that led to the vivisection of the one flesh, but the pain of the vivisection itself.  Even the party who said, “I want a divorce” ended up with that pain.  I find quite astounding that people would deny the transcendence of marriage in the face of the ubiquitous pain that accompanies the process of supposedly ending it.

Now it gets even more contrived these days.  Marriage as humans discovered it blended seamlessly into our biology and sexuality.  However, now that we have rejected transcendence and attempted to treat marriage as a mere human invention, we end up with something (which, fortunately, isn’t really marriage at all) which blends with nothing at all.  If it’s just a contract between two people, it is claimed, than any two people who want to should be able to enter into it.  And in what can only be termed incredible arrogance, governments have attempted to redefine marriage in that way.  It would serve them right if every child harmed by divorce — and that’s a lot of children — sued the government for that harm, since, according to governments, marriage is their invention to do with as they please.  Governments want power without responsibility when it comes to marriage.  And power without responsibility, as George Bernard Shaw noted, is the prerogative of harlots.

There is probably no need to labor the point that, when stripped of transcendence, marriage becomes a horrible caricature of what humans first discovered.  But it is equally pointless and a lot more damaging for people to argue that there was never anything transcendent about it in the first place.  Bitter feminists and atheistic materialists love tp point to the difficulties the people in marriages have faced.  The bogus nature of the argument is evident when we observe that the observation is too narrow.  Of course people have had trouble with marriage.  People are fallen.  But when married to stripped of its transcendence, the trouble people then face puts the previous troubles in the shade.  There is no basis in that scheme for fidelity, stability, true growth, and particularly for the concept or the reality of the family.  And in the world of marriage stripped of transcendence, all of these things have been diminished and damaged, and significantly so.  Just look around.

Here behind the lines, something worse than “equivocation” has occurred with respect to marriage.  Marriage has been supposedly stripped of its transcendence as it is now the human social invention it really (so it is claimed) always was.  What has happened in fact is that a new, cheap, tawdry thing has been contrived from what was left over when transcendence was stripped away, and the label of “marriage” has been slapped on it.  Don’t be deceived.  What atheists, humanist, politicians — and sadly some numbers of religious denominations that claimed to be Christian — have done is to manufacture a bogus substitute, and try to force people to accept it as the genuine article.  So we have two tasks: First, have nothing to do with the proposition that the sub to it is other than bogus.  Second, be aware that we are dealing with lying swindlers, and never let them forget we are aware of that.

True marriage still exists.  And nothing that is attempted here behind the lines can replace, or make it go away.  What is needed is a commitment to stand witness – and defiant, aggressive witness if needs be – to that truth.

The Academy at Prayer.

When “The Academy Weighs In” on the issue of the suspension of Roger Haight S.J. from teaching, it brings into disrepute among faithful Catholics and Christians the enterprise of academic theology.  This is very tragic.  Catholics in North America have been well nurtured by such men of the Academy as Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Richard John Neuhaus.  We have been enriched by the insights of George Weigel into the times and the people who live in them.  Education has been enriched by the efforts of our own Vancouver Archbishop Michael Miller, who has been a university teacher, President, and Curial secretary in Catholic education.  So when we consider what has been promulgated as “prayer” in this situation, we do well to resist the strong temptation to turn on the whole academic enterprise in theology.  But here behind the lines, it is clear that something in the Academy has gone very, very wrong.

When we looked at the first part of Leo O’Donovan’s e-mail message, we noted that it ended with a prayer.  You can tell a lot about a prayer from its beginning.  My hat is off to the Anglican Christians for their Collect of Purity, addressed to “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”  This prayer begins somewhat differently:

Holy One, we turn to you with confidence in our concern.

First question: To whom is the prayer addressed?  I’m not being flippant here, but I wonder was the prayer’s composer?  When one prays to God, when one apparently makes the study of God one’s life work, what does it say when a prayer begins, not with “Almighty God,” or “God Our Father,” (Jesus himself used that phrase), but the nondescript “Holy One?”  As for the rest of the opening, it speaks of the speakers, not the one spoken to.  One wonders: Are we dealing with prayer, or talk therapy?

We can also conclude that the “Holy One” to whom the prayer is addressed has secrets hidden from him, or is terribly uninformed.  Apparently, he needs to be told — dare we say he lectured — on the plight of the poor, the State of the earth and its creatures, the condition of the church, the state of her… excuse me, “its”… relations with “its” sister churches, and finally to be notified that apparently “the other great religions” are centered on this Holy One, too.  Follow the logic of that.  The revealed God Christians worship is a Trinity of Persons who is all-knowing.  Hindus, to pick another “great” religion, worship an impersonal, pantheistic God.  They cannot be the same entity, since one does not seem to be an entity at all.  So then, is this prayer to the “Holy One” addressed to something/someone else altogether?  Someone/something concocted, perhaps, in an academic seminar room, and revealed in a refereed journal?  Just asking.

The second paragraph is simply an unchristian diminution of Jesus Christ, and a fanciful reference to a Spirit who (or that) is not ecidently the Third Person of the Trinity.  There’s a reference to a Jesus, but is it to God the Son?  Here, the “Spirit” calls disciples.  But Holy Scripture describes a Jesus who called disciples, made apostles, and sent God thee Holy Spirit, not to call, but to act in those called so they could be disciples.  Nowhere is there a reference to Jesus as Christ; nowhere a reference to him as God the Son.  Now there is no excuse for this unless the intention is to sneak in another version of the nature of God different from that revealed to, and through, His Son’s Church.  Her prayers, addressed to God, frequently end with them being made through Jesus Christ [His] Son, our Lord, who with [Him] lives and reigns with the Holy Spirit, one God.  More output from the seminar room, perhaps?  It seems no derivative of Christian revelation, or at the very least, downplays that revelation.  And it’s hard to conclude it’s not deliberate.

The third paragraph almost makes one gag, so redolent is it of the influence of victim-manufacturing pop psychology.  Is Father Haight where he is because what he wrote and taught was at marked variance with the teachings of the Catholic Church?  No, apparently he is a victim of the “officials” of the Church.  It does not matter, apparently, whether a Catholic teacher teaches what the Catholic Church teaches, and if one teaches something else entirely, and gets into difficulty, it’s all the fault of the “officials.”  Make no mistake; the last sentence of that paragraph is predicated on the assumption that Roger Haight (and presumably his supporters) teaches the “Truth,” not the Church.  This is not a prayer that one prays when one seeks to pray with the Church.  Indeed, it is a prayer made with disregard for the Church.

By the time we come to the invocation of the “name” at the very end, we are left with one question: the name of whom or of what?

So here behind the lines, the Academy has turned its collective thought processes to things Catholic and Christian, and has come up with something very different from either one.  Further, these are not newcomers to the Academy, the priesthood, or their order.  They have been at this for quite some time.  Is it any wonder, then, that an academic institution, Notre Dame University, could so easily turn its back on its Bishop, its Church, her teachings, and the murdered unborn, and seek secular acclaim by honoring an anti-life President of the United States?  No, no wonder at all.  But the good news is that, unlike the Haight affair, and similar goings-on, and associated academic betrayals of the Church, Notre Dame’s actions did not slip under the radar — of Catholics, faithful Christians, or many Bishops (“officials” or not).  You can’t spit in the face of the Church with impunity anymore here behind the lines, even if you involve the President of the United States.  That’s good news for Catholics, Christians, and the unborn.

Prayer for May 11

Holy One, we turn to you with confidence in our concern. Our world is conflicted and torn in countless ways. The plight of your poor grows daily more severe. The life of the earth and its creatures continues to be ravaged. Our church as well is suffering a wintry time, turning again defensively in upon itself, strained in its relations with its sister churches, tense in its dialogue with the other great religions that seek to show your face.

Still we come before you–not through our merit but because your Spirit, for all the folly and malice of our hearts, cannot be extinguished. That life-giving Spirit, poured out on our world, calls us to live as disciples of Jesus. Give us courage as the community of your incarnate, crucified and risen Word to bear witness to your love as he did, giving himself unto the end, even to death on a cross, and yet living now, through your saving love, in the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears of all his sisters and brothers on this earth. In his name and through your Spirit, we beg you today in a special way to show your provident care to our colleague and friend, your servant and the church’s, Roger Haight of the Society of Jesus.

Today he begins the period of his life shaped by the requirement of officials in your church that he no longer teach or publish, except in a strictly limited way. Strengthen his courage, support his quiet resolve, and sustain the hope in which he has lived his priestly life as a life for your people. As he has given himself to you and the service of your Word, give him your Spirit of wisdom. And give us who stand with him our own measure of the faith with which you have gifted him, that we may all continue to bear witness to your Truth.

Be with us, Holy One, in our need and in your mercy and just judgment. Be with Roger. Be with all who long for understanding, justice and peace, and seek to find you, in times of joy and of distress.  To the glory of your name forever. Amen.

World Without Transcendence – The Academy Weighs In

Here behind the lines, the place of scholars and their institutions is noteworthy. Scholarship is certainly important, and we would be impoverished without, no question. And yet, universities can turn into last refuges for lost causes. It is observed, for instance, the Cold War ended the day one could count more Communists on North American College campuses than in Russia. It seems yet another lost cause has found a refuge in the academic world. That cause is the decades-old effort to rid Christianity — the Catholic church in this case — of any association with the transcendent.

In the interests of brevity and focus, I merely note the existence of the cause. Other more learned and elegant writers have set down its origins among theologians who acted as if a Ph.D. made to members of the Church’s Magisterium, rather than valuable servants thereof. All we need know is that to make the faith a contest of ideas is both necessary and sufficient, de facto or de jure, to banish the transcendent. No metric exists in their realm outside the rulers of academe who referee journals.

Of late, much ink has been spilled about Notre Dame giving President Obama an honorary degree. Again, no need to do more than note it here. However, somewhat below the radar, another event has taken place that gives some insight into how the School of Our Lady could kiss the … er … ring of advocate of the murder of the unborn. And it could well also be an indicator that the scoundrels who have perpetrated these and other despicable acts are a spent force, a shot bolt.

Early in May, Roger Haight, SJ, who earlier had ceased to teach in Catholic institutions by order of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ceased teaching altogether on the further order from the CDF. Fr. Haight wrote a book in 1999, that, essentially, reduced Jesus Christ from God the Son to a “symbol.” One could summarize Haight’s overall portrayal of Jesus as a, but not the, way, truth, and life, whose resurrection was only to be taken as a symbol, too.  If people were surprised the CDF acted, well they shouldn’t have been.

But Fr. Haight, it seems, was a slow learner. He found himself a Protestant academic post, and continued to preach the same non-Gospel. So now, he’s been told not to teach at all. As a Jesuit he has a choice: obey or break with the order by breaking his vow of obedience. He seems to be going to opt for the former — and let that be reckoned to his credit.

Those who wish to break free of transcendence have, as we might expect, not been silent about this further action by the CDF. One particularly revealing reaction came from another Jesuit, Father Leo O’Donovan. O’Donovan is another academic who’s calling to the academy, on the showing of his behavior, was a louder call than that of the transcendence to which his Church bore witness. While president of Georgetown University — a Jesuit school which now insults the listener’s intelligence if it claims to be Catholic — Father O. Donovan had his own problems with the Curia. He was told to evict a club from the campus, and he refused, in the name of free speech. It was a “pro-choice” club, that being the most favoured euphemism for “pro-abortion.” If we are surprised that commiseration flowed from such a source for Fr. Haight, well, we shouldn’t be here either. And what a piece of work the commiseration was.

O’Donnovan sent out an e-mail with two parts, a note and a prayer. According to the note, Haight’s end of teaching comes at a “terrible moment.” It has, we are told, “ecclesial significance.” And the readers are called together to offer “the consolation of colleagueship [sic],” in the context of coming together in prayer.

Now it is terrible that such disobedience has been manifested by a priest-theologian, to the point where this further action was called for. And it is hard to dispute, given the ridiculous and scandalous utterances that prompted this action, that it has “ecclesial significance,” if only because shows that, soon or later, church still can act to guard the Faith. What strikes me, though, is how prayer is ripped loose from its transcendent underpinnings to become a vector of “colleagueship.” It seems to have for Fr. O’Donovan the significance of the pot roast at pot luck supper. Now, I love pot roast, and cook a mean one myself, but heaven forbid I should ever see a pot roast, or collegiality, as a substitute for the things transcendent normally associated with prayer.

Here behind the lines, that’s one of the things that happens when the transcendent is shuffled out of the arena. It doesn’t cease to exist, but there’s a hole where it had once had a place. But oh, what a sad substitute is sometimes sought to fill the hole. In this case, it is collegiality, and that is doubly sad. You see, collegiality is a good thing, a fine thing, even. But place into a void left by the removal of the transcendent, and one will cheapen it, and render it shabby. Something good is cast out; something left behind is degraded.

That’s the first part of the tragedy in the communication. But the bad news just keeps coming. The rest of the bad news concerns the prayer that is the second part of the message. It’s so bad it will get its own discussion. The communication shows what can happen when people try to banish transcendence, but keep its trappings.

Part 1 of the Email – The Note

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

On Monday May 11th at 2 PM, Roger Haight will walk out of a classroom where he has been teaching for the last time. He will enter into theological silence, according to the CDF dictate that henceforth he not teach or publish except in the area of “spirituality.” This is the first time an American theologian has been so silenced. Its personal significance for Roger interweaves with ecclesial significance for theologians, for the church in the U.S., and for the worldwide church. To give this terrible moment its due, there will be a gathering of friends to pray with Roger and offer the consolation of colleagueship. If you wish, you can join with us in spirit at that time by means of the prayer below. Feel free to share this, as you see fit. Roger knows nothing about this, so please keep this confidential.

Leo O’Donovan, SJ

- To Follow: The Academy At Prayer

World Without Transcendence — Measuring Up.

One of the things that has become problematic here behind the lines is making moral decisions.  In the arena where transcendence has been excluded, a basis for evaluating anything has become very elusive.  It reminds me of a scene from one of the last episodes of the original “Battlestar Galactica” TV series.  Our intrepid warriors from space had found earth, contacted its inhabitants (their supposed colonial descendents) and were setting about helping them out of a jam.  After instructing the earthlings on the plan, they told them to wait ten centons before they acted, and started off to do their part.  Someone grabbed a warrior leader, and urgently uttered, “Wait — what’s a centon?”  Not having a metric can make life difficult.

It can also make for utter confusion in the material realm.  My first job was as a combat air crew officer in the Air Force (when Canada had one), and one of the things some of us were taught was how to interpret photographs.  Simple, right?  I mean, how hard can it be to look at a picture and say what’s there?  They disabused us of that notion in hour one of day one.  The instructor put a picture up on the screen, and asked us to describe the scene.  We allowed as it was a valley, curving to the left as it receded from the foreground.  Formed by rather rounded but perhaps a ruggedly surfaced hills.  As we proceeded to embellish our description, the instructor flipped a switch, and the image changed.  The scope widened, and we could see that we had been looking at a close-up image that was now pulling back, reducing in magnification.  We were silenced when it finished pulling back, because what we were looking at, had indeed been an extreme magnification.  When the picture steadied, there was a quite attractive young woman, reclined on a blanket taking a sun bath.  We had been interpreting a very extreme magnification of the surface of the skin on her thigh.  The silence was broken by the instructor’s voice.  “Lesson one: never — Never — interpret anything without a scale.  All you do is concoct a fairy tale.”  What leads to confusion in the material realm can lead to disaster in the moral realm, because to take away the transcendent is to take away the basis for a scale in that realm.

Now comes a rather interesting twist.  If you want to do something that might not “measure up,” or stop people from criticizing and attacking you for what you are doing, eliminating the basis of measurement — the scale — will do the trick.  Years ago when I finished high school in Ontario, we wrote a “Departmental Exam” in each subject.  The Department of Education set it, and it was written by every student, and marked anonymously.  No one knew if he was marking a paper from Metro Toronto or Sioux Lookout.  But after the marks were published, school boards could — and did — use them to publicly chastise the Department for denying them the resources they needed.  Their students were suffering, and the marks gave proof from an objective scale to measure.  Now this situation had to be dealt with, and it was.  Departmental exams were eliminated.  No scale, no basis for comparison — or criticism.  Soon, though, universities had to institute their own entrance exams, to screen out high school grads with high marks who could not read well or add consistently.  The Department, though, found a lot easier to do what it wanted to do.

One of the nasty side effects of the exclusion of transcendence has been the way people who do what they want to do are pummeling those who object to their plans and proposals.  In the moral realm, take away transcendence as a concept, and concepts of right and wrong follow it out the door.  Without the transcendent, something beyond us, and not dependent upon us, we end up unable to measure.  Moral measurement has a name, and the name is discernment.  It is the process of measurement that lets us determine whether or not something is morally licit or illicit.  With that taken away from consideration, through the banishment of the transcendent, those who might try to point out that something is wrong (ever notice that not many people attack others for deeming them right?)  are labeled “judgmental.”  “How dare you judge me?”  is the indignant cry.  And if the transcendent is gone, where can one find a scale or reference, independent of ourselves, to point to as proof we are not judging but measuring against a scale?

This is the situation much worse than simply making mistakes in measurement.  These mistakes can be avoided (“measure twice, cut once”), or discovered and rectified.  Remove the metric and rectification, like avoidance, becomes very complicated indeed.

So here behind the lines, we find ourselves trying to navigate a moral landscape without benefit of maps drawn to an objective scale.  And the step that destroyed the scale, the banishment of transcendence, has made much more complicated the process of reestablishing one.  But that is the Christians duty, and the duty of every human who aspires to moral decency.  The question is not whether or not there’s anything to put back.  It has never gone away, even though, by perverse convention, considerations of the transcendent have been excluded.  It will, though, be a tough fight, and step one is to realize it is, indeed, a fight.  We have only two choices: fight to defend the use of the scale, or cease to have it as a means to good moral order.  The people who threw it out won’t just quietly let it be brought back into the arena.  But it’s still there, just as the horses and chariots of fire that Elisha’s servant was able to see when his eyes were opened.  And the fight to bring it back into play is our fight, a guerrilla war, if needs be, here behind the lines.

World Without Transcendence – Background

A friend of mine is not well.  It’s a chronic problem, and when it kicks up, it hurts — significantly.  My friend is also a Christian, and though he’d be quite happy to be free of pain, he wrote me that while he had it, until it could be banished, he was offering it up, asking that it be joined to the sufferings endured by Jesus Christ, for the benefit of other immortal souls.  (He’s a generous guy.  He could, quite legitimately, have offered it up for the benefit of his own soul.)  My prayers are that he need not do so for long.

Here behind the lines, this kind of acknowledgment of the transcendent used to be much more common than it is now.  I’m not speaking at the distant past; I’m speaking of my own life span.  (Well, okay, not the very distant past, at any rate.)  Having been raised a Catholic, I was informed that in this life, suffering happened and when it did, while we had to endure it, this offering was a good thing indeed to do with it.  Now not everyone, not even every Christian, took that view.  But no one thought we were somehow weird or deranged for thinking that way.  Compared to them, we were just different, and we did something they didn’t.  Today — not so much.

You don’t hear much of a kind of thing today, even (sadly) among Catholic.  And, if you really want to shake things up at a coffee gathering or cocktail party, then mention the concept in conversation.  The reaction will probably be rather like what you could expect were you to announce that you’ve just tested positive for type A H1N1 influenza.  To allude to the transcendent is to invite very sharp and negative reaction indeed.

How did it come to this?  I only ask the question because it is not at all impertinent.  I don’t have an answer, though I’ve encountered lots of theorizing as to how it came to be.  The theories I’ve encountered have been diverse, and the overwhelming majority of them share a common trait.  They ignore considerations pertinent to the existence of the transcendent.  For my part, my answer is the same as the one Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg gave to Kaiser Wilhelm II in answer to the question of how, in 1918, things had come to such a state.  “My God; if only we knew.”

So I’m not going to be concerned about a history lesson, and certainly not about a psychobabble laden treatise on how the transcendent became banished.  But I do want to look at what, it occurs to me, have been some of the things that have come along in tandem with the banishment.  I contend that the banishment either brought about, or facilitated the coming about of these things.  And none of these things has been particularly good.

At the risk of jumping ahead, I want to close with what is, I think, and encouraging thought.  Transcendence does not imply either distance or detached isolation.  It certainly does indicate a state of being beyond, a condition that cannot be contained in a temporal and material construct.  Yet it logically can still be — it is, I’d say — part and parcel of a whole that includes the temporal and material. And like terms in mathematics that approach a limit, it can be as close to the temporal and material as we wish consider it, because it is indeed very close.  That’s the good news.  Humans have not succeeded, through their ignoring it, to abolish the transcendent.  And the way things can sometimes get here, behind the lines, that’s something for which we can all be thankful.

Shame on Me

I exchanged notes with a friend today, and he rather shamed me.  I’ve been lazy with my writing, and my friend noted that he’d been checking here to see if I’d posted anything, and of course finding nothing.

Well it’s not as if there’s nothing to write about.  But with so many other good writer out there, sayinhg more or less what’s been on my mind, I’ve left things to them.  And that’s really not good enough, so I do intend to get back to my keyboard.

So stay tuned, but this could take a bit of time.  My thoughts are for a series, exploring what happens when the very existence of the transcendent is ignored as a matter of course and policy.  Doing this, it seems to me, has consequences both spiritual and temporal, and they are interconnected, even if the former is ignored along with transcendence.

I’m no philosopher, but I think I have a few thoughts that perhaps others can build on.  Wish me luck, or better yet, say a prayer.

The Road to Scoundrelism.

Here behind the lines, much energy is expended in disguising the unpleasant and untoward.  There are enough euphemisms to support an annual festival celebrating them.  If anything unpleasant ensues, there is no lack of people ready to label the whole affair “a misunderstanding,” even when acts were clear and deliberate, and participants knowledgeable and perceptive.  As for the untoward, we could no doubt retire if we had a dollar for every bribe that was labeled as some sort of gift or emolument.  The interesting thing about the whole phenomenon is that it is virtually certain that those who participate know full well that what they are doing is disingenuous (to say the least), but they do it anyway, and erect complex façades to do it behind.  That’s where the energy expenditure comes in.

A moment’s thought makes it quite clear that disingenuous people realize, deep down, the true nature of their actions.  There are places where, we all expect, this behaviour is not found, or at least not tolerated where it occurs.  We can characterize the situation with a simple example: an umpire in a ball game.

Baseball umpires call the balls and strikes, the outs and safes, the fairs and fouls, and without their skill and integrity, it’s certain baseball would not be as popular with fans as it is.  The ball is pitched and caught.  According to its line of flight, it is a ball or a strike (assuming no swing and miss).  That’s what the umpire assesses when he makes his call, and we all expect, and baseball players and fans insist, that he considers nothing else.  Whether it’s the first pitch of the game, where nine innings are yet to be played no matter what the call, or the payoff pitch in extra innings with the bases loaded, where a walk will end the game, we expect and require the umpire to call the pitches the same.  A strike is a strike and a ball is a ball according to the trajectory followed by the pitched baseball.  The result of the call, its consequences, cannot influence the call, because if it does, fairness is destroyed.

Let’s consider how that might come about.  People not only watch sports; they bet on the outcomes.  They bet a lot of money — a LOT of money — collectively.  Probably more than most, the bettors want fairness from the umpires.  But what of the people who handle the bets?  Might one outcome be more favorable to them than another?  Yes, in some circumstances, certainly.  Are they in a position to perhaps influence an umpire, either through threat or inducement, to act to direct the outcome of the game?  They could.  Would the umpire who bent to the influence be seen as acting fairly?  No, never, not even in the case of threat, where perhaps culpability may be greatly reduced, or even altogether removed.  In the case of inducement, would we see him as corrupt?  No question.  This is an example of one of those things the Professor J. Budziszewski points out that people can’t not know.

Before we go any further, let me be clear.  I have no knowledge of there being anything in the baseball industry that resembles the purely contrived example I’m about to set down and have no reason to argue that it is prone to it.  There are, in fact, indicators that those who run the industry seek to make it a hostile environment for anything like the example.

So then purely for illustration, in a fictional construct, let us consider a situation.  The game has, apparently, lost its appeal in a major market.  That market had been once quite lucrative, was currently very marginal, and that was a concern to the marketing and accounting people in baseball.  But then, the team from that market made it to the World Series.  The tournament went to a seventh and deciding game, held at the stadium in that market.  The accounting and marketing people knew, through survey and analysis, that a win by the home team would reestablish baseball in the market.  And that would show on the industry’s bottom line.  But a loss would result in such a disappointment that the revenues from the market would go back into the tank, and stay there for a while, again showing on the industry’s bottom line.  Not just the fans or the bettors have an interest in the outcome of this case.

Now what would we conclude if the following happened?  The night before the game, as the umpires are finishing dinner at their hotel, a couple of baseball industry guys, one from accounting and one from marketing, show up and invite the umpires to join them for an after dinner drink.  They make it clear that, from where they sit, anything on the part of the umpires that helps the home team will clearly be for the good of baseball, and not availing themselves of the opportunity to provide that help is detrimental to it.  From the corporate point of view, it would amount to not being a team player if one ignored these opportunities.  When calling the balls and strikes, they make it clear, they expect the umpires to think of the bottom line of the industry.

What can we say of the marketer and accountant in that scenario?  They are clearly attempting to make other men, the umpires, take into consideration factors which are not pertinent to the decisions they are entrusted to make.  But the urgings come from within the organization, not from outside it.  And they are made in the light of matters that are indeed germane to the welfare and operations of the wider organization.  When it came time to erect a façade, either to influence the umpires or justify their actions, this would certainly be incorporated.  But since only the trajectory of the baseball matters when calling balls and strikes, try though they might, they cannot escape the reality that they are seeking to undermine the integrity of the umpires.  They are behaving very much like scoundrels.

What of our umpires?  What if they give in?  Would they be at all excusable because they did what they did at the urging of those inside the organization?  If they gave in, they might argue that, but if they gave in for personal gain, they would be corrupt; and even if they did so because they believed it truly was for the greater good of the organization, they would have broken trust.  The would be behaving very much like scoundrels.

Let us assume now that our fictional baseball organization is very far gone indeed.  It wants to maintain a façade of a uprightness, but really act in whatever manner benefits the bottom line.  The umpires, though, are reluctant to break trust.  Would placing the umpires under the direction, not of a senior umpire, but under that of the senior accountant, who can’t tell an infield fly from a pop foul, be conducive to the umpires’ efforts to uphold trust?  Is not the placing of their fate into the hands of someone who cares only about the bottom line and in maintaining a needed facade not a truly effective way to undermine the umpires?  Hold them hostage to the bottom line, make their well being and advancement depend only on how they serve it, and the corporate equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome will take care of the rest.  If all goes to plan, the umpires will just go with the flow — it’s not their company — and the end will be achieved.  Scoundrelism will prevail.

Fiction?  Yes.  Fanciful and unrealistic?  If you think so, I have two words to offer.  The first word is “Enron.”  The second word is “WorldCom.”  There are more words, but these will do.

It would be one thing if all of this existed only in the corporate world, in business, entertainment, and the like.  But here behind the lines, it pervades national and governmental institutions.  Consider what the courts do when they declare marriage to be what is written into law code, and turn their backs on simple and plainly evident biology.  Is that upright?  Is it upright when the apparatus of government insists that its servants also turn their back on the obvious, and also ignore their religious faith, and give effect to this fiat, or else be dismissed?  It would be wonderful to be able to say one lived in a country where that couldn’t happen.  I wish I could.

As for the apparatus of government itself, it would be wonderful to say that these organizations are merely victims as well.  It would be wonderful to be able to say that nowhere in the departments or agencies of the government will one find instances where professionals are, like our example umpires, under pressure, sometimes intense pressure, to pervert their principles, betray their trust, forfeit their integrity, and work not according to published principles, but according to the directions given by others who know not their craft but look to a bottom line which is perhaps financial, perhaps ideological, perhaps both.  It would be wonderful if I could say that, even from ignorance.  But again, I can only wish I could.

Here behind the lines, much energy is expended.  Much of it is expended to hide what is happening.  And truth becomes a synonym for plausible denial.  And integrity becomes an indictable offense.  And it is not accidental, but endemic.  I wish I could say otherwise, but scoundrelism is doing quite well here behind the lines.

Fair is Foul: Part I – An Encounter with Aggressive Feminism.

Here behind the lines, there are a number of obvious things one can do that will get one into trouble.  Prudence suggests we avoid them.  They are dangerous things, but their obvious nature permits the danger to be pretty well completely managed.  (Unless fools choose to rush in where angels fear to tread, of course.)  Other things belong to the class of things that must be done, or must be dealt with when encountered.  This class is made up of more dangerous members, but even so, preparation for the dangers accompanying them can be made, so the dangers which must be faced can be, at least somewhat, mitigated.  The really dangerous class is the one whose members give no hint at all of being dangerous.  Encounter them, and you are in the situation of encountering a sniper, or stepping on a land mine.  There it suddenly is, and you didn’t even have a chance of seeing it coming.  This is danger indeed.

It can depend upon where you find yourself behind the lines, and most particularly, who you find yourself among, whether or not a set member is dangerous, and that is quite a complicating factor.  Quite unexpectedly, something that is simply not known to be of danger can, among certain people, blow right up in your face, and reveal itself to be, then and there and most unexpectedly, very dangerous indeed.  Recently, I had this happen.  The people were aggressive feminists.  The thing was, believe it or not, using the word “lady” to refer to a group of people.  And no, I’m NOT making this up.

It happened in an e-mail chat group.  It’s an Anglican group I had joined when I worshipped among Anglicans, in the years prior to my return Home.  The focus of the discussion was an issue related to Islam, of all things, and as a side, supporting reference, I said:

There’s a myth about, it seems, that any Catholic can speak for the  Church and her teachings. Well, I know some ladies in our parish who still think that the question of Holy Orders for women is still an open one in the Church, and so they demonstrate that this just isn’t the case, even though these ladies are indeed Catholics.

(The side issue was a quote from a book by a Catholic, presented in a context which suggested acceptance of the role Islam applied to Jesus.  I’d been informed that it came from a Catholic source, so, apparently, I shouldn’t dispute it.  This was part of my reply.)

I wasn’t ready for what I got back in reply:

And just BTW, do you ever consciously reflect on your language? What do you wish to imply by referring to  fellow  Catholics who disagree with you (and, yes, the magisterium) as “ladies” rather than “women”?

(The lady who wrote this is not ignorant of things Catholic.  Quite the contrary.)

Here’s that danger that gave no hint of its character: referring to a group as “ladies” rather than “women.”  Now here’s an interesting point.  Catholics honour one person in history above all others in the created order.  A Protestant like Wordsworth even noted this honour, noting that she was venerated as, “Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.”  That person, of course, is Mary, the Mother of God.  We call her, of all things, “OUR LADY”.  How can one ascribe sinister and nefarious motives to someone, known to be a Catholic, who uses a title to reference a group of fellow Catholics, when the title is used for the member of the created order honoured above all other members of that order?  It turns out, the answer is that one can be an aggressive feminist.

What followed was a very intense exchange.  The exchange revealed how the feminist outlook came to poison and turn into a danger this title which Catholics apply to the creature they honour the most.

The exchange (I have the material in a safe place, in case the public archive goes dark) revealed some disturbing aspects of this aggressive feminism.  It revealed an utter disregard for logic and empirical evidence; it revealed a disturbing level of disdain for those who didn’t accept feminism’s presuppositions, and particularly for women who did not object, as did the feminists I became entangled with, to the use of the term “lady” when asked about it.  And it revealed a remarkable embrace of the purely subjective, and an incredible denial of the concept of objectivity.

In the end, “fair was foul, and foul was fair,” according to these people.  Principally, I had two of them have a go at me:  the one I quoted above, and a second person.  These persons had a few things in common.  They were female (I do hope that term is safe); they are Anglicans of a liberal theological bent; they are in Anglican orders, and style themselves as priests; and they each hold doctorates.  There is one thing I do not know about them:  Do they take the whole Catholic Church to task for referring to Blessed Mary, Ever Virgin, as “Our Lady,” and not “Our Woman”?  Too bad if they do, actually, because the latter just sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

I will be looking more closely at the three disturbing aspect of aggressive feminism illustrated in the display in later postings.  But this encounter was, in an interesting way, timely.  It spanned the period that included the Sunday of the Celebration of the Passion of our Lord with Palms (Palm Sunday), and at Mass, I read as the Narrator of the Passion according to St. Matthew.  (My voice is starting to come back.)  In that passage, I read:

There were many women there, looking on from a distance, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him.    Among them were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.

St. Matthew no doubt wrote before The Blessed Virgin was called “Our Lady”, and before feminism, too, so he was probably safe to use any gendered personal collective noun of his choosing.  For our part, we should all note the references to the faithful women at the crucifixion that we hear about in the Passion Readings this Holy Week.  Such faithful women, such ladies, are as precious today as then. 

If you doubt that, get put upon by a couple of aggressive feminists.  Meantime, watch yourself if you know you are around any of them. 

The Sound of a Dropping Shoe

My Anglican friends here in this sector behind the lines have had another event come to pass which thwarts any attempt they might make to establish tranquility.  The largest Anglican parish in these parts – some state, in the country – has voted to leave the Anglican Church of Canada.  It took St. John’s, Shaughnessy, years, over five of them, to get to this point.  And therein hangs a tale.

 

This is a pretty well heeled crowd we are talking about.  You won’t find too many potential firebrands worshipping at Nanton Avenue.  Indeed, you won’t find too many charismatic or Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, either.  This is a very reserved, protestant Anglican group.  Remove the cross from the front of their sanctuary, and you have a setting so austere that Plymouth Brethren could adapt to it.  This is not a place to find people who act precipitously.  Nor is it, nor has it ever been, a place to find people who will let go of the Christian truths which they hold.  Holy Scripture is not, in that place, a social history compendium.  And Jesus Christ is their Lord and their God, nothing less.

 

When we look at this turn of events, we should keep those last two points firmly in view.  Much has been made since 2002 about the decision by the Anglican hierarchy in Greater Vancouver to bless same sex “unions.”  Too much has been made of it, because it was merely the presenting issue.  It’s an attractive issue, though.  Pagans and scoffers eager to sell newspapers can fasten onto it and scream “homophobia” (whatever that non-word means) at those who did not go along with it.  Liberal religionists can also use it as a basis for gratuitous rude remarks about the psychology of those who won’t go along with their programs to deconstruct Christianity.  But here behind the lines, you have to ignore noise like that to figure out what is going on.  When you do that, the actions of St. John’s, Shaughnessy, and the implications of those actions, cease to be superficial, single issue items, and become disturbingly profound.

 

Let me be frank and up front.  I know many influential people from that community, and we certainly have (and have had) our differences.  However, if asked whether I could warrant that these people hold to the Christian truth they possess with tenacity, and unequivocally proclaim the uniqueness, Lordship and Divinity of Jesus Christ, my answer would be an unhesitating and an unqualified “yes.”

 

This is what sets them apart from the diocesan organization they have seen fit to separate from.  Would one find, in that organization or the groups subject to it, people who share the convictions of the St. John’s people?  Yes, you would.  Would the diocesan organization, and those who control it, value that exemplification?  Not so much.  The head man of the outfit, Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham, wrote a book (“Mansions of the Spirit”) that was published before the headline making events in his organization, and on the showing of that book, he holds Holy Scripture in very low regard, and clearly separates the so-called “Christ of faith” from the person of Jesus of Nazareth, about whom he has some nice things to say, but “Lord” and “God” do not work their way into the niceties.  That is critical to grasping the significance of what has happened.

 

In the last decade, more than one Anglican has made the point that liberal religion is not an alternative expression of Christianity.  It is another religion altogether, and one which is incompatible with Christianity.  Of course, not just these Anglicans have stated this rather obvious fact, and these were neither the first nor most famous Anglicans to do so.  John Henry Newman beat them to it in the 19^th century.  Those who control Anglican corporate structures would have this ignored, in the name of corporate unity.  (They don’t call it that, of course, preferring to use terms borrowed from secular psychobabble.)  Having set it aside as a consideration, they have proceeded to act without consideration of it at all.  If the articles of the Christian faith do not conform to this psycho approach, then they must either be ignored, or changed.  Jesus Christ need not be Lord and God if that means offending these psycho-principles.  On the showing of one of Canadian Anglicanism’s (now retired) archbishops, marriage is no longer even a concern of the church at all, it being the exclusive province, he claimed, of the state.  (Interesting to note that before he retired, Anglican Archbishop David Crawley, who chucked marriage overboard, acted as Canadian Anglican Primate.)  And the purpose of the local and corporate structures was to move to having everyone get with the program, or at the very least, not impede its furtherance.

 

So let’s cut through all of the psychobabble, all of the corporate ecclesiology of local and national Anglican structures, and get to the reason why, after all of these years, St. John’s Shaughnessy, devoid of activist firebrands, very concerned over the fate of its property (yes, that was there, and from day one, no use denying it) should it act, has now acted to separate from the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster, and its bishop, Michael Ingham, and from the Anglican Church of Canada on 13 February 2008.  The religion which the diocese promoted and the Canadian Anglican church tolerated and encouraged, was utterly incompatible with the expression, proclamation, and living out of Christianity.  It is critical that this point be not missed in all the brouhaha about same sex blessings, unions, and erstwhile marriages.  To concentrate on this brouhaha is to make the same mistake of saying that the problem with a heart attack is that there’s a pain in the chest, rather than that the heart is being starved for blood.

 

It is an error of that latter type that both the local diocesan and national Anglican structures have made.  The local diocese had embarked on endless rounds of conversation, dialogue, consciousness-raising, and outright coercion and propaganda, all centered around the symptom, not the disease.  The national Anglican Church has done likewise, and done so to the end.  Knowing the St. John’s people as I do, I can think of nothing that would have infuriated them more than having the Anglican Primate claim that his outfit’s scheme of having other bishops present, though without authority, was a fitting response to the situation.  (“Someone to drink tea with” is how one former Anglican Church of Canada rector described these other bishops.) This was comparable to approaching a heart attack victim with a syringe full of an opiate, and claiming that the injection of the drug will solve everything.  The denial of the underlying issue was, and clearly continues to be, complete on the part of the Canadian Anglican Church.  If one seeks to understand why the St. John’s people have come to the point (and they had a VERY long way to come to get to that point from where they were 5 years ago) that they would leave not only the diocese but the Canadian Anglican church, one must be mindful of that issue.

 

The implications of this move are bigger than one parish in one diocese in one Anglican province here behind the lines.  One often hears the term “realignment” used about what is happening.  Well, it doesn’t fit.  Neither does “schism.”  This is nothing less than fragmentation.  Consider: In the Lower Mainland of British Columbia alone, within the last five years, there have come to be three groups claiming to be part of the “Anglican Communion” (let’s leave that term undefined, and accept an intuitive understanding of what it means, in the present discussion).  One group is the Canadian Anglican Church.  Another group claims communion membership through the Anglican Province of Rwanda.  And the newest group (which just got a lot bigger) claims communion membership through the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.  The Canadian Anglican Church will have none of the other two groups, but tens of millions of Anglicans in the world will have nothing to do with their bishop in the local diocese, and not much more to do with them.  This is a coming apart, and not even at the seams.  It’s a shattering, plain and simple.

 

And finally, there’s another proposition that can’t be ignored.  Here we have a case of two religions in one church.  (There was a book written with that in the title that made the point years ago.  It was ignored.)  At one point, some Christian truth was held in that church, in particular, the revelatory authority of Holy Scripture, and the uniqueness, Lordship, and Divinity of Jesus Christ.  Those two truths were compromised from within that church.  It matters little whether that church would not, because it did not want to, or could not, because it was intrinsically bereft of the resources needed, guard and defend these truths when they came under attack.  (My take: The “would” and “could” are intertwined, and the basic wherewithal to defend the truth was lacking, as was the wherewithal to remedy the lack.)  This church has failed to do so, and is now shattering as a result.  Amazingly, here behind the lines, it’s possible to easily find people who are surprised by this.

 

St. John’s has left their diocese and their national church.  In understanding why they did so, it leads to understanding why they had to do so.  It also leads to an understanding of what their leaving is a result of, and what is behind what is happening.  And it’s not over.  St. Matthew’s Church in Abbotsford meets in two days from the time of this writing, and may come to a similar decision.  Two other parishes quickly come to mind who may take the same step.  In the wider world, Anglicanism in the United States is also shattering, and is highly stressed in Britain itself.  The Anglican Lambeth gathering looms, a gathering which may well be more memorable by who does not, than by who does, attend.  Here behind the lines, it leads to the understanding that the unfolding process is nothing less than a shattering.