"The Velvet Reformation"

This is an excellent article on Rowan Williams and the issue of homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, which a friend shared with me.

The Velvet Reformation by Paul Elie

I've clipped out several quotes, below, that struck me most. I do wish the ABC (ArchBishop of Canterbury) would take a position -- I think of Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But I stand in a particular cultural place and community, and Rowan Williams is standing in between the liberal culture I live in, and cultures where issue of homosexuality could get priests and bishops killed by religious crazies in their countries. It's not simple.

And yet there is something telling in this church struggle, and even in the person of Rowan Williams himself, of the tensions of our time -- the culture wars, the shrinking of formerly large geographical distances by air travel and the internet, the changing understanding of sexuality from something primarily defined by a community's life and spirituality/religiosity, to something with meaning primarily for an individual's life and spirituality/religiosity, and the changing face of religion and Christianity as a whole.



On sexuality and grace (see his famous essay "The Body's Grace"):
The full expression of this grace through sexual relations takes time and the commitment of the partners to come to know each other—through the commitment of marriage or something like it. Sexual fidelity is akin to religious fidelity—“not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound.” For the church to stand in the way of such relationships, straight or gay, is to stand in the way of God’s grace.

Here was a church leader considering the shape of sexual experience, not the structure of the church, and doing so through the notion, at once ancient and utterly familiar, of sexual fidelity: as a means of grace; and as a figure for the life of the church, in which believers can know the way forward only by going there together, staying faithful to God and each other even when they disagree.

On his value for church unity:
"Now my responsibilities are different. The responsibility is not to argue a case from the top or cast the chairman’s vote. It’s to hold the reins for a sensible debate—and that’s a lot harder than I thought it would be."

"It doesn’t mean you stay together at any price, but it is a matter of whether we can demonstrate to the world a slightly different mode of operation than that which the world commonly operates with."

On Rowan Williams, himself:
“God has given you all the gifts,” one friend told him, “and as your punishment, he has made you archbishop of Canterbury."

Rowan Williams is one of the strongest, subtlest voices in all Christianity. Surely it is right for him to try to moderate the discussion about the place of gay people in the church. But that is not enough. He is a leader, not a stage manager. He should also take part in the conversation; he should somehow declare himself for the course of action he favors—which seems obvious—if only to say that he doesn’t favor it yet.

Finally, on what is perhaps the cowardice inherent in the secession movement:
The founding of a neo-traditional Anglican movement in Wheaton, Illinois, in early December actually confirmed the point. The event made the front page of The New York Times, but the facts belied the claims about its impact. The announcement took place not in Jerusalem, but in a borrowed church in a midwestern suburb, and none of the African bishops was present. Although the breakaway bishops claimed the support of 100,000 people, the 800-seat church was half-empty, and already those bishops faced conflicts among themselves—about the status of women priests, for example. It is the threat of schism, and the dramatic Reformation history that the word calls to mind, that gives the dissident bishops their power. Should they actually secede, they would soon be reduced from headlines to footnotes.