BLOGGING-THOMAS

“History, Vision, Legacy” is the theme for this year’s Pride Week Interfaith Service. It will be held on Tuesday, June 10th at 7:30 pm in the sanctuary of the Foundry United Methodist Church at 1500 16th Street NW (at P St.) That’s just across the street from the DC JCC.

The featured speaker will be Reverend Archene Turner. St. Thomas’ Rector, The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, also will be participating. Music will be provided by the Jubilee Singers, a choral group from All Souls Unitarian Church.

The Celebration of The Spirit Coalition and its predecessor organization WAGLIA have been convening this service for more than 20 years. Bet Mishpachah, Dignity, Al Fatiha, and the DC Radical Faeries are among the founding member organizations. A few years ago it was recognized as an “official” event of the Pride Celebration. This brought an awareness to the wider GLBTQ community that the faith traditions are an integral part of the gay community. In addition, it demonstrated to the rest of the world that those so called “religious-right” organizations do not have monopoly on faith and traditions. The proceeds of the collection at this year’s service will be used to continue and extend the awareness of these two points.

As reported in the Anglican Mainstream and the Union Leader.Com, and the web site of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hapshire, “V. Gene Robinson, New Hampshire’s Episcopal bishop, entered into a civil union yesterday with his partner of 20 years, Mark Andrew, according to WMUR-TV.

The ceremony, held at St. Paul Church, coincided with the fifth anniversary of Robinson’s election as the nation’s first openly gay Episcopal bishop.”

It also comes just before Bishop Robinson departs for the Lambeth Conference, the meeting every ten years of all of the bishops of the Anglican Communion. He is attending as an outside observer, due to his being excluded by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, from the official list of invitees.

The Washington Post coverage adds that “Robinson and Andrew held two ceremonies — a non-religious one in which they became legal partners followed by a formal church service to give blessings to God for their relationship. … Robinson has said he wanted to enter into the civil union before leaving for England to ensure Andrew and his two daughters had legal protections given the threats to his life.”

Gene Robinson has been a frequent guest of St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle, whose Rector, The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, welcomed Gene and Mark during a visit last year.

The Episcopal Cafe reports that “Afterward, during the reception and dinner that took place at Canterbury Shaker Village, Susan Russell gave a 5-minute video interview, which can be found here.”

Main Entry:

tra·di·tion

Pronunciation:

\trə-ˈdi-shən\

Function: noun

Etymology:

Middle English tradicioun, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French tradicion, from Latin tradition-, traditio action of handing over

Date:

14th century

When I still had a brain, I was for an embarrassing number of years a graduate student in philosophy and theology, and I read tons (quite literally) of books from the past. I was sifting and sorting – a crucial part of education, I later discovered – to find the significance of at least a piece of the past for my own life in the present.

One of my intellectual guides was a theologian and social critic named Johann Baptist Metz. He kept me reading on many a long night because he was convinced that one of the main reasons we should read history is to rediscover the “dangerous memories,” the gifts buried in the past and forgotten.

• They are dangerous because some forgotten things can harm us, like an injury we suffer and forget because it is too painful to remember, and yet our life is changed forever by what had happened. Such things need to be remembered so that we can be whole again, so that we can regain health that we once had, but lost.

• Other memories are dangerous because they make demands on us; they need to be remembered because in them the Tradition had a potential that was never realized, and even the people who knew them are dead and buried. Children killed in China or Myanmar will always have “a meaning which is as yet unrealized,” in Metz’s phrase, until and unless we or someone else remembers them and gives them some of the life they never had themselves.

In either case, memory has a very powerful role in who we become as we grow up into adulthood.

For Episcopalians, the power of memory is what is meant by the only-apparently stodgier word, tradition. This is the word we use to speak of turning back to hear the voices of those who have fallen behind us in death, but who still live on through the stories they told, the things they wrote.

These formational narratives from the beginnings of a society or relgion give shape to the world of meaning as we know it. We are who we are because of the stories that we are capable of telling.

For Christians the Biblical stories have a voice in our identity, as does the voice of Reason. And these stories from out of the past, passed along to us in the present, are the Tradition that is the third and equal point of authority for catholic Christians.

One of my heroes, Dorothy Day, in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, wrote: “Tradition! We scarcely know the word any more. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, … all of a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad.

“‘Tradition,’ G.K. Chesterton says, “is democracy extended through time. Tradition means giving the vote to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are walking about.”

Honoring Tradition means admitting that it’s actually never been “all about me.” Others don’t go away just because I’m oblivious.

Tradition is dangerous, though, because to learn about the Tradition may mean we have to rethink everything else we have ever thought, like African slaves in America had to rethink slavery, which they had been told was their God-given lot in life, once they learned again the stories of their ancestors, kings and queens of their native lands, and of the freedom that they once had practiced with abandon, though in servitude they had virtually none at all.

Tradition means giving voice to the dangerous memories of forgotten gifts; it means letting dead insights and the persons who had them come back for another round of life. Jesus remembered his friend Lazarus, and the memory alone was enough to raise him from the dead.

Tradition is not dusty, musty, old, and boring – at least not always. To rediscover it can be like finding forgotten gifts that had been yours all along, although you had forgotten that you had ever had them. But beware of the danger – when you explore the past, you may be changed by what you find.