Archive for June, 2009

It was a quiet week in Washington Northeast . . . . At least until the Metro crash. I had just arrived home from teaching French at Catholic University of America when vehicle after emergency vehicle went wailing off towards where I had just come from, and auto theft alarms and the hundred-thirty-pound Rottweiler next door (incongruously named Flossie) raised up their voices in orgasmic worship of the siren gods. Great fun until I turned on the news and learned what it was all about; it will be some time before I hear another really really loud fire engine and say, “Cool.”

It was a less quiet week for the fellow doctoral students whom I’m coaching through their language qualification exams in French and German. It’s easy enough for me to concoct a quiz question like, Circle the correct completion: Elles sont (a) allé (b) allés (c) allées. Not so easy for George, laboriously mastering his first foreign language at thirty, or Dave, trying to memorize conjugations while his wife is weeks away from delivering their second child and he is entertaining The House Guests from Hell – old college friends with a four-year-old, the three of them fighting like cats and dogs. Being a doctoral student at Catholic U is not a stress-free occupation.

And, curiously, especially not so for my fellow students who are Catholic.

I’m free to float past the authority claims, the arguments against permitting use of condoms in any circumstance (though shouldn’t we take care to protect lives now, so we can attend to souls later?), and the posters for pro-life novenas and campus chastity drives. My Catholic colleagues are not. Sally, an historical theologian in my German class, understands what was lost at Vatican I (1870), when the teaching authority of the church was taken away from university theologians and given to an ordained hierarchy lumbered with its own claim of infallibility. As a committed Catholic, she is stuck with living in an institution that now will not, because it cannot, ever overrule itself; there will be no Brown vs. Little Rock-equivalent doctrinal declaration in her lifetime.

By historical accident, not by superior wisdom, we Anglicans arrived at a different understanding of authority. Queen Elizabeth, knowing she faced the possibility of religious civil war in sixteenth-century England, created a Church of England that demanded uniformity of worship but knew better than to seek uniformity in how that worship was understood; “I desire not,” quoth she, “windows into men’s souls.” We were left free, individually but in community, to decide for ourselves what Scripture is really saying to us and what God demands of and for us in the major decisions of our lives. This has its own risks; where a Roman Catholic polity can be as centripetal as a black hole, ours can be as centrifugal as a dandelion gone to seed.

It also calls us to a different kind of responsibility, both in individual discernment and in balancing individual discernment with the demands of living in a communion that functions by consent and consensus. For some of us, the question is how to balance the conviction that in-church blessings of same-sex unions are not merely lawful but demanded by God’s justice, with the regrettable but deeply felt reluctance of African bishops to countenance any such thing. For others, the question is how to live with being answerable for so many choices. One of my German students is a cradle Episcopalian who became a Catholic in search of greater certainty. The infallibility of Pope in Council is for him the foundation of all spiritual security, and he scraps about it continually with Sally. Their most recent blow-up (not, thank heavens, in my class room) was about, of all things, the validity of Anglican ordinations. She, arguing for, thought the matter was still open for theological discussion. He, against, was quoting canons of Vatican I. Verbatim. In Latin.

Desmond Tutu has asked for a sense of proportion in the Anglican Communion’s debate about sexuality and authority; why is this one sin, if it be a sin, so much more important than any other? Yesterday’s Metro crash, also, is a call to perspective; are we really going to enquire into firefighters’ personal sexual orientations before letting them go into the wrecked cars to pull out passengers? Action is as important as purity of doctrine; our faith doesn’t count for much if it doesn’t take us outside ourselves and outside our immediate faith communities to serve Christ in the world. And our discernment isn’t on the right track if it makes us less, not more, charitable towards those who disagree with us. My gut reaction to Bishop Akinola is to reject him as vitriolically as he rejects me. But then I remember what living in Nigeria was like, how the culture operated, and I can see – just – how many of the authoritarian certainties that represent safety to him are threatened if two men are free to kiss. Anger and fear are joined at the hip; it is his fear that makes him angry, and we can insist that it is time for the church to endorse the blessing of same-sex unions, not later but now, and still pray for his fear. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.