BLOGGING-THOMAS

Violence comes in many forms. Bombs. Guns. Fists.

As well as words, gestures, posturing.

Bullying-behavior rarely resorts to the former; but bullies are masters-of-manipulation with the latter.

We live in the middle of what Ryan Halligan, a staff writer for the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, has described as “An Epidemic of Bullying,” verging on a societal pandemic.  At least, in the case of the bullying of children and young adults, light is finally beginning to be shed on this dark behavior, and responses are being formulated.  For example, St. Thomas’ Parish participated in the It Gets Better project, a national response to the suicides of teenagers who were bullied because of their sexual orientation and identity:

Bullying in the workplace, however, has been described as “The Silent Epidemic” — it happens regularly, but it isn’t being discussed very openly yet.  Writing for Psychology Today, Ray Williams defines such bullying as “the conscious repeated effort to wound and seriously harm another person not with [physical] violence, but with words and actions. Bullying damages the physical, emotional and mental healthy of the person who is targeted.”  And we have gotten so accustomed to such behavior in our entertainment, our politics, and our work-environments that we are numb to the effects of psychological violence, much less to potential remedies for it.

That’s one of the reasons that St. Thomas’ Parish is in conversation with Bishop V. Gene Robinson about the formation of a Center for Nonviolent Communication in our new building when he retires as Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2013. Meanwhile, we are already beginning to work on our own nonviolent communication skills, as well as the community dynamics that can encourage and discourage them, in our upcoming parish retreat with Canon Charles LaFond, who oversees congregational development in the Diocese of New Hampshire.

This is important work for us to do, because besides being potential agents of change in a culture of violence-filled rhetoric and behavior, churches also can themselves be hotbeds for bullying.  In an organization that is built on a metaphor of sheep being cared for and protected from harm by a shepherd, churchgoers get caught off-guard when the sheep attack one another .. or sometimes, even more viciously, the shepherd.  Episcopal priest Dennis Maynard has chronicled the latter behavior in his book, When Sheep Attack, which provides chilling examples of how a lone-wolf bully, or a small pack of parishioners bent on destruction, can threaten to bring a parish to its knees through their bullying behavior.

One of the worst characteristics of church communities, however, is not just that such behavior exists — undercutting even the best efforts of a community to foster an environment of hospitality, welcome, and inclusion — but that often virtually the entire congregation is  aware of what is going on and chooses to stand by and do nothing.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman, one of the most respected voices in describing the systemic dysfunctions of families and communities like the church, challenges this bystander-behavior in the face of bullying in his little book, Friedman’s Fables, in the story he entitled “The Friendly Forest.”   There he describes the efforts of the inhabitants of a forest to encourage a lamb to disregard the continually threatening and aggressive behaviors of a tiger who has taken up residence in the same forest where the lamb lives. Some want to brush off the behavior as “just the way tigers are,”  while others even go to far as to suggest that the lamb is bringing in on herself by being so unnaturally peaceful. Then the conciliators of the forest suggest that all that is needed is “better communication” between the lion and the lamb; they should should just talk through their differences.

The fable ends rather abruptly when, following the continuing advice to the harried lamb, “Don’t be so sheepish. … Speak up strongly when it does these things,” finally “one of the less subtle animals in the forest, more uncouth in expression and unconcerned about just who remained, was overheard to remark, ‘I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.’”

Bullying continues until it stops.  And it seldom stops of its own accord.  It stops when it no longer is deemed acceptable to blame the victim of bullying and instead the bystanders step up — which often begins when they speak out — and state the obvious: We’ve got to cage the tiger.  Authentic nonviolent communication leads to justice in the way we behave — not by talking while the bullying continues, but by finding ways to “cage the tiger” … in ourselves and in our communities. This is the way that Christians envision the Reign of God when the “lion lies down with the lamb” … and the lamb sleeps well through the whole night.

Opening up the newspaper or going online for news recently has been far more of an adventure than even many news junkies and sensationalism mongers could have expected.  I was on vacation, but couldn’t get away from news about

• the country, if not the world, teetering on the verge of an economic cliff
• hurricane Irene and an earthquake on the east coast in a single week

And then this morning’s headlines warned of a “specific but unconfirmed threat” of a car-bomb terrorist attack in New York or Washington this weekend. 

The economic crisis was a human- not a natural-disaster, and could have been avoided by different decisions being made.  And the hurricane and earthquake, we must remember, were natural-disasters, but not vengeful “acts of God.” While the Weather Channel let us see the former coming, despite the fact that we couldn’t do much but hunker-down until it passed, the earthquake caught absolutely everyone by surprise, leaving Washingtonians and others up and down the east coast literally as well as psychologically rattled in the aftermath.

Terrorism, however, is a very different beast.  It is the result of human actions, and at the heart of any act of terror is the desire to remove all of the potential victim’s sense of control from the victim, leaving no action that can be taken to prevent it.  Whenever “they” threaten to strike, “we”  feel helpless to do something in advance to guarantee a lack of success.  In spite of this, there’s no way to hunker-down until the threat is gone, like in a monster storm, because by its nature the threat of terror is ongoing – it does not pass us by to move on elsewhere.   Yet like earthquakes, acts of terrorism catch us off guard, and once we’ve experienced one, they leave us with varying degrees of PTSD responses.

So what are we to do?  Make preemptive strikes against potential terrorists?  Close off streets around public buildings or install detectors that seek to ‘see’ a threat before it materializes into action?  Be on guard against ‘them’ by racial- or ethnic- or religious-profiling?  Install walls and fences at our borders to keep ‘them’ out?

The fact is, we have as a people tried all of these, and many people still find such responses ‘necessary’ even if ‘unfortunately’ destructive of the very patterns of normalcy that terrorists’ themselves wish to bring about.  This is what I’ve come to think of as “the terror trap” – becoming so paralyzed by our anticipatory anxiety that we lose a large measure of our quality of life, even as we “succeed” at temporarily forestalling the next attack.

“The Terror Trap” is what happens when we allow ourselves – consciously or unconsciously – to internalize the strategies of terrorism into our daily lives with one another, for example, through bullying behavior or actual domestic- or societal-violence.  We walk around trapped in our fears of others.  And we also use our financial or social or political power to entrap others in their fears of us and what we might do to them, such as stealth drone attacks in the night in Afghanistan.

However, “evil,” according to the great western Christian theologian Augustine, is not some “thing” with it’s own reality that needs defending against because “it” may otherwise get us.  “Evil” instead is what is left when we remove the “good” from our own lives or the world around us.

• The absence of intentional acts of goodness entraps us in the void of what we experience as “evil” — those places where love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, and radical hospitality no longer empower who we are or what we do.
• The “evil” of terrorism is that it threatens to entrap us in places of suspicion, rather than love; self-interest rather than compassion; retribution rather than forgiveness; unfairness rather than justice; and exclusion rather than hospitality.

“The Terror Trap” isn’t really something that “they” control; it is a trap that we build inside ourselves that captures the goodness that resides in each of us and holds it hostage to fear, doubt, suspicion, and anger.  We have a lot more control over this than we usually realize, but we hesitate because it means changing the habits of our hearts to free the goodness that we allow otherwise to remain trapped within us.  Terror is a trap, whether external or internal, that sucks the air out of the room and leaves us smothering in the void; and in the absence of the good, we begin to create the very terror we abhor.

Sometimes, you stumble across simple things that have profound messages.  This six-chord, guitar-song written by a New Zealander thirty-five years ago is now included in the Episcopal hymnal-supplement, Voices Found: Women in the Church’s Song. We’ll be singing it together this Sunday at St. Thomas’ Parish, but you may enjoy this preview of the original, written by Richard Gillard, who sings it here:

VOICES OF WISDOM – RADICAL WELCOME

Beginning this past October 31^st, St. Thomas’ Parish initiated an exciting guest preaching/presiding schedule for Sunday mornings.  This initiative is an expression of the high value we have long placed on providing a generous pulpit of welcome and hospitality.  It also embodies our commitment to greater diversity in the faces of leadership in our community.

Our first guest preacher/celebrant was on Oct. 31^st, The Rev. Janice Robinson, former rector of Good Shepherd, Silver Spring and the current chaplain of the Bishop’s Search Committee.   She was followed on November 28^th by The Rev. Bill Doggett.

The 2011 lineup of guest preachers and presiders at the Eucharist are:

• January 23^rd – The Rt. Rev. Michael Creighton, Retired
• January 30^th – Canon Charles LaFond, Canon for Congregational Min. (NH)
• February 27^th – The Rev. Simone Bautista, Canon for Latino Ministries
• March 27^th -  The Rev. Preston Hannibal, Canon for Academic Ministries
• May 29^th – The Rev. Kim Baker, Chaplain – Washington Episcopal School
• June 6^th – The Rev. Mpho Tutu, Director of Institute for Peace & Reconciliation
• June 26^th – The Rev. Mary Sulerud, Canon for Deployment & Vocational Ministry

More information will be provided about each preacher prior to their day with us.  We are proud to give worshipers at St. Thomas’ Parish this chance to hear some of the best preaching that can be heard today in the Episcopal Church.  Please join us and bring a friend (or two!).

We want you to know who we are at St. Thomas’ Parish; here are some good ways to start:

1. We try to be a place where all can find and be found by God. We are a community of ordinary people on a joyful and thoughtful spiritual journey together.  Our ministers are called Priests; and the senior minister in an Episcopal Church like ours is called the Rector.

2. This is a Christian community, which for us means that we are part of a long line of people who share a long story that stretches back two thousand years to Jesus and almost two thousand years before that to the earliest memories of the Jewish people.  In particular we are part of the Anglican line of Christians which stretches back to the earliest Celtic Christian communities in the British Isles, and took its Episcopal Church form in the United States following the American Revolution.

3. We practice what we call Radical Hospitality, patterned after Jesus’ own teachings and personal practice. This means that everyone is welcome – there’s no litmus test. All of you is welcome – you don’t have to check part of yourself at the door – not your mind, questions, body, feelings, doubts, or background.

4. Worship is at the center of who we are as a community, and shapes all else that we believe and do. Our Sunday morning worship is centered on the Holy Eucharist, or Holy Communion, a commemoration of Jesus’ last meal with his original followers, and a central way that we celebrate Jesus being present with us today through eating bread, and drinking wine together.  Wherever you may be on your faith journey, there is room at the table for you.

5. Our worship is ordered by what is called The Book of Common (that is, community) Prayer, which contains many of the oldest forms of worship and prayers that Christians used when they first gathered together.

6. When we gather for worship, we usually start with music and singing. We read from the Bible, and listen to sermons (shorter than those in many other Christian churches!) that help us to connect the stories of the Bible with the stories of our own lives. We pray together, give God thanks for our blessings, confess our failings, ask for forgiveness, and lift up our own needs and those of others to God’s hearing.

7. We regularly recite what is called the Nicene Creed, a shorthand way of reminding ourselves of the shape of the whole story of God interacting with our world: God made everything, and everyone. God took human form in Jesus and loves us so much that Jesus was willing to suffer and die on our behalf. God could not be defeated even by death, and lives on now with us as the Holy Spirit, who called the church into being.

8. Episcopalians are a combination of Catholic and Protestant styles of Christianity — our sacramental emphasis on Holy Eucharist is brought together with a deep reverence for the primary authority of Holy Scripture in telling us about God and ourselves. We are a both-and, not an either-or, church; the world isn’t black-and-white, and we are confident that God is with us in all that life brings our way.

9. We also believe in the goodness of human reason, as a God-given resource for understanding who we are. And we trust in what we call tradition — the ways that faith has been passed on over the centuries, down to the present day, in the beliefs and practices of faithful people long before us.

10. At the end of worship, we are sent out to be bearers of God’s love and compassion and justice in the world. Our mission as Christians is to represent Christ in our daily lives, bearing love and justice that is the life-giving power at the heart of reality. Worship gives us strength for our journey and courage to be God’s people in a challenging world.

Come and visit us and see for yourself. There is a place at God’s table for everyone.

On June 20, 2010, the Vestry (or governing board) of St. Thomas’ Parish voted unanimously to move forward to rebuild a new worship space in Dupont Circle. While our new building is going up, I want to be in conversation with you about who we are, what we’re doing here, what we believe in, and why we think this parish matters to the larger communities we live in.

After the original structure, church home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, was destroyed by arson 40 years ago this August, our congregation chose to remain in the neighborhood of Dupont Circle, worshiping, as we still do, in the renovated parish hall. Over time this prophetic decision evolved into an intentional, creative, and courageous leadership role in solidarity with of the growing GLBT community in this historic Washington, DC, neighborhood.

• We opened our doors during the height of the AIDS crisis – welcoming HIV positive individuals to the Eucharist, ministering to the dying and their grieving partners and friends, and honoring the dead with funerals and memorial services when few other parishes did so.

• We pioneered the development of rites for the blessing of same sex unions in the Episcopal Church, writing a still frequently used and widely adapted liturgy in 1998. Subsequently we have hosted countless blessings of holy unions, and our clergy have officiated at many others beyond our doors. Most recently we have been celebrating a steady flow of same sex marriages at St. Thomas’ Parish, including a wedding just this week of a gay couple who have been faithful partners for 33 years.

• All of us at St. Thomas’ Parish have been blessed, too, by a steady growth in the numbers of children in our ranks, some with same-sex and others with straight parents, all of them looking for a spiritual home where they can be assured, as one said recently, that “my child will never learn to hate in this place.”

• As older straight and GLBT members have retired or moved from the parish, younger adults have found a home with us in growing numbers. The result is that the median age of our parishioners is about 35, with only a handful of members over the age of 55, and currently only one vestry member over 45. This influx of young adults has led to a doubling of our congregation’s size and budget in the past 5 years. Now we are in the both enviable and lamentable place of being almost out of room to welcome those still arriving at our doors.

People who come here find an inclusive congregation, whose life is centered in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion — “a place where all can find and be found by God.” We are constantly deepening our practice of faith rooted in vital worship and bold outreach in equal measure, continually learning to love one another and our neighbors, although sometimes it is not clear which is the more difficult. We are proud to be a part of our community, and we also are deeply committed to contributing to our neighborhood and world in days long after we ourselves are gone. We’re growing a church just for you — and a place of sanctuary and refuge, of inspiration and courage, of faithfulness and compassion for tomorrow and the day after.

Dr. Wayne Whitson Floyd, a lay theologian, chairs
the Education and Formation Committee
at St. Thomas’ Parish, Dupont Circle, Washington, DC

One of the recommendations of the 2004 Windsor Report, written in response to reaction against the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, was that the Anglican Communion move towards the adoption of a so-called Anglican Covenant. Despite many gallant attempts to make Windsor into a statement of the beauty-of-unity that is the Anglican Communion, I remain unconvinced. As the old Southern saying goes: “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” I say this because I am convinced that such a document — however nuanced its wording — would in effect state the means by which official condemnation of the Episcopal Church’s full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians at all levels of church life could be justified. It also would define the Episcopal Church’s action in consecrating Bishop Robinson as having removed TEC from the fellowship of the Anglican Communion. Dress it up however you want, but IMHO it’s still a pig.

To its credit, the response of the Episcopal Church up to now has been far from enthusiastic about such a Covenant — “it would be a bad idea that I do not support” Washington’s Bishop John Chane was overheard to say recently. Our bishops and Executive Council and General Convention deputies have agreed, however, to study the idea and make recommendations about the Covenant (the official study guide can be found here), which is in its second draft (the full text can be found here).

The Diocese of Washington’s Episcopal Cafe recently commissioned a series of articles on the Covenant, which give you an idea of how it is being approached officially by the Episcopal Church. And the General Theological Seminary’s Desmond Tutu Center, following its April 2008 conference on the proposed Covenant, has posted on its website more html, mp3, and pdf resources and responses to this than most Episcopalians will ever have the patience to absorb.

I realize I betray my own heterodox Episcopalianism — and poor Southern manners — by having lost already most of my patience to participate in what already is a several years long extended series of debates among our bishops, Executive Council members, General Convention deputies, seminary faculty and all manner of cogs in the complex machinery that is the Episcopal Church. This will continue past this summer’s Lambeth Conference, into the 2009 General Convention, and certainly beyond.

From the outset, I must say that I simply think the whole endeavor is a bad idea, but a bad idea whose time appears to have come.

It’s a bad idea for some fairly simple reasons: Read more

I’m always on the lookout for interesting congregational websites and blogs. Today I returned a telephone call to a rabbi at a New York synagogue, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, whose website describes them as “a unique congregation committed to building a kehilla kedosha, a sacred community, built on a love of the Jewish people, a passion for social justice, prayer and study. We are a caring community, a home in which to celebrate life’s simchas, joys, as well as to grieve and mourn loss.”

I particularly like the invitation by the rabbi, Sharon Kleinbaum, which sounds very much like St. Thomas’ Parish and our language of prophetic hospitality. She wrote: “Join us, not as a spectator, but as a member of the family, with rights and privileges, obligations and commitments. Together we can create a true [sacred community].”