How better to start a Monday than with another column by the good bishop?
Q: You continue to write articles that both excite and amaze me. My respect for you, as I have often said, started when you were my bishop in the Diocese of Newark. Every time I heard you speak you challenged me and widened my spiritual world. I find today that often in my prayers I fall back into the humanizing of God to assist me in relating in some way. When I watch our church being torn apart, however, I realize how limiting my humanizing is. In your columns I see in the Episcopal Church a way to a new Christianity and that enables me to enter my parish and celebrate the Eucharist interpreting what I hear said so that worship becomes much more personal for me.
I feel that the Church must believe what we say every Sunday, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, and with all thy soul. This is the first great commandment and the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
A: Thanks for your letter. I'm glad that this has been your experience. Raising consciousness is not easy. It brings deep appreciation from people like you, but it also brings deep hostility from those who do not see. Every change in thinking involves the death of a previous way of thinking and human beings do not do well in the dying — even when death turns out to be the doorway to resurrection.
It always helps to see progress in the human value system, but sometimes it takes a lifetime before people notice.
I grew up in a radically segregated Episcopal church in North Carolina. I lived through wrenching battles in that church as racism began to die. I lived to see the Episcopal Church in North Carolina elect as their only bishop a gifted African-American priest, Michael Curry, who was at that time the rector of a Baltimore church. He has been directing the affairs of the Diocese of North Carolina now since 2000.
I grew up in a sexist church where girls could not serve as acolytes and women were not allowed to function liturgically or to sit in on any decision making body of church life. I lived long enough to see 40% of our clergy become women, 60% of our seminary students become women and to see my church choose a woman bishop (in Nevada), Katharine Jefferts-Schori, to be our Presiding Bishop, the highest office our church has.
I grew up in a homophobic church where gay and lesbian people were treated as if they were either mentally ill or morally depraved. I have lived long enough to see openly homosexual clergy serving our church with distinction and honor, and one of them, Gene Robinson, to be elected and confirmed to be the Bishop of New Hampshire. Bishop Robinson is not either the first or the only gay bishop in my church, as the press likes to pretend so that it looks like news; he is our first and only honest gay bishop.
Those are the things that make it worthwhile to endure the tension, the conflict and the hostility that change always brings. Thanks again for your letter.
- John Shelby Spong
"Live Forever!"
