Center and Margins
People have asked me several times how I felt at the consecration on Sunday — did I feel joyful or happy or hopeful? What was it like?
I can’t honstly say I felt anything at the time. It just seemed most important to be there.
It was like an ordination. It was unusual in some aspects — the objections, for example. Or the pregnancy of singing “The Church’s One Foundation” (which includes the following words “Though with a scornful wonder, Men see her sore distressed, By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distressed, Yet saints their watch are keeping, Their cry goes up, “How long?”, And soon the night of weeping, shall be the morn of song.“), knowing that schism could occur as the result of misunderstanding what the action there was about.
But the Episcopal Church has always been OK for me, and so I haven’t had the same experience of exclusion that many of my fellow Episcopalians. Coming from the tradition that I did, the Episcopal Church, especially in the places that I have lived (mostly university towns), has always accepted gays. An openly gay bishop was only a matter of time, as far as I could tell. So it was just a fairly normal event to me. Not only that, but all of this stuff has been playing out in the news for so long, that it’s not like there were surprises. We knew there would be objections, that the press would be there, that all this would happen about as it did. I guess it’s one of the advantages of being a liturgical church — one does not have to worry about how events will transpire and how one will react to them. The liturgy constrains the form of the events, so that one has the freedom to know what’s behind them, to understand, to make preparations for all.
Two of the sets of remarks at Sunday’s consecration played on the theme of center and margins. Most importantly, they reminded us that when we pull the margins in to the center, bringing those people who are not remembered into the larger fold, we also bring the center to the margins, helping those in the mainstream know what it’s like to live on the edge. And I think that’s what the Christian message is supposed to be about — uniting center and margins so that each becomes more like the other.
Right. Done for now.
Ecto blogging software
10 November 2003 at 11:30 am.
I don’t know that the goal should be to merge the center and margins. Balance may be more like it. We need both center and margins in proportion to one another.
I see value for both roles in any organization or society. What we need is for each role to appreciate the need for the other and for each to understand that their way of seeing is not the only true way. Only a love not bound by ego can accomplish that