My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves

Say a Little Prayer

By Bernie Reeves

I played Middle C in the Episcopal day school bell choir. Every morning I attended chapel for morning service and read from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Nearly every week I attended Sunday School at my church. I had attendance pins down to the navel and carried the little cross, the church flag and later the big cross as an acolyte for the 11:00 service. I went to Young Peoples Service League (now EYC I think) on Sunday evenings, mostly to meet girls. The Episcopal Church exuded a comfortable confidence and a sense of enduring efficacy. The rectors were worldly and the parishioners tolerant.
For several summers my camping experience included two weeks at Vade Mecum, the Episcopal Church camp snuggled in the North Carolina foothills. Every evening after chapel and vespers we would sit on the hillside to watch the setting sun and sing, "Now the Day is Over." Little did I know that the day would be soon be over for all Episcopalians.
Like most of us, I rarely attended church after age 16 until my first child was born. I gravitated back to the church in 1979 and walked right into what can only be called a religious Bolshevik Revolution. The radical fanatics had slowly infiltrated the inner sanctum of church doctrine, beginning with a silly Marxist phase in the 1960s (the whole country was slightly psychotic back then so it went almost unnoticed) escalating to an end game with the adoption of a new Book of Common Prayer in 1979. As I sailed the ship of my life to the secure moorings of the Church, the pier had been removed.
The Prayer Book issue was a precursor to the radical deconstruction of texts now so trendy on campus. Granted, revising the Book of Common Prayer, the central document in Episcopal life, is hardly unprecedented and updating was probably necessary. But the 1979 Book imposed on the parishioners is a tract of sorts, hinting at the absurdity to come in the brave new politically correct world we live in today. Gender is big and is removed as much as possible, rendering God, an already metaphysical puzzle, even more puzzling by making Him a cross-dresser. But that niggling stuff wasn’t the real reason I could never stand the new Book. It lost its grandeur, its beautiful and lilting poetry, its essence. And it was imposed on purpose by the clergy and bishops, some of whom formed an elite cabal of activists that stole the Church from its people.
From the first day the new Book was adopted, fissures appeared. Some church members broke away and formed their own unaffiliated parishes where they could read the old Book in peace. Some became Catholics. Others started up churches affiliated with African Episcopal churches, such as Angola and Rwanda. Rwanda?
It is due to the reaction of Rwanda and, of all places, Nigeria, to the election by the American Episcopal church of an openly homosexual bishop in New Hampshire that has the newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams calling for a convocation. He has entreated the global Anglican Church to come together to prevent Schism, a word redolent with Medieval resonance. The very utterance of the S-word evokes centuries of conflict in Christianity, from the break between the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches over doctrine and icon worship in the 10th century, the Great Schism of the Roman Catholic Church in the 14th century, to the universal and violent break in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in Germany. Luther opened the permanent fissure between the ancient Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation and broke the grip of the Catholic priesthood that thrived financially on the power to commune with God on behalf of the common man. Luther’s break gave power to the people, so to speak, and a permanent aversion to a priestly bureaucracy controlled by bishops and grandees of the Church.
The era of the Reformation, and later the Counter-Reformation, convulsed Europe and became the most important impetus for the settlement of America. Religious freedom from the Catholic Church and Catholic kings and from the tyrannies of the dozens of Protestant sects against other sects that sprang up in the aftermath was the hidden hand in the constant movement of peoples within America. And in Europe today the Catholic-Protestant wars continue with prejudice and contempt in everyday life a commonplace. The Protestant denominations and sects in the US today still fight it out over matters of doctrine and scripture, still practicing that elemental need to worship as they please.

ANGLICANS
The Church of England broke from Rome in a very different manner than the Protestant sects in Europe. As every school child used to know before the radical scholars evaporated history, Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope in Rome wouldn't give it to him. So he broke away and established England’s very own mirror image of the Catholic Church, but with a twist: The King of England replaced the Pope as the invincible and divinely anointed head of the Church in England. In effect, the newly formed Church of England threw out the baby but kept the bathwater of ritual, apostolic succession, and, most important to the current eruption in the Anglican faith, the hierarchy of Bishops.
The word Episcopal actually means "governance by Bishops." After Henry pillaged the Catholic holdings in England, he kept the basic structure of the bureaucracy inherited from Rome. And although he was the "defender of the faith," he had to rely on a church Primate to sanctify the rule of kings. He created the title of Archbishop of Canterbury for this purpose, who today is head of the Church of England, a state institution. The Archbishop and many of the lesser bishops serve in the House of Lords and religious education is required in British schools. (Interesting note here: Prince Charles can accede to the throne as a divorced man, but can't be Defender of the Faith — that’s why he is making noises that he would "disestablish" the official Church of England.)
In the US, those who remained or later joined the Church of England had a problem. After the official formation of America, the strictures of separation of church and state mandated that American Anglicans could not be members of a church that is the official state religion of another country. Thus in 1789 was formed the American Episcopal Protestant Church, a separate entity but still associated with the Church of England. But the Archbishop of Canterbury has no power to order around the American church. Instead the two churchly entities "commune" on ecclesiastical issues.
The same sort of process occurred during the imperial age when Great Britain controlled 25 percent of the world’s people. The Church of England was established across the globe but the same American-style semi-autonomous nature of these colonial churches with Canterbury evolved, especially as the Empire receded. So there is a world "communion" of Anglicans and Episcopalians with the Archbishop of Canterbury the titular potentate, but the individual national church organizations can act on their own, even though it is often frowned upon at Lambeth Palace, the London headquarters of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

MADE IN THE USA 
The American Episcopalians have caused Lambeth Palace the most concern over the past 40 years. The irony that a church perceived to be upper class had taken on Bolshevik airs was so ridiculous on the surface that most US parishioners just sort of went along thinking it was just a phase connected to the convolutions in society during the era of Vietnam, the student movement and the various fringe politics that dominated the political landscape.
Today, however, as it does on campus, ’60s radicalism remains part of the American Episcopal Church, as does chaos in its mission. Over the years, the left wing activists in the bishopric and priesthood kept calling for reform, most notably the rewriting of the Book of Common Prayer, the central document of the Church and the umbilical cord with England, and hauled off and consecrated a female bishop without proper communication with Lambeth Palace.
Conservative members broke away, some "going to Rome," some affiliating with other national Anglican churches, most notably African communions that kept their rituals and beliefs inherited from colonial days. Others just broke away without affiliation with any larger entity. Within the remaining official Church, many old parishioners stayed on and found themselves sitting in the same pew as arrivistes and Born-Agains who joined to announce their upward social status and found themselves free to impose their own practices onto what used to be a controlled and organized service.
As central ritual control was now in the hands of a tyrannical clique, a free-from lunacy gripped the congregations. Some parishes decided to dress up and act like Catholics with "smells and bells," ornate vestments, genuflection and sang the Ave Maria, a decidedly odd decision as the cult of Mary is avoided in Protestant churches of any sort. Other churches introduced the hootenanny style of worship, featuring guitars, drums, cymbals and a free-form service more appropriate for a high school bus trip. Still others took on an evangelical, foot-washing missionary style more like Four Square Gospelers than Episcopalians. But most genuine church members just sat there and took it. They loved their church and its modest rituals, and they figured sanity would return.
That hope is now dashed with the election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay Bishop, in the wake of the homosexual sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church in the US. Catholic priests were using their power of office to seduce little boys, the sort of corruption that set off the Protestant Reformation and suspicion of a priestly class. You would think this revelation would give pause to the Episcopal curia before they hauled off and sanctified homosexuality upon a 98 percent heterosexual congregation. But no, the American church leaders are so righteous in their own internal political agendas that the effect on parishioners did not enter their mind.
But that's not what is concerning the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has made clear his tolerance of homosexuals in the Church. What bothers him is not even the reality of a fissure with the American Episcopal communion. It’s the breakup of the world church due to the shenanigans of the US priestly hierarchy. To put things in perspective, there are only about 2.3 million American Episcopalians. In Nigeria, for one example, there are 17 million and they are hopping mad that the US church is sanctifying homosexuality when their entire continent is ravaged by AIDS. The Nigerians and the rest of the worldwide church that has ties with Lambeth Palace are threatening to break away due to the unilateral actions of the US. Schism is now on the table.
Like most former Episcopalians, I am tolerant. I don't care if anyone is gay, but I do not think it proper for tolerance to be turned into a power play by a small minority to take over the institutions of society. This process is now rampant in America and the ordination of Bishop Robinson another example of the radical tail wagging the majority dog. This time the dog might bark back. And so ends the lesson.

NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
There is some joy in the land. The Office of Civil Rights of the US Education Department has notified universities that students and teachers are allowed to speak freely without the Feds ruining their lives with harassment suits if they criticize or speak frankly about others. The news is, how did we get to this point anyway?

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And more reason for hope in Tampa where Grandmas restaurant is defying Florida’s new preposterous anti-smoking regulations by allowing customers to light up. Now several other eateries are following suit. Will the authorities open up with Tommy guns?

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The Middle East is like a snow dome, the kind you buy for the kids to shake up and watch the flakes settle to the bottom. Over there it is shaken up constantly and the flakes fall back into the same place they have for 6000 years. Problem is the flakes are made of cordite and plastic explosives, and soon they will be radioactive.

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As we scurry to help the benighted Liberians, why is it we allow Zimbabwe to sink into darkness as Robert Mugabe continues his tyranny against his own people, black and white?

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Good reason to target Target as unpatriotic: the stores’ management turned a veterans group down saying you do not meet our area of giving. We only donate to arts, social actions, gay and lesbian causes, and education.