Burton is the Bp. of Saskatchewan and a regular contributor to The Anglican Digest. ed.
We could hardly believe our good fortune. When I let an English friend know that we needed off-campus accommodation because we were bringing our children with us to the Lambeth Conference, I soon received an email from the Chaplain of the King’s School in Canterbury offering us his house while he and his family were away in Sweden.
It is no ordinary house but part of a medieval compound just near the walls of the Cathedral which is attached to the original ruined priory of St. Augustine of Canterbury. King Charles I and Henrietta Maria spent their honeymoon in the chamber over the entrance gate.
Our children, Caroline & Peter, like the house less for its beauty or historic character than for the trampoline in the walled garden, the opportunities for Frisbee with Mum and Dad in the quadrangle, and, best of all – wonder of wonders – 220 channels on a widescreen TV.
The view from one side of the house is the great Cathedral of Canterbury, golden in the evening sunshine, its tremendous tower a kind of perfection, absolute in its authority, the cynosure of a galaxy of Cathedrals, the matriarch of a vast spiritual family now 75 or 80 million in number, the third largest communion in the history of the earth. Canterbury as a place has been the centre of the English spiritual project since 597 when Augustine arrived here to organize the already centuries-old British churches and coordinate and extend their mission under the oversight of the Bishop of Rome. This was not the beginning of the Anglicanism or of the challenges of living as part of a world church. Nearly 300 years earlier, a delegation of British bishops had gone to the Council of Arles, in France, to address the problem of a heretical bishop named Donatus. But Canterbury became the center of the English spiritual tradition and this small island’s great work of world Evangelism. In the centuries to come Chaucer would celebrate this Cathedral`s pilgrims, T.S. Eliot the murder at her bosom.
This week the old empress has once again called home to her skirts the bishops which she has scattered across the earth, home from Madagascar, from the Himalayas, from the high Arctic and the Antipodes, home from Sarawak, Kalamazoo and the Gambia. And here they are, a living index of the church catholic in lawn sleeves and convocation robes.
It is no imperial durbar, however, despite the scale and pomp of the gathering. Every morning we gather in groups of six or seven to read the Gospel of John and to share something of our lives and burdens. My group is not atypical, consisting of three South Seas bishops, among them the Primate of Melanesia, Sir Ellison Pogo, Bishop Kerr-Wilson of Qu`Appelle, the Coadjutor Bishop of Virginia, the Bishops of Oxford, England, and Willochra, Australia, and a friend of thirty years` standing, John Gibault, the Director of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
It is a spiritual event in which politics is an unwelcome intrusion but one which cannot be ignored. We go from Bible study most morning to discussion groups of 40 where, in my group at least, the bishops never fail to impress me with their spiritual seriousness and concern for the mission of the Church. Most are anxious about the outcome of the Conference which hasn`t yet addressed the most controversial issues before it. Those subjects are to be engaged this week.
At the opening service the 650 bishops processed in the great doors of the Cathedral, down the long nave, up and up from one level to the next, and finally through the narrow door into the choir to their stalls. The Cathedral is so big that even from where I sat in the choir, the front of the building was still out of view. Looking east, I could see in the distance, at the highest elevation, framed by an arch, the only mitred figure in the building, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, seated on the throne of Augustine, surrounded by his chaplains, looking in his beard like an icon of Christ Pantocrator. It seemed surreal until a small group of Solomon Islanders, members of the Melanesian Brotherhood (six of whose religious order were martyred in 2003) processed the Gospel. Diminutive in their traditional grass skirts, a lead by a member of the Brotherhood playing a pan pipe, they carried the gilded Gospel book of Canterbury Cathedral in a small ceremonial boat, down from the hands of the Archbishop, down past the bishops in their finery, out through the narrow door into the sunlit nave to proclaim the Gospel from the Compass Rose inlayed in the floor of the transept. Their joy and sincerity seemed to reveal the spiritual truth of the occasion. What God through Augustine has done! I couldn`t help but think of the words of Isaiah 55, `` So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. ``
St. Augustine’s original abbey sits a couple of hundred yards away outside the walls of the Cathedral. Today it is an untidy assemblage of walls, some surprisingly high, sketching out the perimeter of the ancient complex and its larger rooms which St. Augustine himself built on top of three existing Saxon churches. It is difficult to imagine the world of St. Augustine`s 40 monks, so much has been lost, but the secrets those stones retain have a power to fascinate. Very old buildings are like languages: they absorb every insult to their dignity and pick the pockets of those who would destroy them, growing richer as the years go by. Today Augustine`s priory is a palimpsest, a document written, partly erased and overwritten, and testifies not to the ruin of a single community but to the ruin of succession of communities which built and rebuilt in different architectural styles, one atop the ruins of the next. A single patch of wall can have ten or more sorts of stone and brick, and three or four architectural styles.
This is a good place from which to participate in the Lambeth Conference which is trying to build something new while living in the ruins of a succession of spiritual communities. As everyone knows, we are in crisis, and what at one time seemed primarily an abstract problem of theological coherence has caused the Anglican Communion to begin to break up.
It is an unprecedented situation which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has decided needs an unprecedented response. Gone is the approach of the last hundred years of Lambeth Conferences, which developed, debated and voted on large numbers of substantive resolutions in a parliament of bishops. In the Archbishop`s view, resolutions (notably Resolution 1.10 of the last Lambeth Conference which addressed the blessing of same sex unions and bishops invading each other’s jurisdictions) only heighten tensions in the Communion and are rarely put into action. In its place he has instituted a heavily managed process of small group discussions on prescribed topics, interspersed with optional lectures and presentations on related (and unrelated) topics.
Interestingly, the Archbishop has by a tour de force single-handedly altered the balance of power between his own office and that of the Lambeth Conference. For his power is now no longer simply one of invitation to the bishops to a conference which he hosts. It is one in which he now decides what the bishops can and cannot do when they gather. This is easy to exaggerate, and I know the Archbishop has no lust for power, but it is worth observing, if only as a footnote.
To my knowledge, the only person who has called the Archbishop`s bluff, and that affectionately and only by implication, was that wise observer of the Anglican scene, the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, who, in a sparsely attended `self-select` session on the Windsor Report on Wednesday, teasingly observed that the main difference between the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and the Archbishop of Canterbury was that the Archbishop of Canterbury exercised infinitely more power over his bishops.
It seems that while the bishops have been preoccupied by the threat of creeping papacy in the Covenant process, the Archbishop has quietly assumed a manner which Benedict XVI must regard as amusingly familiar.
The Archbishop knows full well that he is taking a serious risk in structuring the Conference this way. In my view he is entirely correct in recognizing the need to bring about a change of heart in the bishops if the Communion is to remain together. Not a few bishops have become entrenched and (in a few instances) embittered by living through so many years of conflict, much of it internal to their dioceses. The Archbishop spoke persuasively in the retreat which started the conference of our need to find ourselves in another `place, ` with a new way of seeing things and a much greater level of trust. How else can we live in a Communion which involves mutual and voluntary submission in deciding controversial matters and abiding by those decisions?
I don`t think his coup is significant, both because it is obviously an emergency measure and because the Archbishop himself has called for an overhaul of the central institutions of the Communion to make them more coherent in the service of a global mission. While in his Presidential Address the Archbishop poured scorn on `Western` modes of decision-making, and failed to point out the critical and overwhelmingly positive contributions the resolutions of previous Lambeth Conferences have made to the Communion`s life, I think he was merely trying to persuade the bishops of the need for a healing process at this Conference only. He has already initiated this overhaul by striking a Windsor Continuation Group which notably a few days ago called for the creation of a Faith and Order Commission, which body may well be endorsed in the final statement of this Conference at the end of the week. Also, intriguingly, it has called for a Principles of Canon Law Project. The Archbishop has made plain his hope that the Conference will give a clear endorsement of the Anglican Covenant process. It can hardly avoid doing so, given the urgency of our situation and the lack of credible alternative ways forward.
If the Conference ended today, it could well be regarded as one of historic importance in its recognition that the existing central institutions of the Communion cannot hold us together and that major reforms must go forward. But we are only at the end of the first week. My prayer is that the week ahead will bring an act of the Holy Spirit to deepen our conversion to Christ, to open hearts and minds, and to help us forgive one another our past injuries so that we may move on together into that changed ‘space’ of which the Archbishop has spoken. The situation appears to be fragile but the old stones outside my window suggest otherwise.
It is important that we move forward together, not least because we have become inward-looking and preoccupied with internal quarrels. One African bishop in my discussion group expressed in forceful terms the need for us not to get so absorbed with our own ecclesial problems that we forget the poor and those who have never heard the Gospel. Nobody dared contradict him because we knew he was right. Whether we will be given the mind and will to make the required sacrifices remains to be seen.
So do pray hard for us this week for the cleansing and freshening breeze of the Holy Spirit to do what only He can, that the spiritual movement we call Anglicanism may stop holding its breath and enjoy a fresh start in this new day.
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