CHASM
Not counting all those times when he suggests that conservative Christians are closet Klansmen, Jim Naughtonis usually a pretty restrained guy. So for him, this almost rises to the level of wildly-hysterical invective:
I can understand why Bishop Mark Sisk released a statement in advance of Occupy Wall Street’s demonstration at an empty lot owned by Trinity, Wall Street in lower Manhattan. Trinity is a church in his diocese. His clergy had been following the issue closely, and some were passionately supportive of the group that wanted to take over the property. Any bishop is such a situation might have wanted to offer a few words of moral guidance. That I wish he had offered somewhat different words doesn’t change the fact that it was appropriate for him to speak.
Passive-aggressive little fireplug, innee?
I am less certain why Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori felt the need to lend her moral credibility, and by extension that of the Episcopal Church, to Trinity at this particular moment. In situations like the one that was playing out in Lower Manhattan it might have been wiser to acknowledge that people of good faith and judicious temperament can come to differing conclusions, urge further conversation, and remind both sides of the need to eschew violence. Instead she inserted herself into a parochial matter in a way that seemed to suggest that she believed a movement that has suffered far more violence than it has initiated, was about to move on Duarte Square through “force of arms.”
Here’s how upset Jim is. Believe it or else, he even takes a shot at crazy old Uncle Des.
The Presiding Bishop, however, emerges from the weekend’s events looking far better than Archbishop Desmond Tutu who first released a statement, through the Occupy website supporting the movement’s plan to take Duarte Park and urging Trinity Wall Street not to ask the police to make arrests, then releasing a second statement, through Trinity’s website saying that the previous statement was by no means an endorsement of lawbreaking. Why the police would arrest someone who had not broken the law was not made clear.
But let’s do the passive-aggressive thing some more.
I don’t have an opinion about whether Trinity Wall Street should allow Occupy Wall Street to establish a winter camp in Duarte Square.
Yes you do.
I can’t determine from the distance at which I am watching this unfold whether Trinity is actually offering real aid to Occupy or engaging in the Lady Bountiful behavior that earns the parish perhaps more credit that it strictly deserves. But I know at least a little bit about crisis communications, and that the way in which organizations speak and act during crises tend to reveal—often inadvertently—their deepest values.
Told you.
In this particular crisis, Trinity embarrassed Desmond Tutu into publicly reversing himself and induced the Presiding Bishop into weighing in on a fractious parochial matter in which the wider church has nothing at stake. At issue, in essence, was Trinity’s right to dispose of a tiny piece of its vast commercial real estate empire as it saw fit. I don’t necessarily contest that right, but I believe that in defending it, Trinity treated the good name of our church as a commodity that it had purchased through philanthropy and was now free to deploy.
So the richest Episcopal parish in the country has become an adversary now, the private chapel of the big money boys? Yeah, pretty much, according to former bishop and current posturing fraud George Packard who was arrested Saturday.
This became an opportunity for individual and gratuitous violence by policemen. The simple arrests were done, why were they messing with these people? Which brings me to the melodrama of the day and the forecasts by our leaders. The only “force or arms” present on Saturday was not in (or at) the hands of demonstrators. Such a statement is woefully out of touch with what Occupy Wall Street stands for. It is the corporate culture which employs these means either grossly or through manipulation of money and power. So much so in this case that the NYPD was called out as gendarmes for the latest corporate client, Trinity Church. We avoided any real tragedy in the midst of peaceful protest, but barely. Should this have really unravelled I would not have held the NYPD accountable as much as those who brought this bizarre, and needless, construct into being.
Bishop? I hope you aren’t counting on some sort of spiritual benefit or gift emerging from this stunt of yours.
Because that ship has sailed, old-timer.
“The way in which organizations speak and act during crises tend to reveal—often inadvertently—their deepest values?” I’ll take your word for it, Jim. And do you know what OWS and its supporters are communicating to the rest of us right now?
They’re all spoiled children.
OWS had to move on to that stretch of land. Why? Because it wanted to and it didn’t need another reason. And since OWS wanted to move there, OWS supporters like Packard demanded that Trinity let the kids move there, no questions asked.
From all accounts, Trinity has gone out of its way to support Occupy Wall Street. But now, because they had the temerity to draw a line, they have suddenly become the enemy, suddenly become the symbol of all that is wrong in the world.
Do you want OWS to become even more of a joke than it already is, Jim? Then keep on declaring that any and every thought that pops into some OWSer’s empty head was put there by God. And whatever you do, keep on encouraging that whole “what’s yours is mine if ’justice,’ as I define that word, demands it” vibe OWS is putting out.
The reason why you’re having such a hard time understanding the motivations of people like Mark Sisk, Katharine Jefferts Schori and Jim Cooper these days is because they possess something that seems to be completely lacking in the OWSers and their brain-dead enablers like George Packard.
Maturity. They’re the adults in the Episcopal room, Jim. And they’re trying to save you people from yourselves.
Do you know it’s called when you steal something from a billionaire banker or financier? It’s called stealing. And last I checked, it read “Thou shalt not steal.” So if you can higher-criticize that to mean, “Thou mayest steal if most of the money in thy land is in the hands of a very few people,” you’re a better man than I can ever hope to be, Jim.
UPDATE: This is what I’m talking about, Jim. The Rev. John Merz, priest-in-charge at Ascension in Brooklyn, writes Larry Pro and basically confirms everything I mentioned above. OWS is leftist which means that it’s holy and it’s from God and everybody knows it. It also means that OWS can take whatever it wants whenever it wants it and doesn’t have to observe any stupid rules, in the Bible or any place else.
OWS asks for no permits, it blows where it will uninvited and still, through direct actions and assemblies hallows space that allows the voice of the people to be heard. There is a power often mistaken as violence at work there. I am reminded of Otto’s work on the holy as “a terrible power.” When things start being overturned, when the powers and principalities are threatened, I always figured it would happen in a way that was not neat and clean. We are to be taken aback.
As far as Merz is concerned, Trinity-Wall Street might as well join the Anglican Church in North America.
There is no need any longer to publicly critique Trinity Wall Street for their track record. I promise for my part that I will not dwell there, but rather to move on with these parting notes:
Publicly they need to preserve face as they understand it according to their varied interests. Privately I must remark on the shocking dissonance between their professed support, their vast resources and power and the things they provided: leaving a drop-in center open, allowing group meetings in other space literally a handful if not less of times, deleting posts on their blogs that enjoined them for basic relief of human needs (porta-potties). It pains me to experience this disconnection, as they never intended to connect, listen to, and support this movement in any real way. It is a rehash of their 9/11 record (many know the real story there) locally in times of social crisis. They do the right thing only if self- preservation (image) requires it and even then only haltingly. There is no amount of explanation that can dissuade me of that. I do hope that I can forgive them. Perhaps one day they will also understand and forgive me for my challenging comments since this started the first weeks of OWS. Time will tell. But to devote another second to them would be a second wasted.
There you have it. The sense of overwhelming entitlement. Greed, if you like. The sense that as long as you claim to have a “higher purpose,” laws, commandments and Scriptural precepts don’t apply to you. The sense that “holy” is whatever you think it ought to be and that anyone who disagrees with you or tells you no is evil.
Merz may not like this but an edifice with those properties is nothing more than a house built on sand. And you all know what happens to those.
I can understand why Bishop Mark Sisk released a statement in advance of Occupy Wall Street’s demonstration at an empty lot owned by Trinity, Wall Street in lower Manhattan. Trinity is a church in his diocese. His clergy had been following the issue closely, and some were passionately supportive of the group that wanted to take over the property. Any bishop is such a situation might have wanted to offer a few words of moral guidance. That I wish he had offered somewhat different words doesn’t change the fact that it was appropriate for him to speak.
Passive-aggressive little fireplug, innee?
I am less certain why Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori felt the need to lend her moral credibility, and by extension that of the Episcopal Church, to Trinity at this particular moment. In situations like the one that was playing out in Lower Manhattan it might have been wiser to acknowledge that people of good faith and judicious temperament can come to differing conclusions, urge further conversation, and remind both sides of the need to eschew violence. Instead she inserted herself into a parochial matter in a way that seemed to suggest that she believed a movement that has suffered far more violence than it has initiated, was about to move on Duarte Square through “force of arms.”
Here’s how upset Jim is. Believe it or else, he even takes a shot at crazy old Uncle Des.
The Presiding Bishop, however, emerges from the weekend’s events looking far better than Archbishop Desmond Tutu who first released a statement, through the Occupy website supporting the movement’s plan to take Duarte Park and urging Trinity Wall Street not to ask the police to make arrests, then releasing a second statement, through Trinity’s website saying that the previous statement was by no means an endorsement of lawbreaking. Why the police would arrest someone who had not broken the law was not made clear.
But let’s do the passive-aggressive thing some more.
I don’t have an opinion about whether Trinity Wall Street should allow Occupy Wall Street to establish a winter camp in Duarte Square.
Yes you do.
I can’t determine from the distance at which I am watching this unfold whether Trinity is actually offering real aid to Occupy or engaging in the Lady Bountiful behavior that earns the parish perhaps more credit that it strictly deserves. But I know at least a little bit about crisis communications, and that the way in which organizations speak and act during crises tend to reveal—often inadvertently—their deepest values.
Told you.
In this particular crisis, Trinity embarrassed Desmond Tutu into publicly reversing himself and induced the Presiding Bishop into weighing in on a fractious parochial matter in which the wider church has nothing at stake. At issue, in essence, was Trinity’s right to dispose of a tiny piece of its vast commercial real estate empire as it saw fit. I don’t necessarily contest that right, but I believe that in defending it, Trinity treated the good name of our church as a commodity that it had purchased through philanthropy and was now free to deploy.
So the richest Episcopal parish in the country has become an adversary now, the private chapel of the big money boys? Yeah, pretty much, according to former bishop and current posturing fraud George Packard who was arrested Saturday.
This became an opportunity for individual and gratuitous violence by policemen. The simple arrests were done, why were they messing with these people? Which brings me to the melodrama of the day and the forecasts by our leaders. The only “force or arms” present on Saturday was not in (or at) the hands of demonstrators. Such a statement is woefully out of touch with what Occupy Wall Street stands for. It is the corporate culture which employs these means either grossly or through manipulation of money and power. So much so in this case that the NYPD was called out as gendarmes for the latest corporate client, Trinity Church. We avoided any real tragedy in the midst of peaceful protest, but barely. Should this have really unravelled I would not have held the NYPD accountable as much as those who brought this bizarre, and needless, construct into being.
Bishop? I hope you aren’t counting on some sort of spiritual benefit or gift emerging from this stunt of yours.
Because that ship has sailed, old-timer.
“The way in which organizations speak and act during crises tend to reveal—often inadvertently—their deepest values?” I’ll take your word for it, Jim. And do you know what OWS and its supporters are communicating to the rest of us right now?
They’re all spoiled children.
OWS had to move on to that stretch of land. Why? Because it wanted to and it didn’t need another reason. And since OWS wanted to move there, OWS supporters like Packard demanded that Trinity let the kids move there, no questions asked.
From all accounts, Trinity has gone out of its way to support Occupy Wall Street. But now, because they had the temerity to draw a line, they have suddenly become the enemy, suddenly become the symbol of all that is wrong in the world.
Do you want OWS to become even more of a joke than it already is, Jim? Then keep on declaring that any and every thought that pops into some OWSer’s empty head was put there by God. And whatever you do, keep on encouraging that whole “what’s yours is mine if ’justice,’ as I define that word, demands it” vibe OWS is putting out.
The reason why you’re having such a hard time understanding the motivations of people like Mark Sisk, Katharine Jefferts Schori and Jim Cooper these days is because they possess something that seems to be completely lacking in the OWSers and their brain-dead enablers like George Packard.
Maturity. They’re the adults in the Episcopal room, Jim. And they’re trying to save you people from yourselves.
Do you know it’s called when you steal something from a billionaire banker or financier? It’s called stealing. And last I checked, it read “Thou shalt not steal.” So if you can higher-criticize that to mean, “Thou mayest steal if most of the money in thy land is in the hands of a very few people,” you’re a better man than I can ever hope to be, Jim.
UPDATE: This is what I’m talking about, Jim. The Rev. John Merz, priest-in-charge at Ascension in Brooklyn, writes Larry Pro and basically confirms everything I mentioned above. OWS is leftist which means that it’s holy and it’s from God and everybody knows it. It also means that OWS can take whatever it wants whenever it wants it and doesn’t have to observe any stupid rules, in the Bible or any place else.
OWS asks for no permits, it blows where it will uninvited and still, through direct actions and assemblies hallows space that allows the voice of the people to be heard. There is a power often mistaken as violence at work there. I am reminded of Otto’s work on the holy as “a terrible power.” When things start being overturned, when the powers and principalities are threatened, I always figured it would happen in a way that was not neat and clean. We are to be taken aback.
As far as Merz is concerned, Trinity-Wall Street might as well join the Anglican Church in North America.
There is no need any longer to publicly critique Trinity Wall Street for their track record. I promise for my part that I will not dwell there, but rather to move on with these parting notes:
Publicly they need to preserve face as they understand it according to their varied interests. Privately I must remark on the shocking dissonance between their professed support, their vast resources and power and the things they provided: leaving a drop-in center open, allowing group meetings in other space literally a handful if not less of times, deleting posts on their blogs that enjoined them for basic relief of human needs (porta-potties). It pains me to experience this disconnection, as they never intended to connect, listen to, and support this movement in any real way. It is a rehash of their 9/11 record (many know the real story there) locally in times of social crisis. They do the right thing only if self- preservation (image) requires it and even then only haltingly. There is no amount of explanation that can dissuade me of that. I do hope that I can forgive them. Perhaps one day they will also understand and forgive me for my challenging comments since this started the first weeks of OWS. Time will tell. But to devote another second to them would be a second wasted.
There you have it. The sense of overwhelming entitlement. Greed, if you like. The sense that as long as you claim to have a “higher purpose,” laws, commandments and Scriptural precepts don’t apply to you. The sense that “holy” is whatever you think it ought to be and that anyone who disagrees with you or tells you no is evil.
Merz may not like this but an edifice with those properties is nothing more than a house built on sand. And you all know what happens to those.
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