the cassandra pages

Mourning, in Color, Part 3

My grandmother, Beth (left), and her sister Minerva, around 1906

3.

The elder great aunt, Inez, was a history teacher, avid reader, accomplished painter, and lover of classical music and opera. She never married, but lived with a friend, “Aunt Blanche” in Endicott, New York, where they both taught. On holidays and many other times during the year, Aunt Inez came to our house, pulling up in her venerable, bulbous green Chevrolet: an antiquated accoutrement that defined her as much as the sturdy, thick-heeled, black lace-up shoes she always wore. She loved lavender scent, and violets and full-blown roses patterned her sheets and wallpaper. One room in our house was always kept for her extended visits, and the bookcases held bound issues of National Geographic, history books, piano music. We were great friends, from the time I was little (when I called her “Aunt Nine”, a name that stuck), to her very elderly years, when she came first to live in our town after Aunt Blanche died, and later, with my grandparents in our house.

In her nineties, Aunt Inez suffered a series of small strokes that impaired her ability to retrieve the right words, and eventually, her memory. Reluctantly, my grandparents found a place for her in a nursing home, where she lived for a number of years until she died – by then, having difficulty even recognizing her sister. I was grateful for her death, as I remember, because she had long since lost the qualities that made her herself, and I doubt she would have wanted to live on in that state.

I have her diaries, written in the years from about 1914-1924; her detailed family genealogies; and a set of stories she wrote and gave me, bound into a book, when I was twelve. They tell the family history, about how each branch of the matriarchal line made its way from New England to central New York and what their lives were like there, and continue on to tell her own story of growing up on a hill farm in the tiny town of Beaver Meadow, taught by her remarkable mother, Libby, to read the classics and play the piano and paint and embroider, and by her father to fish and ride horses and grow potatoes. Apparently, with her teacher’s instinct, she figured out early on that I would be the one to give those stories to, and one day I hope to extend her narrative and make it into a book. Aunt Inez is buried near my grandparents and her own parents in the Miller family plot in the
South Otselic cemetery: a beautiful, quiet, tree-filled spot perched above the town, overlooking the corn, oat, and hay fields of the lovely Otselic Valley. Someday before long I’ll go over there and sit and ask her to help me tell those stories.

Latest from Lambeth

The Archbishop of Canterbury admits that the Anglican communion may break apart, and is trying to insist on the adoption of a signed covenant of faith with a two-tiered "membership" system for the Communion. Only signing members would have decision-making power; the others (the Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and a few others, presumably) would be in this second tier. It's an interesting way to kick people out and yet not be seen as kicking them out, isn't it? The Guardian has been unimpressed with Rowan++ and admiring of the Americans, while the Times of London commended the A of C as a true leader, who "put his office ahead of his own, former, liberal agenda." Ruth Gledhill of the Times said a few days ago that the American church was "close to anarchy" by their election of a female presiding bishop! That's quite a view, and an interesting definition of the word "anarchy", no?

One reason I wrote my book was to explain how decisions are made in this recalcitrant American church, which puts democratic process and a commitment to justice first, rather than duty to institutions and tradition. After 250 years, the British hierarchy still doesn't seem to get it. I do feel that Williams is trying to salvage a solution that will keep the communion together, perhaps in hopes that over time, these differences will abate. That possibility seems more and more unlikely: after all, women are no closer to being accepted as fulll members of the church and as priests, in many parts of the world, than they were thirty years ago when the Americans ordained the first women. But the Archbishop has so clearly sided with the conservatives that I cannot respect his leadership as being moral or just at all, and as such it falls well outside my understanding of the teachings we're supposed to be following.

Mourning, in Color, Part 2

My maternal grandmother’s sisters both died before she did. She was the middle one; the younger sister, Minerva, died not long after her own daughter, Patricia, who had juvenile diabetes and died in her 50s. I had moved to New England by then, and I remember exactly where I was standing, in the kitchen, when I got that call from my mother: Aunt Patty had had a heart attack and fallen; her husband had found her dead in the bathroom in their house. I was shaken: even though I knew about the complications she had been having, I hadn’t expected this. I called my cousin and good friend Paul, Patty’s son, not knowing what to say. When he wrapped his arms around me at my own mother’s funeral a few weeks ago, and felt the sudden sobs through the thin linen of my dress, we both probably thought back to that other day, twenty-five years ago. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. It was enough.

Like her own mother and aunts, Patty had been a teacher, but she was known to all of us in the family as a talker, a reader and a knitter: all things she did incredibly well, and often simultaneously. Everyone in the family still wears sweaters and wraps up in afghans she knitted for us. She could knit faster than anyone I’ve ever known.

After Great Aunt Minerva stopped teaching school, she became involved in the antique business as an expert on collectable buttons. She went to shows all over the northeast, and wrote a book on the subject of antique buttons; her personal collection, which was huge and valuable, was devoted primarily to two subjects: roosters, which were a symbol she used, and images of the goddess Minerva, or Athena. I used to love to go up to her house and look through the cards of mounted buttons she had for sale, and see the new additions to her collection. Her house was full of antiques, from milk glass rooster dishes and fine Victorian furniture to a large collection of flow-blue china that she used every day. She and her husband wintered in Florida, and for years when I was little, letters came to me from HayKay, their cocker spaniel.

Minerva fell sick not long after her daughter died. None of us ever knew quite what was wrong with her – there was talk of various ailments, some serious, some vague - but it really seemed that she just didn’t want to live any more. Her husband became a sort of gatekeeper, because Minerva, always rather vain, didn’t want visitors to see her in decline. They came home from Florida to their regular house in our town, and she talked to my grandmother every day on the phone. I spoke to her a few times myself, about other things, like the delphiniums blooming in the garden that spring. She grew weaker – I think she simply stopped eating – and then she died. I came home for the funeral, in the Episcopal Church. My father sang at the service. She was buried in the cemetery in back of the church – I remember Paul standing there next to the grave, wearing dark sunglasses - and we all went back to my grandparents’ house and drank whiskey and talked.

People in our family were supposed to live forever. The previous generation had all lived into their nineties, and some beyond, and we had been lulled into thinking everyone would just go on and on, the Thanksgiving table simply extending to make room for subsequent generations, but of course that was impossible. Still, it was what we had believed – but now the fabric of the family had been rent as decisively as if we’d ripped the long white jacquard linens that always covered the holiday tables. My cousins and I - still under thirty - looked around, shaken.

Columbus Follow-Up

An Open Letter from Bishop Gene Robinson to his LGBT Colleagues (published this weekend by The Witness)

and a most welcome op/ed piece by Michael Hampson in The Guardian, titled, "The American Way Puts the Church of England to Shame."       

Mourning, in Color

Growing up on Victorian novels, as I sort of did, in a household of women highly influenced by Victorian culture, I made the acquaintence of a lot of characters dressed in widow's weeds. The  custom of wearing mourning was long past, of course, in the 1950s, and even so, it would be nearly thirty more years before death would touch our immediate family and I would have any first-hand idea of how these people close to me would deal with it. My grandmother, never opposed to a dramatic gesture, startled us one Thanksgiving by setting a place for a recently-departed close family friend who had sometimes joined us for that holiday. Sitting down for the meal at the long table with its twenty places, we realized there was an extra chair, a place setting, and an upside-down wine glass for "Auntie Vera", who had recently died, alone, in her Manhattan apartment. She had been a childhood friend of my grandmother and her two sisters, and was the illegitimate daughter of the wealthiest man in the tiny central New York town they lived in after leaving the family farm. One day, the father had appeared with Vera - a baby - in his arms, handed her to his wife, and announced that they would be raising her with the family. In 1900 I suppose that could actually happen in real life, not merely in books. Aunt Vera never married. She lived in New York, where my grandparents visited her several time a year, and she'd also come up to see us once or twice each year, filling the house with her big laugh and red-haired personality, settling in for martinis and story-telling about her travels in Europe and elsewhere. She and my father especially liked each other; he had irreverent names for her that would set off the laughter, and I remember her visits fondly. I still have a doll with an elaborate embroidered costume that she brought me from an Eastern European country, and a small box of similar style that has always held my small hair clips and barrettes. The first time I was ever taken to New York was just before Christmas in 1957, when I was five. My grandparents, parents and I saw My Fair Lady on Broadway; went to a smorgasbord at the Piccadilly Hotel that held the biggest shrimp I had ever seen in my life; saw the skaters at Rockefeller Center and the dinosaur skeletons at the Museum of Natural History; and the magical, sparkling Christmas displays at Lord&Taylor. All of those memories, especially the last one, are connected in my mind with Aunt Vera.

 Her death was the first time those icy fingers reached into the secure world of my childhood family. My maternal grandmother's parents had died before I was born, though not a long time before, and they seemed to hover around the fringes of our life along with the family friends who had died in World War II, close to recent memory and still affecting the adults in some way I didn't understand, but outside my own world. They came to life in stories and in the photographs in elaborate gilded frames - Victorian again - on tables in the parlor. I asked questions about them; listened; puzzled; remembered the pieces as if I knew I'd need them someday.

I think I remember Aunt Vera's death and that subsequent Thanksgiving because there must have been something askew, something disturbing that I picked up on. I think it may have been my grandmother's unexpressed grief, and the general dismay about the loneliness of Vera's death: she had been found in her apartment after some days. There was the initial phone call, then more from lawyers and friends, and then this unprecedented Thanksgiving gesture which someone in the family must have criticized. And that's all I remember; Vera then joined the people in the portraits, except that I had my own memories to add this time.

(This will be the first in a series of blog posts about my family, which may or may not be posted one after the other.)

Bonne Fête, Québec!

Today is St. Jean-Baptiste Day, La Fête Nationale du Québec. Our reading about this holiday taught us that in the early Christian days in France, a pagan holiday close to the summer solstice, characterized by fires lit at night (by the king himself!) during the longest days, became converted to a feast day for St. John the Baptist. In New France, the first recorded celebrations of the day took place in 1638 - and they were primarily religious. After the defeat of the French by the British, the celebration of St-Jean-Baptiste Day became overladen with patriotic feeling, and was, for a time, banned. The Societe de St. Jean-Baptiste was formed in 1843, specifically to lobby for the celebration of the holiday. On June 24, 1880, that society held a gathering of the froncophone community across the province and commissioned the hymn "O Canada" (which became the national anthem in 1980.) The pope made St. Jean-Baptiste the patron saint of Quebec in 1908. Now it is a Quebec holiday similar to July 4 in the U.S. with parades and fireworks; the religious celebrations were largely ignored after the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

In Montréal this weekend, there are lots of ways to party: Madonna was here for two concerts, the Grand Prix takes place today and tomorrow, there is a big parade at noon and fireworks tonight, and we've received two invitations to barbeques. Early this morning I took a bike ride through the mostly-empty, holiday streets nearby, watching a few restauranteurs polish glassware and shopkeepers sweep the streets. A homeless man still slept on a park bench, and a group of boys who had clearly been out all night hung out in front of a cafe just openign for breakfast. When I rode past the huge Eglise St.-Jean-Baptiste, though, I noticed a sign advertising a "traditional mass for St. Jean-Baptiste" at 10:00 am, with an hour-long prelude on the grand Casavant organ, the mass to be presided over by M. le Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, the Cardinal of Montréal. This was too fascinating an opportunity to pass up, so I came home, changed my clothes, and biked back to the church.

I've never been in this dark, huge church when there were more than a handful of concert attendees or worshipers, so I was astounded to find it brightly lit and packed. I asked if I could sit up in one of the balconies and was directed there by a friendly usher. At 10:00, the church's bells began to peal, and the congregation got to its feet: a procession of white-robed priests and bishops, and finally, the cardinal himself, smiling beneficently, entered the church from the back, while a quartet of professional singers led us in the Chant d ouverture, which I found extremely beautiful and managed to join in haltingly, in French: "Nous sommes le corps du Christ/ chacun de nous est un membre de ce corps./ Chacun reçoit la grâce de l'Esprit pour le bien du corps entier./ Chacun reçoit la grâce de l'Esprit pour le bien du corps entier." (We are the body of Christ/ each of us is a member of this body/ each receives the grace of the Spirit for the good of the whole body.) Nearly the whole service was sung by this quartet with the congregation joining in the verses and refrains.

I'm not Catholic and have only attended a few masses in my life, though our Anglican services are much the same. I was impressed with the warmth of the Cardinal and the obvious affection he has for his flock of Montrealers, and vice versa (mirrored by the use of the familiar "tu" whenever God was addressed); and touched by the sincerity of the worship: the simple prayers, the continuation of tradition which seemed to matter a great deal to the people attending, some of whom were clearly dyed-in-the-wool French Québecois, and others clearly immigrants; and the general good-natured happiness of the whole event, which felt quite like a birthday party for someone well-loved. At the time of passing the peace, I exchanged greetings - "La paix du Seigneur" - with the people around me. And though I hadn't planned to, at the last minute I took communion, even though I guess I'm technically not supposed to. The gilded roof didn't fall in!

At the close of the service, ushers bearing huge baskets of little breads came out of the side chapels and lined the front of the church. The cardinal and priests came forward and blessed the breads, while the quartet and congregation sang: "Seigneur; viens bénir notre pain. Et nourris tous ceux qui ont faim. Donne faim de justice á ceux qui ont du pain. Seigneur, viens bénir notre pain." (lord, come bless our bread. And feed all those who are hungry. Give hunger for justice to those who have bread. Lord, come bless our bread.) I was sure I was witnessing a long, long tradition. The cardinal told us to receive our petits pains at the back of the church on our way out, and to share them with others later today. I'll take mine to the barbeque this afternoon, and see if there is an appropriate moment to tell the story and break the bread with my friends, who happen to be an Episcopal priest and his wife, formerly Irish and Italian American Catholics. And then, very late, we'll join the rest of the city at the fireworks!

(Please click on the photo for a considerably larger version)

We've Been Here Before

Tomorrow is La Fête Nationale du Québec - St. Jean-Baptiste Day - and I will be returning to normal blog topics! One thing we learned when reading about the event on the internet recently is that St. Jean-Baptiste Day (which had its European origin as a pagan summer solstice holiday) has traditionally been the day when swimming pools open. And sure enough, today the fountains in the children's wading pool started up, so my writing is accompanied by the squeals I've come to associate with summer in Montréal.

Before leaving the subject of the Columbus General Convention, I wanted to write one final post adding a little historical perspective. Since I do happen to be straight, several people have asked me about my "entry point" into the issue of gay and lesbian rights and inclusion. For me, it was my experience as less-than-equal by virtue of being a woman. That was true both in society in general - no American woman born fifty years ago can possibly say she hasn't felt this - and in the Episcopal Church, which didn't grant full ordination rights to women until 1976. I did a lot of research on women's ordination for my book on Bishop Gene Robinson, and discovered that the same language and the same tactics - including the establishment of endless committees and delays "for further study"  - were used then in order to keep the power where it had always been. For the book, I interviewed the Rev. Nancy Wittig, one of the "Philadelphia Eleven": the first women who were ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church in an "irregular" ordination in 1974. This is a passage from the book that deals with the actions of the General Convention that led up to that defiant act by frustrated women and bishops. We don't have the same situation now, since a gay man has already been legally ordained and approved by General Convention three years ago. What we have is an attempt to undo the damage, making Gene's election a one-time anomaly. That will not stand, in the long run, but it's instructive - and perhaps even a little bit encouraging - to see the pattern and know that justice eventually won out.
 

In 1972, during one of their annual meetings, the House of Bishops had tested the issue [of women's ordination] with a vote, and come out 74-61 in favor of ordaining women priests, but at the next General Convention, at Louisville in 1973, the ordination of women again failed to pass in the House of Deputies, because of a rule which said that if the votes of a diocesan delegation to the House of Deputies was split, (such as a “yes” vote from the lay delegation and a “no” vote from the clergy), the vote of the entire delegation would be recorded as a “no”. The lay deputies voted in the affirmative, but the clergy vote in Louisville was even more anti-women than at the previous convention.

...In Louisville, the [progressive women who made up the Episcopal Women’s Caucus]  got together and experienced strong camaraderie, and discussed how they could organize and help one another. “It wasn’t really an organized effort yet,” Nancy remembered. “There were some of us who were young and shot our mouths off—and I was certainly one of them—who knew some of the history of Phyllis Edwards and Bishop Pike.”

“Deaconesses” had in fact been allowed in the Episcopal Church since 1889, but did not have the same authority as male deacons, who were considered members of the clergy. Both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion had stressed this point that deaconesses were “not clergy”, although they had gone back and forth on the question of whether the conferring of deaconess status by the laying-on of hands was, in fact, a conferring of “holy orders.” Didn’t the Church believe that something incontrovertible happened—a permanent change ultimately emanating from God— when someone was ordained by laying-on of hands, rather than being simply appointed? That was the underlying question. In the 1960s this debate gathered steam. In 1964 the General Convention changed the canons to state that deaconesses are “ordered” (like male deacons, priests, and bishops) rather than “appointed.” The following year, 1965, the controversial bishop James Pike of San Francisco recognized Deaconess Phyllis Edwards as a regular deacon, setting off tremendous protest within the hierarchy – and it would take five years of argument before the church voted to allow women deacons to be ordained, with the same authority as their male counterparts.

“People in power don’t easily give over some of that power and authority—it has to be taken,” Nancy stated. “I felt that for women’s ordination to succeed, it couldn’t be a matter of one bishop and one woman. That had been the beginning of the end for Pike—the church pursued him and tried him for heresy—and I am convinced to this day that it was really over the ordination of Phyllis Edwards as a deacon. So the lesson to be learned from that was ‘don’t do anything by yourself, work as a community.’”

“In the church, women had been attacked and accused of not being able to do things on our own—the big joke, of course, was that we all got up and went to the bathroom together. But the Holy Spirit worked in the feminist movement to educate those of us in the church and outside of the church to realize that we would have to band together to survive. And we did.”

In addition to the fight over women’s ordination, the Louisville convention had also seen a tremendous struggle in the House of Deputies over the election of John Allin, a conservative, as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Allin succeeded John E. Hines, who had been a staunch supporter of the church’s role in the civil rights movement, and perhaps one of the most progressive presiding bishops in the church’s history.

His election may have been part of what Nancy Wittig called “the beginning of a backlash”. It came from the more conservative priests and bishops who finally realized that women were serious about being ordained not just to the deaconate, but to the priesthood—and saw this as simply too much.

“Not only would they have to share,” Nancy said, “but it had been a boys’ club, with all that boys’ clubs do—they had not only been the holders of all the power, but they had also been the holders of a lot of dirty secrets. And I suspect on a gut level that some of them knew that if women began to get wind of this, it was not going to be life as usual. All clubs that are just for the people in power are like that. And that was before we really knew how to talk about the power differentials between men and women emotionally, socially, politically, economically—all of that—and all of those things were mixed up in the argument over women’s ordination.”

From Chapter 3, "Sisterhood," of Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Gene Robinson by Elizabeth Adams, quoted here with the permission of the publisher, Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, NY.

The Morning After

The Integrity Eucharist, Trinity Episcopal Church, Columbus, Ohio

A person named “Harry,” who lists neither email address nor website, wrote a searching comment on the discussion of yesterday's votes at Father Jake's website. His perspective is important, I think, for those of us who get caught up in politics. Personally, I don’t feel angry this morning, just sad that the time for justice and full inclusion clearly hasn’t yet arrived for my church. I believe it will, and will keep working toward that, because I think we must. But the daily work ahead for me, if I’m going to take my own baptismal vows seriously, is not to wait for the Church to be ready, but to  continue to find ways to make a difference to those who are suffering, to show radical hospitality, to be in my own small way the sort of force for justice in the world that I wish the Church were ready to be.

Harry is right about what anger does to us, and he is right that we need to see that clearly and realize what self-righteousness and the desire to “win” do to us inside. At the Integrity Eucharist last Friday night, the sermon was about “loving anyway”, and it brought many of those present to tears. (Taking place at the same time as the Integrity Eucharist, attended by a thousand gay and lesbian people and their supporters, was a conservative Eucharist by the people who insist that homosexual behavior is sin and a conscious choice, and that practicing homosexuals have no place in the church - and of course some say much worse than that.)

Loving those who hate you, or are different from you, is the core message of the Gospel and, it seems to me, it’s the most difficult of Jesus's teachings to really apply to our own lives. Nevertheless, that’s what we’re called to do. It's always humbling and inspiring to me to be reminded of this capacity to love by the lives of the very people who have been the most wounded by hatred and exclusion.

UPDATE, late afternoon, June 22:
Here are some reactions from Convention participants.

A rundown on additional legislation and resolutions that came up in the final hours of General Convention.

An open letter of reaction by the African primates, written by the Rt. Rev. Peter Akinola of Nigeria.

The Final Word??

Well, in the last moments, and led by both the present and incoming presiding bishops’ pleas for “a compromise”, the convention faltered. The House of Bishops passed a watered-down version of yesterday’s resolution:

Resolved, the House of Deputies concurring, that the 75th General Convention receive and embrace The Windsor Report's invitation to engage in a process of healing and reconcilation; and be it further

Resolved, that this Convention therefore call upon Standing Committees and bishops with jurisdiction to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.

As I understand it, this resolution is non-binding, but nevertheless, I’m extremely disappointed and angry – but not at all surprised. The only consolation is that this will not satisfy the conservatives, so the outcome may be the same anyway (The “Anglican Network” of conservative bishops have already released a prepared statement, as expected, calling on the Archbishop of Canterbury for support in recognizing them, not ECUSA, as the true Anglican Church in the United States.) After the vote, however, a group of dissenting progressive bishops issued a statement of conscience objecting strongly to the vote, and I applaud them. The first parts of their statement have to do with what they perceived as a flawed process leading to the vote; the final two points are about substance:

“Our witness to justice has been prophetic in this nation and in the wider Anglican Communion on the issues of the full inclusion of people of color and persons who are differently-abled. For more than 30 years women been permitted to be included in the councils of this Church as lay deputies to this Convention and as deacons, priests and bishops. This witness to full inclusion has borne the fruits of the Spirit and is incarnate in the faces and lives around these tables and throughout the Church. The language of this resolution too much echoes past attempts by the Church to limit participation of those perceived to be inadequate for full inclusion in the ordained ministry.

Any language that could be perceived as effecting a moratorium that singles out one part of the Body by category is discriminatory. We are absolutely committed to the future of this Communion and the process of healing the strain that we readily admit and regret exists, and has been exacerbated in our own house by events today. We must participate in this process with our own integrity intact and thus we are obliged to make this dissent. We intend to challenge the rest of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion to honor the promise to include the voices of gay and lesbian in the conversations about the future of the Communion. We pray for the Church, for our Communion, and for our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters.”

 

Ban on Gay Bishops Rejected

The Episcopal Church stands firm, and refuses to bow to pressure by conservatives and world Anglican leaders.

It has just been announced that the House of Deputies has voted and the results are that NO new resolution was passed limiting same-sex blessings, and NO resolution adopting the Windsor language and request for a moratorium on gay ordinations. As I understand it, both the blessings and elections of bishops shall be left up to the local parishes and dioceses, just as before. Like the election of the first female Presiding Bishop, this is a much more progressive outcome than I expected from the Convention. I share the opinion of others that the ultra-conservatives just turned off too many people with their gay-bashing, and the attempt by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office to affect and influence (read:dictate) what we ought to do in our own church and own country, very much backfired. It didn’t set well in 1776, and it doesn’t set well now. You would have thought they would have gotten the message by now!

This won't go down well - I predict that the Anglican Communion will now come apart.

Later note: Here is the BBC take on this. Note the language throughout, from the headline "defiant" to "despite the threat of expulsion" later in the article. In fact, the American church is completely autonomous, as is every other member of the Anglican Communion; the A of C has no authority whatsoever to tell the American church what to do or how to run its elections or convention, as qB notes in the comments.