Bishops' Blog

Complicity

One has to be judicious nowadays on what one comments on politically, but today's news item about Marine Le Pen caught my eye. The extreme French nationalist candidate denied that the French have guilt with respect to the Holocaust, since it was the Gestapo who actually rounded the Jews up.

What caught my attention was the connection to the moment in the reading of the passion narrative on Palm Sunday and Good Friday when we join the crowd in asking for the release of Barabbas instead of Jesus. Surely this is the moment when complicity as a central feature of sin is held up to our eyes. We cannot draw clear and distinct lines of guilt so that we are off the hook - we share the blame with others. We see this across generations in Greek tragedy; we see this across relationships in family systems; we see in society in the flaws and blind spots that whole worldview share. Thomas Merton wrote "conjectures of a guilty bystander," with the concept of complicity packed therein.

To be sure, we cannot dissolve the concept of individual responsibility, as the prophet Ezekiel emphasizes. But it must be held in balance with the idea of solidarity. The latter, in the state of corruption, is connected to what the New Testament calls "the powers and principalities," forces which run both within and around us, which envelop us in complicity with our half-knowledge.

Of course all this is counter-point in Holy Week to that other, yet greater complicity: "as all died in Adam so we're all made alive in Jesus Christ." (Paul, Romans)

Bishop Garrett In Retrospect

I have just finished reading our founding bishop's journals. It is a slow read, mostly lists of confirmations and baptisms by an indefatigable man. But it is also interspersed with tales of cyclones, forced rides of a day and a half with food and a day without water (in August!), camping with cowboys in driving rain, his own typhoid and malaria, and a public hanging or two. Remind me not to complain about ordinary inconveniences!  He  seeks to reopen the Sunday school at the Chapel of the Incarnation, and he worries that $600 for land for a church in Waxahachie is just too steep!

But one also sees an evangelist attentive to opportunities, to new extensions of the railroad and what they portend, in the midst of great economic flux. He understands the cultural openings to hearing the gospel - a library here, a store or dispensary there. He has a clear sense of Episcopal identity, of the sacramentally evangelical Christian faith he has on offer. He organizes missionary societies for men, women and North Texas. He creates a Bishop Garrett Association to raise funds in the east. As he travels, he keeps an eye out for clergy and for potential ordinands. He asks the help of the Baptists and Methodists in his peregrinations.

His world is so much harder in one way, more straightforward in another. But his spirit perdures among us to a remarkable extent, and whatever we muster as mission strategy amounts to its evocation.

Peace

+GRS