Bishop's Column
Posted Tuesday, August 07, 2007
No Better Healing Pain than History
August 2007
Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed. (Luke 1:1-4)
June 2, 2007: Cordelia Biddle and her husband Steve Zettler – pillars of St. Peter’s, Third and Pine, dedicated ECS volunteers, and marvelous authors both – joined my wife Joan and me for lunch at our house. We all had a great laugh when Steve explained that while Cordelia writes “historical novels” requiring much research, he simply writes “novels” because he found out a long time ago that “it’s easier and quicker just to make it all up!”
June 18, 2007: Sheldon Hackney – Diocesan Historiographer, one-time President and now Boies Professor of U.S. History at Penn, and former Warden of Christ Church, Philadelphia – and I compared our prospective summer reading lists over dinner. Because it says much about me that I don’t eagerly embrace, only reluctantly did I admit that, as usual, my list was limited to non-fiction works – mainly history. After noting that his list mirrored mine, Sheldon said, “The older I get, the more I want to know what really happened.”
June 25-27, 2007: Joan and I attended a series of lectures on various topics at the “Tri-History Conference” of our church’s three historical research organizations – the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, the National Episcopal Historians and Archivists, and the Episcopal Women’s History Project – at Williamsburg, Virginia. All in all, the investigators’ findings brought home to us a saying favored by the French: rien sans peine – “nothing without pain.”
Historians tend to research topics that interest them, and as the writer Susan Sontag (1933-2004) noted, failure is always more interesting than success. So, while at Williamsburg we heard some success stories – like that about a rector of Trinity Church, Princeton, who during his tenure (1866-1914) launched the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Princeton University and thereby dramatically altered the position of our church in a place where Presbyterianism dominated town and gown, or like that about Vida Scudder and the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, women who from 1900-1950 addressed gritty social realities through intercessory prayer, study, and direct action, and thereby promoted “social Christianity” as an expression of a catholic democracy – for the most part what we heard were stories of painful failures.
The stories were also painful to hear. We heard that there have been plenty of church fights. We learned, for example, how in 1857 squabbles in the Episcopal Church undercut its ability to agree on ordaining a bishop for a group of priests in Mexico who had left the Roman Catholic Church; how Protestant leaders resisted the claims of the Washington Cathedral to be the nation’s church; and how disagreement with his clergy over episcopal authority led Charles Beckwith to resign as Bishop of Alabama in 1922. We learned about the struggles of women for a place in the church’s ministry and leadership. We heard, for example, how clergy and deputies (all males) at the 1934 General Convention defeated efforts to align the status of women deaconesses with that of male deacons; and how from 1895-1950 black and white laywomen in the Diocese of Virginia, though almost as many in number as the clergy, were grossly underpaid and given neither training nor pensions.
We were reminded of our church’s anti-semitism through a lecture on how Charles Bridgeman’s attitudes and ideas about “the Holy Land” during his tenure as the liaison between the Episcopal Church and the Church of England’s Jerusalem and the East mission (1924-1948) shaped current church debates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We were confronted with our church’s racism. We heard, for example, how the Monacan, one group in the Powhatan Confederation in Tidewater Virginia, numbered tens of thousands when English colonists arrived in Jamestown, but only a few hundred today; how white Anglican leaders back-pedaled from an inculturated Anglicanism established by early Anglican missions to the Iroquois in the Mohawk Valley of New York; what a copy of a 1819 Book of Common Prayer, which belonged to a woman in Brooklyn who owned a slave, tells us about slavery in New York; why the church’s efforts to evangelize slave populations in Virginia failed; how the position of the church in Maryland was generally to accept slavery as part of the social system, to support colonization of free blacks in Liberia, to resist abolition, and after Emancipation to continue its passive acceptance of racial divisions well into the 20th century.
Not all stories are regarded as “history,” but these are, because they are born of pain and are painful, and therefore interesting, to engage. As history, these stories also have the power to heal, for as we know from psychiatry, psychotherapy, and the therapeutic sciences, recovering on a personal level “what really happened” in the past – our own histories – can effect our own recovery.
If we desire healing, therefore, history is the place to start. It is curious to me that before they were revised in 2006, listed first among the canonical requirements for entering the ordination process in the Episcopal Church was “a course in history.” Requirements for baccalaureate courses in literature, arts, and the sciences followed. But history came first. Thereby the church was saying, “We want clergy who can engage the past, who can think in relative terms by distinguishing what things meant then from what they mean now, and who can not only endure pain, but experience it in such a way that it excites in them a commitment to change.”
In the same spirit, we have been diligent about recording and researching our diocesan history. Thanks to the enormous efforts our Glenn Colliver, our archivist, this year we re-located our archives in the new state-of-the-art archival center at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. Editor David Contasta and his team of ten historians have completed and sent to the publisher the draft of a new diocesan history, to be published by early 2009. Having neared completion of one project, the Commission is now starting another – a study of the history of slave-holding by clergy and laity in Pennsylvania, resultant racism, and efforts by church and civil society to mitigate the effects of slavery and racism through abolitionist efforts and the struggle for racial justice.
Behind these efforts lie not just antiquarian interests, but our evangelical and soteriological commitments to recovering the past in order to bring health to church and world in the present.
The task is not easy. In the prologue to his gospel, for example, the evangelist Luke, who writes far more about health and salvation than the other evangelists, tells us that he decided “after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account … so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.” He purports to deliver an accurate account of actual happenings. But does he?
Despite his seemingly impressive grasp on historical detail, his Gospel and subsequent volume, the Acts of the Apostles, are clearly products of his literary imagination. As a third generation Christian, he must have been aware of tensions and conflicts among widely-divergent theological camps in the church, but he irons out all the wrinkles, presenting a picture of miraculous unity and linear development of the spread of the gospel in orderly progression from Jerusalem to Rome.
Luke, in other words, is not exactly like Steve Zettler, whose work is the fruit of a lively literary imagination. He may be closer to Cordelia Biddle, crafting something akin to historical fiction. He certainly seems to fall short of Sheldon Hackney’s drive to “know what really happened.”
Or does he? Viewed from the perspective of Christian faith, “the truth concerning the things about which we have been instructed” regarding “the events that have been fulfilled among us” is that, by Luke’s description, despite the death of Jesus, the persecution of the apostles, the conflict between Jewish and gentile Christians, and the rivalry between orthodoxy and various heresies, God nonetheless is carrying out God’s divinely-mandated plan according to what “must take place” – one of Luke’s favorite phrases.
That, I confess, is the same perspective I come to when I study history. During a recent vestry meeting at St. Andrew and St. Monica Church in West Philadelphia, a member asked me somewhat pejoratively if I didn’t think our church’s morality of late had changed. “Oh, it’s changed, all right,” I said. “When I was a boy growing up in Michigan in the 1950’s women who worked were looked down upon, we whites never saw black people because the banks and real estate folks were red-lining the neighborhoods, we never even heard of, let alone ate, Mexican food or anything but Midwest meat and potatoes, and I have no idea what torment gay men and lesbian women suffered in our midst. Despite all of our present troubles, I’d say things are actually better, that I’d far rather live now than then, and that, albeit through a lot of pain, God is working God’s purpose out.”
There’s historical reality for you – with lots of pain, loads of healing! No wonder we asked those who would lead the church to study history first. I hope we always will.