New in Our Lives

- The Rt. Rev. Edmond L. Browning

Presiding Bishop, retired

[I saw this first in The Vintage Voice, mailed monthly to all retired clergy and surviving spouses. I use it with the gracious of Bishop Browning and of the publisher, David Hegg, the Church Pension Fund. -- L.]

I didn’t really set out to get a dog. It wasn’t one of those when-I-retire fantasies – they were all about making our new home beautiful, having ample time to do my woodworking, taking walks with Patti, and spending time with the grandkids. Real Norman Rockwell fantasies – though I don’t recall a dog in any of them.

But you know how it is: sometimes it’s the things we don’t expect that turn out to be the really great blessings in life. Somehow I heard about this litter of standard poodles, so Patti and I decided one afternoon we’d drive over and just look and of course we came home with a dog in the back seat. Webster was small, but we’ve raised standard poodles before and we knew it wouldn’t last. Sure enough, he’s about as tall as the picnic table now, and rambunctious: he just about knocks me over when he greets me after I’ve been out somewhere. Already he feels indispensable, and I can’t think what we did without him. In the morning, when he seems to be all tail, he’s so glad to be walking with me, and we secure the perimeter together in companionable silence, I surprise myself with how much I love this dog – how much a part of me Webster has become – how much I delight in his guileless happiness. We’re thinking of getting him a playmate.

I’ve found myself faced with something new and fallen in love with it lots of times in my life. It’s happened to me in the church, over and over again. It’s happened to all of us: something new appears, something new and all but unimaginable, something that doesn’t look like it’s going to fit in at all. And it doesn’t, not at first – we circle it suspiciously, nudge it with a toe to see what the heck it is, argue about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. And, amid our very mixed welcome, it takes its place in the family and we all get used to it. After awhile, we can’t imagine how we managed without it.

Just about every new thing that happened in our church when I was Presiding Bishop was like that. The introduction of the controversial new Prayer Book into our lives, a new hymnal, the growth in the number of ordained women and their integration into the Episcopate, the continuing candor with which African-American voices, Latino voices, Asian-American voices, gay and lesbian voices among us spoke their mind – I can’t imagine us now without them. That is why I am not in the least afraid of the future and its controversies: we have demonstrated again and again, the elasticity human beings need in order to embrace change and grow in response to it.

I hope we don’t forget just how strong and elastic we are. I am concerned, sometimes, about a certain fearfulness with which controversy about new things is approached these days. Maybe it’s the millennium: maybe this fearfulness comes from looking back and seeing just how profoundly things have changed just in the short walk we have had together on the earth. How can we have come so far, so quickly, from where we started? Is it safe for us to have done so? And so we shrink back from the mighty changes of which we have been a part. And people are afraid of resolutions at General Convention, afraid of groups pressing issues with passion, afraid of social justice initiatives – even eager to oppose them spiritually, as if social action and prayer could not co-exist within the same human spirit. It is as if we thought we might break if we have an argument about something that matters. But we’re not going to break. The unity of Christ’s body is not weak. It’s very strong. The Civil War, America’s bloodiest and most wrenching conflict, did not sever our church in two. So, I don’t guess God wants it severed.

Webster is lying on my foot as I write this. My foot is falling asleep, but I don’t dare move it – he’s so hyper, I hate to disturb him on those rare occasions when he actually comes to a halt. I’ll have to eventually, of course, because it’s time for lunch, and just the routine of having lunch with my wife, an utter rarity two years ago, has become too sweet a certainty to pass up. So Webster has to negotiate sometimes, too, just like the rest of us.

Edmond L. Browning retired January 1, 1998, after serving the Episcopal Church twelve years as Presiding Bishop. With his wife … he now lives in Hood River, Oregon.