“There is Great Disorder Under Heaven,

and the Situation is Excellent.”

Ambassador Duke’s remembrance of a Maoist saying

in Gary Trudeau’s, Doonsebury, 12.25.75

 

A Rumination following General Convention

by

Mark Harris

(poetmark@worldnet.att.net)

 

Duke, Gary Trudeau’s icon of Hunter S. Thompson, receives hope from the words of others, just as do Mr. Thompson and you and I.  The question is, of course, whose words and why? Thompson, the great Gonzo journalist, and Duke his counterpart, find them proceeding from unlikely mouths in unlikely places, mostly in social locations unfamiliar to those of Episcopal Church sensibilities. And thus Trudeau’s Duke quotes what he remembers of a saying of Chairman Mao, “there is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent.” It sounds, says Duke’s assistant MacArthur, like one of Duke’s parties. 

 

It also sounds like a summation of the state of the Episcopal Church following General Convention in Denver: “There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent.” In a way it is a statement of great hope for those who see this past General Convention as a prelude to coming events.

 

General Convention 2000 is an event completed, part of our history as Episcopalians, now subject to the interpretive wiles of various parties and factions. Some of those interpreters have been hard at work these past few weeks searching for what was left of resolutions and ground fought for. Others are marking out territory against the day when the savaging is over and new empires are to be built from the ruins of the old.

 

The dogs of ecclesiastical war have been let loose to fight over the bones of the Convention’s corpus of legislation and action, and indeed over the Church itself. It is not a pretty sight.

 

Appalled opponents of various resolutions passed are holding post convention meetings. They are voicing promises of impending action.  Stern demands are being made. Ecclesiastical international cartels are at work. At the same time the spin put on the matters by those who thought the resolutions positive is that this Convention was indeed a Jubilee event. The bare bones of Convention are tasty to those who have carried them off. They are bare indeed to those who are left out. 

 

It is hard to know what of the unofficial interpreting has been the most disturbing: the post-Convention Net chatter questioning again the ordination of Women, gnawing on a bone of contention long chewed over and tossed out of our more public discourse; the essay “He Descended into Hell - John Shelby Spong Meets Lucifer,” in which whatever damnable wound was inflicted with salt at Convention is now rubbed raw in shameful satire; the strange suggestion that the General Convention was captivated by Satanic forces, using as evidence a resource book available early on at the morning Eucharist; the satirical rewriting of the Resolution D039 suggesting that somehow homosexual relationships are like thievery;  or the notion that General Convention was spiritual high ground, if not a mountain top experience.

 

Of the official interpretations I can say little except to opine that almost everyone with perceived power in the Episcopal Church did what they had to do to keep at bay the dreaded possibility of presiding over an open break in the Church.

 

Many believed that that break would happen in Denver. It did not. In many ways Denver was just fine. We went with the wide-ranging agendas of the Church in hand and hoped we could work at them all in a genteel way. Concerning the divisive issues we held on to hope in the most chronological sense; we hoped that we could weather the storm and wait it out. And so we did. The clock ran out before we seriously embarrassed ourselves.  But there were few words of hope larger than the moment and it’s passing, larger than just getting by. It appeared our hopes concerned the reign of the Episcopal Church. There were few words of hope for God’s reign.

 

There is a reason for that. The Presiding Bishop, whose words were heard more than any other person at Convention, had and has an amazingly difficult task. He is charged to care for this particular band of folk who constitute the religious community called the Episcopal Church. And first among the skills he must muster are those he referred to in his own instillation – the skills of rebuilding the church. So it is not surprising that in the meditations he gave at the Convention Eucharists his primary word would concern life together. 

 

As many of us know life together only dimly reflects the reign of God, just as actual marriages and other states of blessed union only dimly reflect “the union that is between Christ and his Church.” Among other things, actual life together lacks the fullness of justice. Such justice often calls not only for personal transformation (to which the Presiding Bishop spoke eloquently) but also for turning the world upside down (to which he spoke very little.) And no wonder, for part of that turning would be conducive to a break in the unity of Convention and of the Episcopal Church. So these words of hope concerned the Episcopal Church, or even more the individuals who came to the Eucharists, than they concerned the reign of God.

 

We know from other sources and other encounters that the Presiding Bishop does indeed have wide ranging concerns for the assertion of the reign of God. Indeed he could not in good conscience proclaim a Jubilee without such a concern. Yet it is interesting to note that a search engine applied to his meditations at Convention reveal very few words that would link jubilee to justice or debt, and many more that link jubilee to rest and time out from the struggle. Indeed, once beyond the first of the meditations Jubilee justice was not particularly an issue at all. His words were hope for respite and transformation; they were less so words of hope for justice and peace based upon the struggle for justice.

 

It is a time when a word of such hope would be most welcome. But such a word cannot be forthcoming without the apocalyptic sensibility that Babylon will fall. The word of hope might well begin with the observation that “There is great disorder under heaven.” That disorder is the early signs of the fall of Babylon, and from the position of the discounted, rejected and unrepresented what could be more hopeful? The reader should beware – in the actuality of life together every church, every gathered people, becomes Babylon directly in proportion to its pride in being itself the Body of Christ. We are the Body of Christ because we eat the bread of tomorrow, the bread of the reign of God, not because we are as community ourselves the promised bread.

 

That is quite otherwise than claiming the moral or spiritual high ground for Convention, or claiming alternative ecclesiastical orthodoxies the better ground.  The word of hope lies in recognizing that the results of the General Convention 2000 event are that “there is great disorder under heaven.” General Convention held the order for a short while, but the dogs are running in the fields now and the bones of no one’s ancestors are safe. Disorder is the reality.

 

“And the situation is excellent.” The excellence of the situation is that things in this church, as church, are going to get messy, and publicly so. It hasn’t taken any time at all for the dissonance in the Episcopal Church, and in the leadership of various churches in the Anglican Communion, to reassert itself. The issues that seemed avoidable at Convention are not so avoidable after all.

 

Why would this be excellent? From my best Episcopal Church sensibilities I cringe at this dissonance. Propriety, not to mention the desire for more simple loving kindness, veers away from the mess of ecclesiastical disunity.  But from the standpoint of perfecting a word worthy of the reign of God this is good news.

 

It is only from the apocalyptic vantage point that “great disorder” is a sign of an excellent situation. From that strange and visionary standpoint disorder means that we are not succeeding forever in avoidance.

 

The next years will require of us in the Episcopal Church an imagination greater than what can be gained by chewing on the bones of ecclesiastical compromise.  At some point there will be an implosion, a collapse, of the arrogance that leads us to think that matters of morals and justice are determined by our ecclesiastical grasp of some Biblical rules of order.  At some point there will be a need to declare the irrelevancy of our disorder in the face of the groaning of the whole creation as it waits. 

 

There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent. Soon, for those who gather beyond the field of bones, there will be the beginning of a party. I hope we will be there, but I doubt the Episcopal Church will be any more than the so-called orthodox remnant or any other Church. We will be fortunate if we are invited at all.