Today's Prayer

This is prayer is not an easy one for me. My stomach is in knots.

Today my prayer is for Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who are in prison for the killing of Matthew Shepherd. Lord whatever Aaron and Russell are struggling with, wherever they need your help and comfort today - I pray you may grant it to them and that they may come to feel and know your love.

Thank you John-David Schofield and Peter Akinola

As a gay Episcopalian, I’m truly thankful for John-David Schofield and Peter Akinola and those of similar spirit. For they give me a great spiritual gift. As the Dalai Lama puts it here:

[M]erely thinking that compassion and reason and patience are good will not be
enough to develop them. We must wait for difficulties to arise and then attempt
to practice them.

And who creates such opportunities? Not our friends, of course, but our enemies. They are the ones who give us the most trouble. So if we truly wish to learn, we should consider enemies to be our best teacher!

For a person who cherishes compassion and love, the practice of tolerance is essential, and for that, an enemy is indispensable. So we should feel grateful to our enemies, for it is they who can best help us develop a tranquil mind!

This idea is not new for those of us who are Christians---although we seldom practice it. Jesus has taught that I must not only love my enemy, but take action by praying for those who persecute me (and, I suppose, become thankful for them in the process as I myself experience forgiveness).

On this point of being thankful for those I perceive as enemies, I loved a recent post on Mark Harris’ Preludium here by an Episcopal priest who wrote:

Actually, it might not be such a bad thing if the Super Holy Global Anglican
Church were to undertake a massive mission campaign in the United States (and
Canada). Though I'm not sure to whom they would appeal. The neofundamentalist-neoevangelical-neoliteralist-neopuritanical folks are already pretty well taken up already. But it might get us off our hands and in response start doing a better job of proclaiming a genuinely evangelical, genuinely catholic gospel of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps we are seeing a fresh awakening, not only in the Episcopal church, but in other churches---including those that might be viewed as more fundamentalist---of the need to proclaim the genuine gospel of Jesus Christ even more loudly in the face of those who have wrapped themselves in the flag of religion and created, in the public’s eye, the impression of Christianity as a judgmental, exclusive, and bigoted faith.

If that awakening is occurring, we can thank John-David Scofield, Peter Akinola and their followers.

Today's prayer

Today my prayer is for John-David Schofield, Robert Duncan and Robert Gandenberger. Lord whatever they are struggling with, wherever they need your help and comfort today - I pray you may grant it to them.

It's OK to get angry

Thanks to two individuals--Bishop Carranza of the Diocese of Los Angeles and Jasper Goldberg, a high school student who attends Church of our Savior in Mill Valley, California--who have helped frame for me why getting angry is not inconsistent with loving our enemies (after all, they wouldn't be our enemies if all was sweetness and light).

As Bishop Carranza points out, it was St. Thomas Aquinas who said: "He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust."

The link for Bishop Carranza's statement is to Susan Russell's blog, "An Inch At A Time here, Jasper Goldberg's statement can be found on Bishop Marc Andrus' blog here and Father Jake Stops the World here.