Nativity

In her 2008 essay "Altered State", Andrea Lee says "I'm not sure I love it, but it's mine." It's a wonderful memoir; it's perfection of that New Yorker "Personal History" format. I find myself remembering this quote of hers in a variety of contexts.

For example, sometimes I hear someone like David Hollinger describe recent trends in religious observance in the US. He will say that among Christians, committed practice is on the decline overall, especially among the educated, and is increasingly confined to evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. In this picture, the old liberals in the mainline churches are graying into irrelevance. Hollinger's work comports with what you find from Mona Chalabi or Ross Douthat, so this is a common thing to hear.

When I encounter this argument about the good ol' churches (a biblicist has informed me the correct term is "historical churches") I can't help but feel a certain sense of loss that is hard to place and harder to justify.

Just what would be lost with my native tradition that I'm not really part of anymore? What sense of attachment or need is there then to feel vulnerable to loss?

These involve another question about what separated me from the churchly life in the first place. The Episcopal chaplain at school tells me what I am is a "cradle", with a (dubious) Mayflower claim and all. I was born into the church and in growing up got to be... less than Episcopalian. How does this happen? 

I can tell you how it happened for me. A summary version. I got the sense that I could "have" the goods of the tradition: the artistic richness, the way of welcoming, the progressive senses of justice and respect, without the tradition itself.

There was that, and the fact that I could not intellectually connect these goods of life to the tradition's main formations of the good, that is to the orthodox theology and Christology of the Anglican Communion. Just what of a good life, as we have come to conceive it, can be reduced to precisely professing the nature of the incarnate divine? 

But it is precisely the formulas that are central to the collective recognitions of the Anglican communion. Formerly the state religion of the British empire, what is holding the communion together, and it is barely held together, is the orthodox formulas of Nicaea, Chalcedon and so on.

This basic doctrinal idiom appears to be all that keeps North American liberals, southern African liberationists and British conservatives talking to each other.

This idea of salvation in its present relation to the good life on earth is immanent to me. I was born in the middle of it and have to make sense in terms of it.

Now, as I have told this story of falling off from one tradition, I have excluded more creative possibilities for it. But, whatever such a creative alternative to the lived tradition would be, for me it would need to include a vision of the good of plurality, that of mutuality among people with very different kinds of lived experience.

I know the Anglican Communion's imperial baggage is considerable: its diversity is because of the reach of British imperialism. However, the church I have known is one of the last places where adults of very different backgrounds regularly and intimately come together.

None of the Western alternatives to the intellectual exclusiveness of Christianity have been able to sustain this sense of community. These are mainly intellectual exercises. They have also tended only to be more exclusive, more minute in their distinctions, and their reach has never extended beyond people in the richer parts of the postcolonial world.

Worrying about the alternatives does nothing to affirm a reconnected relationship with Mother Canterbury.

Whatever relationship I'd find for me and with my family has dimensions that are not intellectual to which I have tried to put words. It begins with feelings I can articulate in something like Lee's formulation and a persistent fear of loss when I look at the difficulties of the newly vulnerable churches. 

Asking questions in terms of her formula focuses intensely on the personal: what is mine? how could I be sustained in spirit? Asking questions like this present a real danger of a Protestant excess of individuality. I hope that asking how one could flourish in a place in a broader world furnished with resources of good living and good deliberation can be a different kind of question. I consider this in the follow-up post "Singleness of Heart".