Traveling light means going with open hands and open hearts, ready to embrace what the moment offers. It means traveling undefended, without rigid expectations or high walls or self-defense. Finding a welcome has something to do with being vulnerable, being open to the hospitality that another offers. If we're not ready to receive, if our hands aren't open, then who's going to be able to get in? - p. 73
At its best, Anglicanism has always held up comprehensiveness as one of its highest values. We don't all have to agree. There can be more than one right answer. This turf is God's, not ours, and it's broader and more expansive--even greener--than we are capable of imagining. We have said, from our Celtic Christian beginnings, and explicitly from at least the time of Elizabeth I, that the middle way, the middle road, is the most important, because there is something vital to be gained and learned from the people on both shoulders. Gamaliel, the perennial pragmatist in the book of Acts, says, "Well, what you're about may NOT be right, but we'll just have to wait and see what comes of it. If it is of God, then there won't be any stopping it." - p. 75
I wholeheartedly believe that both of ++Katherine's observations are true. Before we can do anything, we must open our hearts and our minds to recognize that there are so very many ways that God is working in the world. It is one of our own fundamentals, as progressive Christians, that God/Christ/Spirit is bigger than any book, any doctrine, any church, and is certainly capable of working in any way that God/Christ/Spirit chooses to work.
At the heart of the great struggle in Christianity at this time is that neither extremists, conservative/fundamentalists or liberal/progressivists, are willing to "travel light," and let go of their own biases or prejudices regarding God at work in the world. Every time we try to lock God within covers of the Bible, we are confronted with our own limitations of understanding that God is bigger than that. God is all in all. Who are we in our limited capacities to say that God is ONLY in the written text of Holy Scriptures, or ONLY in observeable Holy Creation? We say, in our catechism, that all things necessary to salvation are in Holy Scriptures. BUT we do not say 1) that they are ONLY found in Holy Scriptures, nor do we say 2) that ALL things in Holy Scriptures are necessary to salvation.
Our openness to seeing God in the wonders of diverse Creation AND in the complex and often contradictory Bible, and using the divine gift of human reason to discern how God is working in the both, calling us to reconciliation, is very frustrating to our more extreme friends who can't move beyond their own interpretation of Holy Scripture. Radical fundamentalists see it as the transcribed, word-for-word utterances of God dictating to humanity how it is to live into right relationship. Radical progressivists see it is flawed and even purely human invention that is corrupt, with authorship and motivation bringing most if not all of it into serious doubt.
We need to let go of our baggage, as we interact with one another, especially within the boundaries of the Episcopal Church. We are the "Via Media" (perhaps the only true Via Media remaing in the Anglican Communion), and the less ecclesiological doctrine we formally legislate, the better. The doors must be open to all, the pews must be comfortable to all, the table must be inviting to all, and the challenge and call to ministry in the world must be announced to all. It is the only way that we will effectively reconcile all to God and to one another. And it certainly was the example given to us by our Savior, Jesus Christ.
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