Anglican identity, part 2: Finding and forgetting
When this blog began several weeks ago, many of the contributors made reference to the Pew research study that reported that “more than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all.” I’m not sure if any of the other contributors to this blog count themselves in that 28 percent, but I do.
And maybe it is because I made the leap from one denomination to another that I feel so moved to explain what I love about my church. (Converts are notoriously obnoxious about this stuff!) In my last post I promised to discuss more about my own personal sense of Anglican identity, so here goes.
I am an Episcopalian by personal choice and through the grace of God. My family of origin, as well as my husband’s family, are all Roman Catholic; I can’t emphasize enough the deep respect and gratitude I have for my Catholic upbringing and the ways it has shaped me. Still, for a myriad of reasons I won’t enumerate here, I chose a different path.
So for me personally, why Anglicanism? Being the only Episcopalian on this blog, I feel the need to make the usual disclaimers about speaking only for myself. My entries are just one person’s current, contingent take on what it means to me to be Anglican, so I highly recommend that if your curiosity is piqued you jump in and read more widely.
As a start, one of the clearest definitions of Anglicanism I have read can be found in An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church (Don S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum, editors). It makes plain some of the traits I so love about our church: its sense of balance and compromise, its ability to respect tradition while celebrating cultural difference, its emphasis on practice and worship over doctrine, its humble recognition that while God is unchanging and perfect the church is not. In addition, we are a church that embraces sacrament, liturgy, adherence to apostolic succession, and the centrality of the historic creeds, and you’ve got a pretty potent mix.
Not surprisingly, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is infinitely more articulate on the subject of Anglicanism than I will ever be. Writing about a group of Anglican theologians, he says something in his book Anglican Identities that I think holds true of Anglicans generally, at least when they are at their most thoughtful. These theologians, he writes,
“take it for granted that the believer is always learning, moving in and out of speech and silence in a continuous wonder and a continuous turning inside-out of mind and feeling.”
That sounds just about right to me.
Several months ago I had a conversation with a friend who is an Episcopal priest. I referred to a group of people I had known “even before I became an Episcopalian,” and my friend interrupted me by saying, “Dear, you were born an Episcopalian!”
The comment made me laugh, but it also contained a deeper truth.
Because the truth is, I sometimes do think of myself as having been born an Anglican, in terms of my inborn, God-given temperament and personality and my simple me-ness. Which is not the same as saying that I believe everybody should be an Episcopalian. Rather I have a sense that in some weird way I cannot fully understand maybe, just maybe, God wants me to be one.
Without question I do believe that God wants each one of us to find a community–a spiritual home–where we can both be ourselves and, in some important ways, forget our selves. Once there, we can move out of the realm of personal preference and fulfillment, and instead focus on the work of loving God and our neighbor, the work we are all called to do.
The photo is of the banner of the Church of the Holy Spirit (Episcopal) in Belmont, Michigan. I chose it because we have just celebrated Pentecost, but also as an homage to Holy Spirit parish in Berkeley, California, where I was confirmed. Finally, of course, it is the Holy Spirit who unites all Christians, regardless of denomination.
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Pamela Dolan, 39, works in the field of religious education and is on staff at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Webster Groves. She earned a master's degree in theology from Harvard before spending several years in New York studying medieval religion and literature. Pamela is new to the midwest, but she and her husband enjoy life in the suburbs their two young daughters and one very old dog. 
I enjoyed your essay very much, and thank you for sharing it with us! Archbishop Rowan had some wonderful things to say in the collection entitled “Anglican Identities,” and I love the text you cited. It might be helpful, though, for those unfamiliar with Anglicanism to consider what else Archbishop Rowan said about the distinctive Anglican “method”: “It might be summed up as the belief that scriptural and Christian language always says more than it initially appears to say. . . . Revelation provides not a system to be received but a language in which to discover more and more echoes and consonances. . . This approach corresponds quite closely to one of the two varieties of “skepticism” regularly found in Anglican literature, a skepticism about formulae and dogma that is fundamentally skeptical about the capacities of the human mind. It assumes that we are liable to self-deceit, that our knowledge is affected by our moral and spiritual lack. In this context, to be cautious about hermeneutical or dogmatic closure is not to discard or relativise sanctioned words; you occupy the territory marked out by those words, but you will not know where the boundaries are, because the search for definite boundaries suggests that you might be in possession of the territory, not yourself included in (possessed by?) it. And this contrasts with a skepticism more obviously generated by Enlightenment suspicion of authority, in which the target of the questioning is the formulae as such and the processes by which they were shaped.” In this vein, what Augustine said about the way to know God might also be adopted to describe the essence of the Anglican way: “That way is, first, humility; second, humility; third, humility; and as often as you ask, I’ll tell you, humility.” Thanks for writing.