The Irish Times is reporting that “a conciliatory statement is expected at the end of the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury,”which concludes today. Others are predicting that the whole endeavor will have been a waste or even a sham, a kind of desperate stall for time. The British paper the Telegraph has a particularly depressing article out today, found here, about bishops pressuring “the Archbishop of Canterbury to declare a split in the Anglican Communion for the sake of orthodox Christianity.”

For my own part, I am sure only that it will take time, perhaps a very long time, to understand with any clarity the actual results of the Lambeth Conference. It is almost unAmerican to spend two weeks following an event and not have some definite sense of resolution or closure when it is over. Who won? Who lost? What was the score? Can we give it “two thumbs up”? Our usual methods of assessment simply fail us at times like these.

If you still find yourself troubled just trying to articulate what all the fuss has been about in the first place, you might be interested in an article in America: The National Catholic Weekly. One striking passage reads:

The sniping at Archbishop Williams from all sides has been intense. He is accused of giving in to evangelical blackmail, of being a closet liberal, of being a ditherer and a Canute-like figure pondering theological abstractions while the waves crash on the shore. In fact his leadership has been extraordinary, a witness to the influence of Catholicism on his ecclesiology. The easier path is the one of expulsions, or at least of taking one side or another; but he has taken the far harder option of trying to forge a communion out of polarization. He has tried to persuade both the global South and the North Americans to renounce their absolute positions for the sake of unity, and not to move impatiently ahead.

I would encourage anyone interested in having a better understanding of the current state of the Anglican Communion to read more of this article by Austen Ivereigh. No single article is going to capture everything important to say on the subject, but I find great merit in his focus on church structure, and in his nuanced depiction of the mutiple sides in this debate, which helps move it from an “us versus them” mentality. He is also spot-on in his understanding of the role of Archbishop Rowan Williams.

Our own Bishop of Missouri, George Wayne Smith, has written some wonderful blog posts about the conference. His latest post also gives a nod to the leadership of Archbishop Williams: “Another reason for the provisional successes lies in Archbishop Rowan’s spiritual leadership. [...The tone he set] modeled the discipline of careful listening at the heart of all we have tried to accomplish.”

Finally, I encourage you to dive in and read some of the recent offerings by Rowan Williams himself. He has become such a lightning rod, and so much is written about him, that it can be a helpful corrective to attend directly to his own words. I am particularly enamored of a sermon he gave during the recent meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England, just before Lambeth began. It addresses the metaphor of the “waterless pit” found in Jeremiah and asks us to consider the questions, Where would Jesus be? And with whom? My favorite passage follows:

One of the desert fathers remarked, ‘And how very easily we laid aside the yoke of Christ and burdened ourselves with the heavy yoke of self-justification’ - There’s a phrase to ponder – a heavy yoke of self-justification. That’s the law, that’s the curse. That’s the waterless pit indeed - where we struggle ceaselessly, unrelentingly, to make ourselves more right, and to lay hold upon our future. We lay upon ourselves a heavy yoke, from which only the grace of Jesus Christ can deliver us. In a nutshell, we lay upon ourselves the yoke of desperate seriousness about ourselves.

In the midst of a chaotic and polarizing epoch in the Church, we all need reminders about basic Christian concepts like sacrifice and reconciliation, along with warnings about the dangers of self-righteousness. In spite of their fancy titles and funny hats, the men and women meeting at the Lambeth Conference are simply fallible, faithful human beings who need our prayers and support while they do this work. We cannot expect them to perform miracles. It is God who works miracles, and we who watch and wait and weep and pray.

To borrow a phrase from the good Archbishop himself, what we need at the moment is to live in a spirit of “passionate patience.” Passionate does not mean simply heartfelt and authentic or intense; it also shares the root of the Lation passio, or suffering. To allow our patience to be a form of suffering without falling into apathy or despair, to balance engagement and waiting, demands for justice with cries of repentance, might turn out to be the only way forward.