Your Faith, Your Life

An Invitation to The Episcopal Church, Revised Edition

Jenifer Gamber, Bill Lewellis

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780819233721
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The everything-you-need to know adult guide to the Episcopal Church.
This updated and revised edition incorporates new initiatives and changes in the Episcopal Church, including marriage, inclusion of LBGTQ+ persons, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry's call to join the Jesus Movement, and taking our faith out into the world. A Leader Guide is included in this revised edition in addition to the "transformation questions" that follow each chapter.Easy to read but with substance for newcomers, adult formation groups, and lifelong Episcopalians, this book is for all who desire to know more about the Episcopal Church.

Part One

Welcome

PREFACE

Telling Secrets

More than thirty years ago, a committee planning a conference on “Spirituality and Mission” scheduled twelve workshops on spirituality for the morning and twelve on mission for the afternoon. Separating the workshops in this way was a logistical—not a theological—decision. Still, we needed a way to preempt the unintended message that spirituality and mission were not related and need not converge.

We discovered a story. A child wandered into a sculptor’s studio and watched a master sculptor work with hammer and chisel on a large piece of marble. Marble chips flew in all directions. Months later the child returned. The block of marble had become a majestic and powerful Aslan-like lion. “How did you know,” he asked the sculptor, “there was a lion in the marble?” “I knew,” the sculptor replied, “because before I saw the lion in the marble, I saw him in my heart. The real secret, though, is that it was the lion in my heart who recognized the lion in the marble.”

In Clowning in Rome Henri Nouwen told this story of the Christ within, who recognizes himself unformed in the disguises of the world, to illustrate the relationship between contemplation and action. We used it to show how clearly related spirituality and mission are.

The story also suggests to me—I have worked in church communication for nearly fifty years—that our basic ministry as Christian disciples is about God’s word becoming flesh. Incarnation continues.

When I was a Roman Catholic priest working in the bishop’s office of the Diocese of Allentown, I assisted that diocese’s founding bishop at an ordination.

Vincentian Father Bob Maloney—an insightful theologian and a friend—had a unique preaching style. He punctuated with whispers. You knew he was about to say something he especially wanted you to hear when he leaned forward and lowered his voice. It was effective. He leaned forward to whisper; the congregation leaned forward to hear.

The late Bishop McShea didn’t care for Bob’s preaching style. As presider, he was seated behind the preacher, unable to hear the whispers. After the service, he quipped to me, “Bob Maloney preaches like he’s telling secrets.”

I heard a mission statement: tell secrets, tell what you have seen and heard. Whenever we talk about God, or listen for God (whenever we worship or pray), we’re in the realm of mystery . . . secret . . . the realm of the hidden yet revealed . . . a presence to be encountered somehow in our relationships and in the signs and symbols of our worship.

Christian thinkers have used both a Greek and a Latin word to talk about the hidden presence of the real—the partially veiled and partially unveiled presence of God—to refer to visible signs (persons, loved ones, the Church, bread and wine) that communicate something of God’s hidden presence.

From the Greek word musterion we get our English word “mystery” (suggesting something secret, something hidden). It was translated into Latin as sacramentum (suggesting sacrament, sign, something visible).

When rightly used in religion, the word “mystery” describes not a puzzle or a problem to be solved, not even the limit of our understanding, but a visible reality that suggests the hidden presence of God.

We walk frequently along the edges of divine mystery. If we listen closely, as we live God’s love, we hear secrets . . . and we tell secrets of the kingdom, of God’s visitation. Our mission as Christians is, in fact, to tell secrets, to tell what we have seen and heard.

Your Faith, Your Life: An Invitation to the Episcopal Church, disguised as a reference book of information, is about transformation. It is about the lion in your heart becoming a lion in your world. It is about relationship. It is about process: being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and in Love. It is about increasing our attentiveness and transforming our consciousness through reflection on our faith and life and on being in Love. Ultimately, it is about secrets of the heart, rumors of angels, whispers of the hidden presence of the real. It is about telling secrets of God’s visitation.

—Bill

While Bill Lewellis was deep into ordained ministry, I was attending the first-ever Episcopal Youth Event held at the University of Illinois in Champaign–Urbana, in the summer of 1982. I was a sixteen-year-old member of Christ Episcopal Church in Poughkeepsie, New York. Bill and I might be divided by a generation, but we are joined together in our love for God, a commitment to spirituality and mission, and an attitude of approaching life as a journey of transformation—a journey of uncovering the dream that God has sown deep within us.

I love the story that Henry Nouwen tells of the lion waiting to be revealed within the marble. It is a story of a secret waiting to be revealed by the hands of an artist. As Bill reminds us, each of us also has a story to be revealed. God has sown within each of us a dream, an image that reflects the love of Christ.

According to Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, all children have “an innate spirituality, a great sense of wonder, spontaneity, imagination and creativity, and a connection to something larger than themselves.” Yet many children lack the language to “give expression to that sense of something deeper.”¹

Many adults, too, lack the language of faith that gives voice to their innate spirituality and desire to know the transcendent. I grew up with the language of the Episcopal Church—a language of images, actions, words, and postures layered with memories and meaning inherited through centuries of tradition. Most Episcopalians, however, didn’t grow up in the Episcopal Church. For some, the language of the Episcopal Church may seem like an untold secret—like a secret handshake of longstanding members of a private club. It is not meant to be a secret, but instead to reveal a mystery.

The language of the Episcopal Church need not be a secret. That’s why Bill and I set out to write this book. It is, however, only an introduction. Language, and indeed faith, is living. Words gain meaning though use and change with our ever-deepening personal context. Each time you celebrate Eucharist with your community, the language of worship will gain a layer of meaning. Its meaning will change, and so will you. That’s what a spiritual journey is like. It transforms.

Throughout my life I have welcomed opportunities to grow. When Bill shared with me how he has integrated the transcendental imperatives of Bernard Lonergan introduced on page 6 in this book into his faith and life, I began to learn a framework for receiving these opportunities as a process of transformation. We have adapted those imperatives—be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in Love, and, if necessary, change—as the framework for Your Faith, Your Life so that you might also journey toward ever-deepening personal transformation.

We never lose the opportunity to develop the language of spirituality, whether we are five, twenty-five, fifty-five, or one hundred and five. Planted deep within each of us, God’s dream awaits to emerge just as the image of Aslan emerged from the artist’s marble. It is our hope that this book will provide language and information as well as the opportunity for reflection on your spiritual journey of revealing that dream.

—Jenifer

How to Read This Book

Your Faith, Your Life is more than an invitation to the Episcopal Church. It is an invitation to reflect on personal transformation as you consider facts about the Episcopal Church. Disguised as a reference book of information, as Bill has suggested, this book outlines a path toward authenticity and personal transformation.

Five imperatives frame this journey: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, and be in Love. We explore these in the introduction. The imperatives, however, require an essential ingredient this book cannot provide—you, the reader. You bring the text of your life—experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and very being itself—to this text.

To invite you to begin a practice of reading your life and listening to what it says, Bill offers interludes between chapters from his experiences. Embodied in his stories is an invitation for you to remember your stories. Bring his story into the chapters and read the chapters as invitations to recall your own stories.

As you read this book, you will also notice comments set off by rules from the main text to help guide your reading. Sometimes church vocabulary can be challenging. Don’t let the words get in the way. The rich images, rituals, and words that express our understanding of God and the world are sometimes necessarily complex. God is ultimately a mystery, beyond knowing. Still, we use our senses—sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell—to express that mystery. Any one way falls a little bit short because God is in all things and beyond our capacity to describe. Ultimately we may agree with the thirteenth-century monk Meister Eckhart, who said, “Nothing is so like God as silence.”

1.Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, interviewed by Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith, American Public Media, April 3, 2008.

INTRODUCTION

Transforming Questions

At the core of human life is a search for meaning. Nothing else truly satisfies. We need to know that our lives have meaning. Among theologian Paul Tillich’s contributions to religious understanding was to insist that what we mean by God is actually that which is of ultimate meaning, that our search for meaning is ultimately a search for God.

When seeking information, there are no dumb questions. When seeking meaning, however, you may have had the experience of being led along a rabbit trail by someone’s uninsightful questions. For in our search for meaning, even if we discover a right answer to an irrelevant question, that inappropriate question and answer will take us way off course.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution,” Albert Einstein said, “I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

Einstein understood the importance of asking the right, intelligent, and insightful question. Seeking to discover the proper question has long been central to Bill’s thinking, to his prayer, his faith, and his life. He was introduced to this concept—how crucial it is to ask the right question—during the 1960s by the late Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, who cited four “transcendental imperatives” and their interrelated questions, to be asked with intentional awareness on one’s path toward authenticity and integrity.

Authenticity, in the framework of this book, is the result of our disciplined attempts to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible and, therein, open to intellectual conversion of mind, moral conversion of wills, and religious conversion of heart. The journey begins where we are and seeks to get beyond ourselves to the unique and beloved persons God has created us to be. This journey to integrity, into the mystery of God’s love for us, takes courage.

Authenticity is a journey that begins where we are and seeks to get beyond ourselves to the unique and beloved persons God has created us to be.

Bill introduced the imperatives to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible to Jenifer during conversations about what truths God was calling her to. She also found them to be consonant with her way of being in the world. Bill and Jenifer come to these questions differently—Bill as a theologian, father, husband, and son, and Jenifer as an economist, wife, mother, and daughter. But both share a love for the search: to know God, to know ourselves, to know our faith, and what all of that might mean for our lives...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part One: Welcome
• Part Two: Be
• Part Three: Seeking the True and Be Attentive
• Part Four: Be Intelligent
• Part Five: Be Reasonable
• Part Six: Seeking the Good and Be Responsible
• Part Seven: Seeking God and Be in Love
• Glossary
• Leader Guide
• References
• Acknowledgments