Wednesday, January 2, 2008

A gift for a departing bishop

Many of you will love this, I think.

It comes to us from The Episcopal Majority. Read it and hoot, and appreciate the multiple levels of meaning.

Non-Anglicans will appreciate it too, so this isn't just for the in-group, though it will have particular resonance for them.

Happy Back To Work Day, all.

5 comments:

johnieb said...

I'd like to have that one myself, and I rarely put a sticker on my ride; it has just the right amount of cheeky justice, to my ear, with respect for good order: tasty.

Ken said...

I was in a parish where the Rector sent a letter to the enrolled parishioners at the end of 2005, saying that he had done a lot of soul searching (I really do believe this) and was enrolling in Immaculate Conception Seminary in South Orange to be reordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

I wasn't shocked. I saw him the following Sunday at coffee hour and said he had the signs all over him from the first day I was there: a total hostility to stuff like Liberation Theology, the Jesus Seminar, anything that wasn't doctrinally correct.

In a way I envied him. He figured out where he belonged and he went there. It took me years to get it.

He was also emotionally stunted, and that may not stand him well in any priesthood. When my brother-in-law killed himself early in 2005, his pastoral comfort was gelid. Apparently he was really big on being liturgically correct, and was a stickler for putting down anything that sounded like "heresy" (whatever that is), but he was not my favorite parish priest. Who knows how someone can be changed? He deserves prayers.

Oh: he was ordained to the RC Diocese of Trenton in May and is a Parochial Vicar in Tom's River.

His successor at long last is a woman whose ordination I attended in that same church in 2005. She will be awesome.

Jan said...

Thanks. I've never put a bumper sticker on my car, but I'd like that one, too.

Paul said...

I first saw those bumper stickers in the Diocese of Utah where Carolyn Tanner Irish was Episcopal bishop (and from a famous Mormon family too!). Glad to see the message spreading, this time through my friend Bill Easter (who introduced me to +Jeffrey).

Fran said...

I enjoyed that- the story and the bumper sticker!