The Rt. Rev. Daniel H. Martins, Bishop of Springfield, writes about the final plenary session of the House of Bishops’ meeting at Kanuga Conference Center on March 14:
We began with another table discussion of generous length (about 30 minutes, as I recall). Each table was given a sheet amalgamating all the feedback that had been turned in on sticky notes yesterday concerning how we think we’re meeting the personal and institutional challenges of dealing with the way we tend to systematically marginalize individuals and groups based on criteria over which they have no control (“Who I am” rather than “What I do”).
This went well enough, and then the plenary floor was open to sharing from the table discussions. All was going according to plan. Then one bishop (whom I will not name, though he probably wouldn’t mind) got up and said, in effect, “There’s an elephant in the room, and we’re ignoring it in favor of a bunch of navel gazing.” That’s when everything went off the rails. A handful of others got up and said, “Yeah. There’s an elephant in the room, and we need to talk about it!” Except … nobody actually named the elephant. And I was getting the feeling that those who were giving their Amens to the original comment were all talking about different elephants, but I didn’t know for sure. Was I the only one who was clueless? So I went to the microphone myself and said, “We have a set of Core Values in this House, one of which is to speak directly. But here I am listening to a bunch of us saying that there’s something we desperately need to talk about, and I have no idea what it is.”
After a few more speakers, we took a break while the Presiding Bishop, the members of the Planning Committee, and the chaplains all hung heads together to figure what to do. During the break, several bishops greeted me enthusiastically and thanked me for saying what I did, because they were equally clueless. It felt good not be alone in my ignorance.
Then the bishop who had made the comment that got the whole ruckus started came up to me and clarified what he meant. It was all about the Bishop of Washington’s sermon on Sunday, and her remark about the number of her own parishes that are slowly (or not so slowly) withering away, without even a spark of the sort of vitality that would be attractive to those seeking a deeper spiritual life … and here we are spending four days talking about our feelings and our childhood memories.
