Sunrise 7:21: Amen to a day of beginnings

The amens started last night when the Dawn Joggers went to an interfaith prayer service for [now] President Obama at Grace Cathedral. It concluded with the The Rt. Rev. Marc Andrus, Episcopal Bishop of California reading the Rt Rev. Gene Robinson's invocation prayer that began the inaugural concert on Sunday night (that HBO did not broadcast) and leading those assembled at Grace in a hearty, "Amen." The DJs stayed in the City and the female DJ admits to waking a number of times during the night hoping she'd see the pink of dawn, much as she did when she was a child waiting for Santa. Or maybe, just maybe she'd wake up - and horrors it would all be a dream - this amazing man (a human being not a messiah reminded Robinson) really wasn't about to become the 44th President of the United States, pledging that "together we will change American." Finally the dawn came - for the DJs, and with God's help, for America...

Sunrise 6:38: Oak against the hill

It may be the greenness of the grass that set off this one particular oak on the Big Dish ridge. The female Dawn Jogger doesn't recall noticing before how it seems to be pulling itself uphill as if it's trying to reach the top. The famous quote from a George Herbert poem - "storms make the oak grow deeper roots" - seems fitting both to this tree's life and the challenging events the DJs faced this past week. Ironically, they happened to read about Herbert on March 1. He was that day's "saint" in Robert Ellsberg's All Saints. Ellsberg writes that Herbert's poetry "seems to reflect the virtures of balance and moderation so prized in Anglican spirituality." Balance and moderation appear to be lost in the current Anglican controversy...

Sunrise: 6:50: Rainy day pride

Steady rain grounded the female Dawn Jogger this morning and found her instead heading to downtown Menlo just after dawn on a grocery run. When musing yesterday on the Communique issued by the primates of the Anglican communion, she had neglected to check on her own Bishop's response, which begins: "The inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the full life of the Church is a matter of justice: as we are all part of the world, and the kindom of God is like a net laid over that same world. All on the earth are connected by this net, whether perceived or not. Actions of justice and injustice reverberate throughout the whole, promoting either integrity, remembering, and shalom, or diabolic isolation." (Full text of The Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus's response.) That's the spirit and theology that has made her proud to be an Episcopalian...

Sunrise 6:52: Farewell to meat - or justice?

The female Dawn Jogger encountered a new herd of cattle on her Wednesday Big Dish run this morning, the first day of Lent and the day after Carnivale (carne vale - farewell to meat). Lent has traditionally been the time that Catholics - be they Roman or Anglican - fasted by giving up meat. (Although that's unlikely to save the new herd.) Growing up as an Episcopalian, the female DJ's Lenten fast was more likely giving up her mother's great chocolate chip cookies.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, has characterized the communique issued at the end of the just completed five-day meeting of the Anglican Primates as a call to another kind of fast:

"The Episcopal Church has been asked to consider the wider body of the Anglican Communion and its needs. Our own Church has in recent years tended to focus on the suffering of one portion of the body, particularly those who feel that justice demands the full recognition and celebration of the gifts of gay and lesbian Christians. That focus has been seen in some other parts of the global Church, as inappropriate, especially as it has been felt to be a dismissal of traditional understandings of sexual morality. Both parties hold positions that can be defended by appeal to our Anglican sources of authority - scripture, tradition, and reason - but each finds it very difficult to understand and embrace the other. What is being asked of both parties is a season of fasting - from authorizing rites for blessing same-sex unions and consecrating bishops in such unions on the one hand, and from transgressing traditional diocesan boundaries on the other." (Full text of the Presiding Bishop's reflection).

The female Dawn Jogger finds both the communique and the Presiding Bishop's call deeply troubling. Both Bishop Jefferts Schori and Archbishop of Canterbury (the titular head of the Anglican Communion) Rowan Williams seem to be in a a position in which their jobs as leaders of organizations are trumping their own previously-stated beliefs. Is the unity of an entity, the Anglican Communion, which was cobbled together by circumstance in the first place, that important? The male DJ often quotes Brother Timothy, who told the DJs during a visit to the Cowley Brothers rural retreat center, "Don't ever confuse faith with religion." To participate in a fast that restricts the full inclusion of all God's people seem to the female DJ to be doing just that.