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Part-time
communicator's lament - Virginia Barrett Barker
The ministry of
communication - Herb Gunn
"Telling the
truth"- The Rev. D.Moore
"Fact-based storytelling" - Bishop
Charleston
Lay
ministry of communication - Cn. Rick Johnson
"Communications
is a ministry" - Ray Suarez
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Opening Address, by Ray Suarez
Episcopal
Communicators' Conference
Washington
D.C., April 24, 2002
I am really delighted to be here with you today. Really delighted in part
because a guy like me only rarely gets to speak in a public way, without
euphemism and evasion, to out myself as a Christian. Because of what I do
for a living, it is understood to be part of the unwritten rules that
guide the mores and folkways of official Washington, it is better that I
don't talk in my stories about the things I believe . . .that I drop in
the middle of interviews my own view of the proper relationship between
people and the planet, not to mention church and state . . .both heavily
informed by my evolving life as a Christian adult. So occasionally, in
front of some groups, I'll hint at it, wink about it, toss a little jargon
around in a way that signals to the audience that I've spent a few hours
in church.
Here's my Rosie O'Donnell moment, folks: I am an Episcopalian . . .happy,
devout, and reasonably well adjusted. Those were simple, declarative
sentences . . .the key to good communications.
In the past few weeks I've gathered with a very small group in a chapel in
Grace Cathedral in San Francisco remembering how good it is to hear Rite
One when you haven't heard it in a while, been to a Dixieland Jazz
Eucharist in St. Richards' church in Winter Park, Florida, not my cup of
tea, but interesting, and my kids and I strove to keep up with the
chanting in an Anglo-Catholic parish in Brooklyn so ethereally high that I
thought the rector was going to chant the announcements and the welcome to
coffee hour.
We manage, year after year, to find a way to be who we are without our
heads exploding from trying to hold too many contradictory thoughts at
once. Yet the headlines are full of talk about religion that is hard to
call good news. I come to you at an odd moment in the life of the Church.
Our cousins in the Roman Catholic Church are reeling from a crisis of
confidence in part deriving from flaws in communications. Though it's not
our church in the narrow sense, what's happening in the Roman Catholic
Church in America is strikingly germane to you Episcopal Communicators.
The people in charge of the church weren't willing enough to tell people
enough about the bad apples, and what decisions were made about them. They
still aren't willing to tell the people who are paying the bills just how
much the settlements have cost, where the money is coming from, and what
is NOT going to be affordable because of the extraordinary costs.
Secrecy and the hoarding of information, rather than its sharing, led to
problems festering, tissues of the body becoming necrotic, far from the
comfort and aid of the light, fresh air, and disinfectant that information
can be. A country with a big ocean on each side, and the immigrants who
had mostly come from Europe and Latin America is suddenly wondering who
these new people are in their midst. I was driving with my father in
Brooklyn and he pointed out a small mosque and said, "See that place?
That's where that Sheik Omar comes from. That was his place." He was
talking about Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, now in a federal penitentiary for
his role in the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Why are there
Muslim rebels in the heavily Catholic Philippines? Was that synagogue fire
in Tunisia an accident, or an attack? What is happening in American Jewry,
as Israel struggles with the Palestinians and America's own elected
leaders ask, then demand that the army pull out? How is it that in France
there is horror and shock at the second-p0lace finish in the presidential
election of a man who used to peddle Hitler speech tapes, at the same time
an upsurge in anti-Semitic violence that has not attracted the same level
of shock inside or outside France? How much are the world's sorrows over
religion the sorrows of all people of faith? And what of our own house?
You come together at a time that is challenging in our own church . . . as
Episcopalians wrestle with the nature of authority, obedience, and
orthodoxy.
Until the treasurer is on trial for fraud, or a bishop is on trial for
heresy, or a priest stands for authority by refusing to recognize it . . .
or American bishops are rebuked by Third World brother bishops at a
worldwide gathering . . .until these things happen we Episcopalians
operate as a kind of open secret in the wider society . . . dirty laundry
is the only laundry much of the public sees.
The wider public, if it cares at all to look, may only hear stories of
conflict, dissent, and debate. Our own family fights fly under the radar,
one week I head over to a bookstore in my neighborhood to hear Bishop
Spong describe a church of the future that doesn't at all resemble the one
he ran a diocese for . . . and in that same week get a glossy and
expensive mailing from other members of my denomination urging me to help
them slam on the brakes for a church swerving out of control.
Inside the family, is anyone happy with who we are now? Probably a lot of
the people you talk to in the pages of your publications. People who
aren't on commissions, who aren't members of breakaway parishes, who
aren't riled up by sexual identity policies or suing their priest for
cribbing sermons.
They need you so much . . . they need to be able to place their church in
the context of the rest of their lives, be uplifted and entertained, moved
to act, and moved to reflect. In an information-saturated culture they
need a slice of the world they are unlikely to find anywhere else but in
the work you do, but they are a difficult audience.
When I do my vestry-member's rotations at the welcome table in our parish
hall, I find I'm helping to settle in people who've never been in an
Episcopal church before this year, but have a toddler and another child on
the way, feel the tug of religion, and heard this was a good place to be
from a friend.
We've got diplomatic and civil service people who've spent much of their
adult lives moving from place to place, join the closest Episcopal church
wherever they go, and need little more than a "hello" from me .
. . and people in the middle, back after a long break, back after a
divorce or separation, a death in the family, wounded, wandering, and
looking for a little comfort. I don't know how you do it . . . it's like
writing a text book for everyone from 1st grade to college freshman that's
supposed to somehow teach them all.
If you were priests or other ordained persons, we might carry a certain
set of expectations for what comes out of yoru mouths and your word
processors. A little abstract, airy-fairy, a little God talk would not
only be in order, it would be in the job description.
But from where I sit, you are doing a very difficult thing: trying to
bring the norms and conventions, disciplines and rigors of a highly
skeptical business, to the work of describing the common life of a
multi-million member enterprise whose founder and CEO is rarely seen in
person, an enterprise that never runs a profit, wants its customers to
work for no wages, in fact, pay it for the privilege of working for no
wages, demands that its customers in fact be gentle rather than cunning,
lay up treasures in heaven, believe and yet not see, bless those who
despise them, and in a million other ways do and say and be people whose
behavior cannot be described in conventional ways of understanding
getting, wanting, having, desiring, for good or ill the engines that keep
America clanking along.
There are easier ways to make a living than marrying faith and reason. We
work in a business that wants us to figure out people's ulterior motives,
and yet you work for an institution that suggests that the way to deal
with the unlovable is to love them more. And if that doesn't work, love
them more still.
You have to talk in the abstract about that knotty subject of money, and
yet in a straightforward way to the very people who open their hearts and
wallets to keep our churches going. You are part of our institution, and
yet critical thinkers about its future, explainers, teachers. It's easy
for us to explore our common joys, but the strains, tears, and family
fights that mark our church are not solved by covering them up in mush
mouth language and well-meaning bumpf. Take them on. Explain with care.
Sure, I know people are hurting over this stuff. I know there's something
more important than money and power at stake. But openness in the way we
talk to each other is just an extension of a philosophy that allows
elected lay people to hire priests, to take part in the task of electing
bishops, even the head of our national church. Is there a Christian way to
talk about gun control? Taxes? Sex? War? The Environment? Capital
punishment? You know there is.
The people who read your publications get the worldly way to think about
these knotty challenges coming at them through every medial orifice . . .
printed word, the web, talk radio, level-headed and well-modulated
commercial news and jumpy, itchy, hyper kinetic 24-hour cable. There's
plenty of that stuff. But the self-selected publics to whom you speak are
hungry for another way of seeing, at least a way to step back from the
relentless message-peddling coming from commercial media to think for a
few moments about what a Master who told us to be in the world but not of
the world really would have us do.
None of this is easy; it may not even be popular, at least not at first.
But your work is so important. So important. If our religion is just a
place to hide out from the world, a bunker to protect us from the
buffeting winds of the rest of the week, then there need be no teeth, no
challenge, no crunch to the things you write, report, and publish.
But the people I've known my whole life in church are up to their chins in
the world . . .immersed in it. When we look to our church for decoding of
horribly complex events, some perspective, a Christian way to understand
the war, stewardship not only in the Sunday morning context but in the
Monday April 15 context, why is there discomfort? Why is it so much easier
to fall back on fortune cookie and Hallmark Card comfort?
I hope our publications can be places for the good argument, too . . .
where we hash out our differences in this wonderful, loving, maddening
extended family. I also hope our publications can be sounding boards for
ideas we find difficult, unpopular, bothersome. If people with us on this
journey think you should be able to make the whole walk without stubbing
your toes or bloodying your knees occasionally, they need to find a church
that promises an easier walk.
Your publications are lectern AND pulpit . . . and yes should bring
strength and renewal . . . right along with discomfort and concern. You
are bread for a hungry people. You are heralds of comfort for the
afflicted, and should live out the assignment given us by the noted
atheist H. L. Menchen, bringing affliction for the comfortable as well.
We are working hard in God's small American, Episcopalian corner of the
Kingdom . . . light it up for everybody in, as it's called in that lovely
phrase in the old prayer book, the blessed company of all faithful people.
Outside your community, the idea that communications is a ministry might
strike some as an odd one . . . it's a job . . .you do what you have to
do, there's a certain amount of office politics, money woes, deadlines . .
. you get paid, you come home. But you all know better than anyone how
vital communications are at this juncture in the life of the church . . .
in an information-saturated society keeping that other voice relevant and
in the mix in the push and pull of our daily lives, in the decision-making
in our neighborhoods, cities and counties, indeed our nation.
The challenges to our country are so many. I have to admit I sometimes
think the world is winning, that we are an outgunned minority, charming
but soft in the head.
The other day I interviewed the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah abu El-Assal,
at National Cathedral, about the prospects for peace in his home see. He
told me that Christians changing the world is nothing new, and not hard
for him to imagine, even in that sad land. He noted that in that same
country, two thousand years ago, just a handful of people laid the
foundation for a faith that would change the world. There are so many more
of us today, he reminded me . . . certainly we can do it again.
# # #
Ray Suarez is senior correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and
a journalist with 25 years of experience in print, radio and television.
He is an active, engaged Episcopalian, currently serving on the vestry of
St. Columba's Church in Washington, D.C. and former vice president of the
board of Episcopal Charities in Chicago. Suarez is also a founding member
of the Chicago Association of Hispanic Journalists.
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