Erin's GA Journal

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Erin's GA Journal:
Reflections from Erin Cox-Holmes

When Delivery Stalls

So here we are at the General Assembly. The Assembly is cranking along, in vintage Assembly fashion. Wayne is cranking out his reports in vintage Wayne fashion. The Commissioners are voting. The caterers are catering.

It's just me, sola moi, who isn't producing anything. It's as if the baby I'm determined to have-- my insightful GA Journal--has stalled. I'm pushing, but labor has ceased to be productive. I admit it--my heart and most of my mind are home with my little guy who is sick, and for whom I have many aches but no healing magic. It means I'm watching GA from a bubble, the one I'd like to wrap him in and can't. GA action is happening, but much of it feels as if it is beaming in from another planet, or as if I belong on one. The GA and I are not in the groove this year.

There's a theological point here, and I'm going to milk it for all it's worth. Themes are emerging for the 213th GA. Threads are being woven. But the tapestry is not far enough along to see the patterns. We -- my reflections, the Assembly, our emerging church -- we are all a work in progress. Labor has stalled while eyes dilate over the endless reports, motions, substitute motions, amendments. Yet centimeter by centimeter, promises Jesus, I shall build my church.

Apparently my reflections on it all are going to come by the grace of the Linguistic Muse when she deigns to sing, and no timing of mine or this website are going to hurry them along. That, as it turns out, is the most theological reflection of all -- The reminder that from the back of my overstuffed brain, to the stiffness of my over-seated rear, to the immobility of my nontyping fingers, that our Time is not God's time, and all the votes and reports in the world will not progress the Kingdom one iota faster than the speed of God's grace.

So as I wander in my half-baked reflective wilderness, I will post here when the themes find their images, and the images find their words, and the words find their rightful relation to one another, and we get to insight. I'm not happy about this Farmer in the Dell style of reporting. But I guess, this year, that's how it's gonna be. You're just going have to keep checking back, to find out when the muse serves up the main courses.

For now, a few appetizers. These are the chords I'm following, in my murky, convoluted way.

	"A More Excellent Way" -- the theme song of this Assembly, as Commissioners try to find a path through the widerness of division and discord. One person I talked to is spending this Assembly looking for the "real ways" the theme: "Rooted and Grounded in Love" is playing out.
	"Moving" -- The Assembly is moving along. The Assembly has, occasionally, been moving. And if you are as directionally-challenged as I am, the room locations in the Civic Center seem to move, every time you exit the building and try to find the Exhibit Hall again. We're gonna think about moving.
	Building Bridges: Jack Rodgers was elected a a Builder of Bridges. I'm thinking about bricks, about the sort of bridge being built, about the bridge's theme song, and about how bricks and substitute motions for the main motion fit together
	Who Owns the Words--and who gets the Middle Ground
	Change Happens. Last year I wrote 2 Twinkle-fingered reflections on how generation and digital change is affecting the Assembly. That massive underlying shift is proceeding, although in more ordered, integrated and not as Seinfeld-esque kinds of ways. Still there's enough material for Neckerchiefs, Part Deux.

Keep posted. Eventually there'll be quintuplets of reflected wisdome.

Till then, I leave you with TS Eliot, who understood this kind of thing:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.... Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings...
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-..
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. (from 4 Quartets)

This is Erin Cox-Holmes,
for Kiski Online

Other Reflections from the GA Journal:
An Underlying Systemic Disorder?

Last Updated: June 26, 2004