A RESPONSE TO PRESIDING BISHOP FRANK GRISWOLD - BY REV. MATT KENNEDY

AS EYE SEE IT - A response to Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold

By Matt Kennedy

"C'mon Frank, Don't be such a literalist. Remember the reader and the text are in conversation with one another. The text has its perspective and culture, the reader has hers. Somewhere in the middle, beyond the written canon and living reader a new reality is birthed that is "truth" for both the text and the interpreter.

You see Frank, it does no good to prooftext canon. What was going on in the canonists community at the time the canon was written? What particular social, economic, ethnic or political struggles marked the community in which the canonist lived? Surely you are not suggesting that we simply take the words of the text written in one social context and apply them directly to our own?

Perhaps, Frank, God is doing a new thing? I mean you have your perspective on canon and these retired bishops have theirs. Both are valuable. Both are true.

Somewhere in the tension between your two truths a new community of reconciliation is taking shape. Whatever happened, Frank, to the field beyond rightness and wrongness? I thought we were all going to meet you and the Sufi mystic Rumi there? This is not the time for prooftexting and literalism. This is not time to draw lines or to marginalize those outcasts on the fringes of ECUSA whose voices are so seldom heard.

Now, Frank, is the time to wage reconciliation."

Yours in the Diverse Center,

Matt Kennedy