I wound up taking the Episcopal confirmation class and getting confirmed. Something basic in the confirmation class always bothered me. The main catechist was a newly ordained associate who was clearly on a good career path: the parish I'd joined tended to produce headmasters, deans, and bishops, and this guy had married a bishop's daughter. I knew guys like that in college, already on the fast track toward white-shoe law firms or investment banks or cabinet positions (or all three), so the type wasn't strange to me. But I knew at a very deep level that this guy was ready to do whatever it took.
I heard a report not much later about a prominent doctor in the parish who was a big enough donor to be seated at the head table next to the bishop (Rusack) at some dinner. Eventually, the doctor stammered out, "You know, Bob [I suspect he was able to call him Bob], as a doctor, it's always been hard for me to accept the virgin birth. It's been a long and spiritual journey. But now, after many years of struggle, I've come to recognize that yes, it's true."
Bob replied in astonishment, "What? You don't believe in any of that stuff, do you?"
This was maybe 15 years after Jim Pike, in the estimate of his brother bishops, took things a little too far. Pike's biographers, though, point out that in the bishops' view, the problems were more of style than substance, and Bishop Rusack is probably as good an example of Broad Church thinking as any. The good doctor was clearly a little too naïve, and Bob Rusack pointedly told him so.
I was also a little naïve myself, and that parish a little too sophisticated, and when the rector (formerly Dean of the American Cathedral, Paris) indicated he wanted to counsel me about something, I left and went to a parish that was felt to be Low Church as opposed to Broad. I wasn't sure what the difference was, and nobody had actually gone so far as to explain to me that the first parish was Broad Church, any more than one fish would need to explain patiently to another that, after all, we swim in water. I was happier at the second place, possibly only because I'd learned a little better to keep my mouth shut.
Indeed, my catechist had spent a good part of confirmation class covering the career path of Episcopal clergy, including the ins and outs of how a vestry hires and (heaven forfend) fires a rector. The associate who'd been hired along with my catechist at the first parish had already moved over to the second, on his own very good career path, so there wasn't that much distinction between Low Church and Broad; you could do very well either way. (I got along much better with the second guy; I'm sorry to say he had difficulties over the ladies in a later parish, was eased out of the priesthood, but took up a successful parallel career in the non-profit field.)
I was uncomfortable with the subtext of all this stuff the whole time. I told my mother at one point that it was hard for me to think The Episcopal Church had much purpose other than providing certain people with good careers. My guardian angel, still at work, seems to have prevailed on me to recognize that I had nevertheless returned to the Church, and this was as good an interim step as any.
I've got to say that what bothered me at a very basic level about the careerism sacrificing both doctrine and integrity to itself in TEC also bothers me in what I see of the US-Canadian Ordinariate. Whenever I get a little too close to Ordinariate priests, as I did with Fr Wolfe earlier this week, I get the same feeling. Maybe it's just me.
