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Ecclesiastical Ambiguity

I sometimes forget that this blog is about life as an artist and priest, so I hardly comment on church matters here. But that has to change if I want to stay true to the theme of the blog.

An interesting book I am reading now - just for "fun" - is Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity. The author, WSF Pickering, is a sociologist and priest of the English Church. It examines the Anglo-Catholic movement with particular attention to the ambiguities that characterize it, such as how a church (the CofE) which described or understood itself as protestant for several centuries later was asserted to be truly catholic. It examines other themes as well, such as the ever interesting topic of the homosexual subculture that characterized anglo-catholicism, as well as the idea of there being several valid ways of being "catholic" in the anglo-catholic world.

I'd be the first to admit that these ambiguities exist, but the reality is that similar ambiguities exist in other traditions, and even in the Christian religion itself. Learning to live with the ambiguities and charting a path through their midst to arrive at truth (a person, not a proposition) is what is key. I suppose life as an artist make living with ambiguities rather easy, as art itself is a rather ambiguous pursuit.

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