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Griswold bonds with Gen-Xers at Indianapolis conference
By Jan Nunley
2002-167s
6/28/2002
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[Episcopal News Service]
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold is not a member of Generation X--in fact, he's officially a card-carrying member of the Silent Generation (born 1925-1942). But his emphasis on prayer, his familiarity with Christian mysticism and the contemplative tradition, and his openness to new points of view clearly resonate with the generation born 1961-1981.
'Our presiding bishop is soooo cool! Now I know why he's the presiding bishop,' remarked Lori Johnson of San Diego to 'someone who asked me at work' about the GTNG gathering in Indianapolis June 20-22. 'He was great, I was impressed, pleasantly surprised, and overwhelmed by his comments.'
The group's core values are 'my passions,' said Griswold, who recalled the group's initial 1998 meeting as one from which he came away 'increased in terms of my understanding of the mystery of the church.'
'My sense was that you have your own passionately held points of view but in order to hold them you don't want to disenfranchise someone else,' Griswold said. 'You are able to deal with what I call 'multiple realities' in a way that people of my generation were not shaped.'
In an hour-long session restricted to clergy, he fielded questions on college chaplaincy (he saw 'a reawakening' of its importance), the possibility of 'alternative episcopal oversight' (real, but 'not a large issue' across the whole church), and a shift in sacramental emphasis from baptism to eucharistic community. Then Griswold, his wife Phoebe, and communications aide Barbara Braver attended break-out sessions for more detailed discussions.
The next day, addressing both clergy and laity, Griswold joked about his own early days in ministry, when he saw himself as a liturgical 'revolutionary, a rebel' looking at the church's hierarchy from its edges. He warned of 'a kind of institutional idolatry--and it could be an idolatry not only of the past but of some exciting future.'
'All of us have our fundamentalisms, and you don't know it until finally your fundamentalism has been pushed too far and you say 'wait a minute--I can put up with this, this, and this, but this is just too far!' ' he said, to knowing laughter.
He also lamented the 'cynicism and despair' Gen-X clergy had reported to him among older clergy to whom they looked for mentors. 'How often clergy proffer the Eucharist to others and never receive it themselves in any sort of deliberate way,' Griswold noted. That stemmed from having 'no deep place' in Christ. He urged Gen-Xers to stay 'rooted and grounded' in prayer--not 'anxious, desperate pleas to God, but prayer as a way of finding an interior freedom and a kind of perspective that allows you to appreciate but also to sit loose to some of the realities of the institution.'
'You pray. You pray deeply,' he observed. 'The capacity to make room for difference and otherness has to do with your own groundedness. You don't depend on the institution as the source of all meaning; you know there's a larger frame of reference we call 'life in Christ.''
Calling the next generation 'an incredible gift,' Griswold urged them to guide their elders in the practice of a 'graced pluralism.' Some of the culture wars that are going on in the church 'are not life-producing,' he said. 'Some of the clashes of absolutes, and the incapacity to see that there might be virtue and value and authenticity in someone who disagrees with you is not a difficulty you have…and so you could help us to engage in that enlargement of consciousness that I deeply believe is of the Spirit.'
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