Daily Archives: September 8, 2011

Remembering 9-11

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The media are full of 9-11 commemorations. Linda Holmes mentions many of them, and watches part of one, 9-11: The Days After. Her response:

What I personally felt was a rolling back of a ten-year process in which my memories became less raw and my sadness became more manageable than it was when I stood on the lawn of the state capitol watching a co-worker pal of mine eulogize his brother at my state’s official memorial service. Mind you, my experience of this was strictly from far away, living as I did in the Midwest at the time. I was marked so much less than almost anyone else, and yet feeling that healing effectively un-happening was profoundly unnerving, and I found myself wondering why I was doing it.

Susan Jacoby attacks the “sacralized myth of 9-11” with power:

This Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011, will undoubtedly mark the apotheosis of the long sacralization of the terrorist attacks that brought down the towers of the World Trade Center and killed more than 3000 in New York, Washington and Shanksville, PA. By sacralization, I do not mean the phantasms of those who see a crucifix in a surviving piece of metal among the ruins but an ongoing attempt, usually in religious but also in secular rhetoric, to elevate this event from one more chapter in the history of human evil to “the day that changed everything.”

This mass murder did not change everything; it changed only some things. And what it did change, it generally changed for the worse.

Some religious reflections:

Structure, Anti-Structure, Communitas: The Future of the Episcopal Church

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No, this is not a post on Victor Turner. Rather, it is a brief reflection on the need for change in institutional churches, particularly my own, the Episcopal Church.

Mark Harris has been asking hard questions about re-structuring the Episcopal Church in response to budget shortfalls and other issues. In one post, he asks whether it is time for a special General Convention. Earlier, he offered some imaginative possibilities for the future of the Episcopal Church here and here. Insofar as his questions arise out of budgetary considerations, it seems to me, he is reacting rather than imagining new possibilities. . The question should be, what sort of church do we need to be at this moment in history? Our institutions were designed and built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and do not seem nimble enough to change for the twenty-first.

Scott Gunn has also posted on this issue here and here. The latter post is an attempt to think about the current response to the need for change in terms of grief, which might be helpful on one level, but seems also to obscure things in some ways.

It seems to me that Gregory Jones’ comments about “sustainable institutions” might be helpful here

Less noticed, perhaps, is our longing for God, and for elegance, in the design of our institutions. The question is not whether we will organize ourselves; it is whether we will do so well or badly. We yearn for institutions — including those in the social sector — that will function with what Matthew E. May, in his book “In Pursuit of Elegance,” calls “effortless effectiveness”: an ability to achieve maximum effect with minimal effort.

We marvel at corporations, such as Apple, that offer such effectiveness. Apple combines identity and innovation, efficiency and creativity, functionality and beauty. Such organizations attend to the design of the physical spaces they occupy, to be sure, but elegant design is more than that. It involves attending to the design of people’s time and development, the design of ideas, the design of services, the design of networks and the design of budgets.

In fact, what Jones is describing is precisely the same sort of thing that Harris is imagining in his posts about the future Episcopal Church.