The Patriot Post® · The Bishop of Unbelief

It must be the climate up there around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; it seems to freeze everything, including belief.

Consider the unbeliefs of the Rev. Kevin Genpo Thew Forrester, bless his heart and save his soul. He’s just been elected bishop of the diocese of Northern Michigan even though he doesn’t sound too keen on some of his church’s teachings.

For example, he doesn’t believe God sent his only begotten son to die for the sins of the world. A minor detail, perhaps, but one that naturally raises the question: Why then would he want to be a bishop? Or even a priest?

Almost as impressive, at least from the perspective of those of us with literary pretensions, the Reverend Forrester has been known to tinker with the Book of Common Prayer, that treasure of the English tongue. It seems the Reverend thinks he can improve on the Apostles’ Creed and the baptismal vows.

Here’s hoping the Reverend Forrester still believes in this much of the old Book of Common Prayer: For we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things we ought not to have done. And there is no health in us.

To some of us, that isn’t just an expression of belief but an all too observable condition.

Whatever dangers the Reverend’s dabbling with texts represents to the “faith, unity and discipline” of the church, which an Episcopal bishop vows to uphold, his urge to reword some of the traditional texts to meet his personal specifications does represent a danger to the English language. Whatever’s left of it in these Twittering times.

The Reverend says he doesn’t believe in Satan, either, which must be just the kind of thing Old Nick loves to hear as he goes to and fro in the land and walks up and down in it, seeing whom he may devour next. It’s just about his greatest weapon, folks’ not believing in Him. For once we’ve depersonified evil, and reduced it to a nominalist abstraction rather than a real Presence, we have disarmed ourselves against it.

There is something more than irreverence in the rationalist’s demand that the believer explain why he believes; there is something of the voyeur. To insist on an explanation of another’s belief amounts to an invasion of privacy, an intrusion into an intimate relationship – the one between worshipper and Worshipped, the created and the Creator, the loved and the Lover.

By now the Reverend Forresters have succeeded in creating their own backlash in the mainstream church. In a turn that still strikes some of us more parochial types as unexpected, if not miraculous, most of the world’s Anglicans, that is, adherents of the old Church of England, now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The see of Canterbury seems to have grown somewhat, and acquired some colorful offshoots.

These new Anglicans grow restive with all the backsliding they detect in their still imperialistic brethren. Whenever a bishop back in Engand or the United States embraces some new morality that sounds a lot like the old immorality, they threaten to go their own way – or rather the old way. And they may yet succeed in restoring it in the church.

God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Who would have guessed that the Third World might come to the rescue of faith in the First?

The Reverend Forrester says he believes in Satan only figuratively, as a generalization, a symbol. This is the kind of remark that always brings to mind the young Flannery O'Connor and her response when a condescending Mary McCarthy, already well established as a successful and fashionable writer, was talking to students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But let Flannery tell the story herself, as she did years later in a letter to a friend:

“I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy. … She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. … Toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. (She) said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most portable person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it. That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

The heart still stirs at her words after all these years. Because there is an unassailable truth in them: The heart owes no one an explanation.

© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.