God in the Tesseract: Remembering the Ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi

"God does not change, He is the same today as He was yesterday and will be tomorrow."
                                                              -conservative railing against change...

a model tesseract created in two dimensions by a sequence of
three dimensional diagrams displayed in the right linear order

Like mosts points of heresy the statement above takes a truth, the wholeness and perfection of God beyond change, and then places it in an inappropriate context, the changing and tumultuous existence of created beings within time and space.

The reality is that God does not exist. Existence is dependent upon time and space. Existence is what flows from God, in creation, it is something which God can experience and within which be experienced as fully as existence allows, but it is not something upon which God depends.

To say that God is the same today, as yesterday, and tomorrow is to place God in a box... a box we do not even recognize we are placing God within because it is the Box of Linear Time within which we confine the vast majority of our perspectives. To that end, while still ultimately faulty, we must take God out of the Box and strive to put God in the Tesseract.

We all know how to draw a square on a piece of paper, a two dimensional object, and we handle various types of cubes, three dimensional box shaped things, everyday. A tesseract is this type of object in four dimensions. We can only experience it as a cube, because we move through time in a linear way, but the tesseract itself consistently has characteristics of which we are not aware but might become aware as we shift forward in time. In more familiar terms the Holy Spirit will continue to teach us new things.

Now this is still a broken metaphor, the tesseract is nothing but a more advanced box that limits the nature of God... but it is a less broken metaphor than one that speculates God as a held constant within the confines of time, which is what we so often are trapped into doing by our limited perspective.

Now let us ground ourselves on a specific point in time... January 25th, 1944. Japan was invading China and all foreigners were required to leave and this exodus included all of the Anglican clergy in the country. The one exception was a deacon, Florence Li Tim-Oi. Bishop Ronald Hall made a decision to ordain Florence Li Tim-Oi, who showed all charisms of a call to priestly ministry, to the priesthood and thus provided the Anglicans in China a servant to aide them in going about sacramental ministry... a need so pressing that the reality of Florence Li Tim-Oi being the first woman allowed to enter such a role was suddenly no longer of consequence.

There are two options about what occurred at this moment. The first is that there is a simple box about who God is and that we have to stay in that box whose lines are known. If this is the case then the Rev'ds Hall and Tim-Oi broke a wall in this simple box and walked outside of God's purview. I continue to find this a rather sad and simplistic construction of God more like unto an idol than anything requiring an actual depth of faith. The other option is that an ontological reality always possible but simply not manifested within our linear context fully manifested itself.¹ To put this more simply, something that always could have been happened. Or, to go back to our initial model, a shift occurred in the tesseract which shifted the nature of the cube we can reference within our spacial and temporal reality and thus revealed a deeper truth than the one previously known.

The second possibility, the one I hold to, is a bit scary. It requires faith in a God whose nature is not only at points unknown but who is in reality unknowable. It requires a constant humility in the face of the erosion of understanding and the potential shifts of the box of who God is and what is of God. It holds up faith in a process of discernment and understanding, but is doubtful and suspicious of the static set of known facts considered immovable and set. It does not deny the unchanging nature of God but does recognize the problematic viewpoint by which we have to grasp said nature... more than anything it is prepared to encounter points of intense revolution where pastoral necessity upends historic boundaries of what is pastorally appropriate or theologically sound. It recognizes the Rev'd Florence Li Tim-Oi not only for the pragmatic reality of her blessed life and service with us but the fulfillment of ontological realities brought into our keen by that blessed life and service.

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1 It is important to note that in all probability this was not the first manifestation of this ontological reality within our perception of linear time. Earlier manifestations from the first centuries of Christianity were simply ignored, repressed, and forgotten by later centuries.

At the start of the conversation: Where Sacramental Marriage Equality will place the Episcopal church...

The Episcopal Church has gone about the inclusion of the LGBT community in its own curious way. As we are a prayer book people our process of inclusion has been about allowing the inclusion of LGBT individuals into our prayer book rites. While at some point a hurdle has been placed before every rite in the Book of Common Prayer the two major hurdles for the LGBT community have been that of entering into the rite of Ordination and the rite of Marriage. There might have been better paths we could have taken but I am not sure if, given our strengths and weaknesses as a church, we were actually capable of any other. This path does, however, have ramifications that, on account of our perspective, I am not sure we recognize.

What has been asked from the LGBT community is that the Grace manifested in their lives be recognized and named as such by the Church. That the inward invisible grace alive and well in the LGBT community be placed in the context of the Church’s outward and visible signs. The struggle we have been taking up is that of bringing the church to a point where it is capable of discerning, openly and honestly, the fruits of the spirit that manifest themselves when Christ’s Crucifixion is Proclaimed within the LGBT community. This is the basic struggle the church has encountered throughout history as outsider groups have begun to openly make such proclamations and in so doing call into question things taken for granted by the church.

A trap that we have fallen into repeatedly, in these discussions and others, is speaking about access to the sacraments as inalienable rights. This is simply bad theology. When we are dealing with matters of Sacrament we are dealing with matters of Grace and no individual has an inalienable right to Grace. Grace is the fundamental reality of God’s creating, redeeming, and sustaining us from which the natural order flows and it is upon that foundation that arguments of inalienable rights are then built. One simply cannot build a functioning theology of God’s Grace thats foundation is the inalienable rights of individuals.

The problem is that while the grace denoted within Ordination and Marriage might be the ones that we are most prepared to discern and able to facilitate they only engage the tiniest fraction of the fruits of the spirit manifesting themselves in the LGBT community and the greater LGBTQ+ community. The Q+ signifying individuals whose reality simply is not readily contained within the terms Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender but is also contained neither within heteronormative nor cisnormative contexts. Discussions of Ordination and Marriage allow us to engage and work with members of the LGBT community whose lives generally conform to our preexisting concepts of ordained clergy and married couples. Individuals who are as close to white european heterosexuals as one can be and also be LGBT. It also means that we are primarily focused on LGBT adults.

Now these are good conversations to have, we have to start somewhere and on account of our context as a church these were the conversations that we were going to fall into before all others. The problem is that the church, even at points the LGBT individuals in the church, think this is THE conversation with the LGBTQ+ community. That a church with LGBT individuals being ordained and married is a church inculturated and aware of the Grace of God manifesting itself within the LGBTQ+ community. This is simply, and overwhelmingly, not the case.  

This summer we will be continuing the conversation around wether we will recognize the grace manifest in many same gender couples for what it is, Marriage. Some want space to keep the conversation percolating on local levels, some want local levels to be able to name the grace for what they know it to be, some want the time for this conversation to be over and the recognition of this grace to be Marriage throughout the church. There is a chance that, on the national level, the conversation will be closed. Regardless, however, the local conversation will be far from over.

In some places an end to the conversation on a national level will make the conversation easier on a local level and in some cases it will not. That is the case with any of the outcomes above, and I think what will make the final decision at the end of the day is which of the three possibilities before us will best facilitate further honest and open conversations with the LGBTQ+ community that lead, as we have found them to do, towards the inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals. It is, in my mind, the perpetuation of those conversations that is of utmost importance, far beyond the actual pronouncement around marriage.

What the LGBTQ+ community has within it to transform the Church in regards to its witness about the Grace of marriage is huge. The LGBTQ+ community inherently moves us towards an understanding of Marriage outside of the oppressive gender norms inherent to its use in our history. As the church fumbles towards an understanding of the Grace of Marriage that is not determined by patriarchy it is the queer voice that will be key in the subversion of this gender oppression and the undermining of patriarchy. This is, however, only the smallest of ripples that the LGBTQ+ community has to offer a church willing to be transformed by the grace manifesting itself in our midst as we proclaim Christ Crucified. 

The conversation so far towards the inclusion of the LGBT community in regards to Ordination and Marriage is not THE conversation the church needs to have with the LGBTQ+ community. It is the conversation we needed to have so that we could have in our midst those able to facilitate the actual conversation between the church and the LGBTQ+ community. The LGBTQ+ community is truly diverse, way beyond the spectrum of those individuals whose lives and patterns, like my own, can readily fit into the expected norms of the church. For those of us from the LGBTQ+ community who fit in It is rather easy to forget that the rest of the LGBTQ+ community exists and has overwhelming value for the church. It is easy for those whose only experience of the LGBTQ+ community are the LGBT individuals who readily fit into the church to even know that we are not all that there really is to know. It is easy for us to fall into an echo chamber and think that because we all are hearing the same thing the full conversation is taking place. 

No matter what happens this year at General Convention the conversation will be extraordinarily far from over. The conversation to include the LGBTQ+ community that can readily conform to our general expectations within our norms is the easy one, it is the minor one. The actual conversation is the one ahead of us, the one were we begin to ask not how can the church readily include the LGBTQ+ community in its midst but how can the church be transformed to a deeper and greater understanding of God’s Grace through the unique proclamation of Christ Crucified by Queers. The conversations will be like unto those that tore through the church after the early Jewish followers of the Rabbi Jesus began to be transformed by early Greek followers of the Way of Jesus. It is for those that we must prepare ourselves, more than anything else.