Scottish Theologian's Meditations Take Bishops on Five-day Wellness Trip
Episcopal News Service. September 26, 1990 [90248]
Mary Lee B. Simpson, Editor of The Southwestern Episcopalian, publication of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia
WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 20 -- A 45-year-old Scottish Presbyterian mother of three, who describes herself as "a licensed question asker" and the Anglican Communion as a "duck-billed platypus," charmed and challenged bishops with her daily meditations on healing during the House of Bishops meeting.
Elizabeth Templeton, a theologian familiar to many of the bishops for the daily meditations she offered during the Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican bishops, took the clergy on a five-day wellness trip through the worlds of history, nature, the cosmos, ministry, and self. With a kind of magpie temperament and childlike imagination, she connected the bishops' busy lives with past and present theology through Bible readings and prayers.
Templeton said she hates the staleness of theology and thrives on the untidy questions that surface in the theological questions she finds in newspapers, novels, and plays -- not necessarily sermons and doctrine.
The groundwork for this theologian's meditations during Eucharist, done on a mother's daily jog, comes from ordinary things like what her children say and do.
"Children have a kind of truthfulness that theology needs and that most of us adults don't accept," said Templeton. Her perspective as a parent surfaced in these meditations.
"I think being a parent has taught me more about forgiveness than I knew before," Templeton told the bishops during a meditation on the healing of history. "The amazing thing about the forgiveness of small children is that they don't choose to do it. They do it like breathing, like the Samaritan finding the wounded Jew and simply seeing that it is obvious that he needed to be picked up," she said. "They do it like breathing. "There's no self-conscious magnaminity about it."
In her meditation on the healing of nature, Templeton wondered aloud about the burden the next generation will bear as self-conscious protectors of nature. "As our 11-year-old steers me round the supermarket, firmly vetoing products made with animal fat, or damaging rain forests, I sometimes wonder, 'Are these children going to be capable of having orgies of consumption?"'
With a sense of mischief, Templeton challenged the bishops to work at healing the church by looking at all of life, and she urged them to be more open to all that is going on around them. "Things won't be mended just by looking at ourselves," she said during an interview.
Templeton has been questioning all her life. As a teenager when she went through "that awful evangelical thing where you weren't a Christian if you didn't say the right stuff," she recalled her father treating her with great gentleness and Christian nurture.
As a young adult Templeton found she couldn't hold on to her belief in God. "I asked, 'Will this be something I shed?' I wanted to tackle it hard, to give theology the benefit of the doubt before I gave it up," she said.
That collapse led Templeton into a study of theology at New College, Edinburgh. She stopped short of ordination because she couldn't sign the church's confession of faith.
Gradually, and with the help of a Greek Orthodox colleague at Edinburgh University where she taught religion, Templeton became aware of Sartre's concept that "what's not there is more important than what's there."
It would be facile and a little cozy to seal these meditations with a fairy-tale "and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after" ending, Templeton said on the final day of the meeting. "But it is clear to me from the experience of these few days...that we move inside the stretching generosity of God who kindles in us such desire for the openness of his kingdom that we do not know who we are, or who we shall be till we can greet one another, and the alienated world as our own cherished selves."
At the end of the series, one admirer told Templeton, "You tied up those meditations so neatly."
"Oh, I do hope not," replied the woman who loves questions. "I'm much too untidy for that."