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Griswold Uses Trinity Institute to Extend His Role as Teacher

Episcopal News Service. June 23, 1998 [98-2203]

(ENS) Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold was featured speaker at the 29th annual Trinity Institute, May 26-28, preaching at the opening Eucharist and making two major presentations on the theme, "Acquiring a Listening Heart."

Participants in the institute, in the sanctuary at the Trinity Church in New York, and those at the 180 downlink sites across the nation, expressed appreciation for the presiding bishop's teaching role. And Griswold sounded themes that have become hallmarks of that ministry, themes he has articulated at clergy retreats, staff meetings at the Church Center in New York, and last March's meeting of the House of Bishops in North Carolina.

In welcoming the presiding bishop, the first to address the institute, its director, the Rev. Frederick Burnham, said that it is becoming clear that Griswold "is talking a new language, a wonderful, welcome new language for this church."

Listen with the ear of the heart

Citing the prologue of the Rule of St. Benedict, Griswold in his sermon and again later urged Christians to listen carefully, listen with the ear of the heart. "Therefore, to speak to the heart, to listen with the heart, to have one's heart transformed from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh is to touch upon the deepest and most fundamental dimension of who we are and are called to be," he said.

Griswold quoted Flannery O'Connor's description of her role as a writer, one who follows "lines of spiritual motion, as they may be perceived on the surface of life, to where they provide revelation...tracking down the Holy Ghost, an attempt that should be pursued with gusto." That task would be a good summary of everything he meant to say, Griswold said. "We are all, by virtue of being called to listen, obliged to track down the Holy Ghost with gusto."

Drawing on the now-familiar themes of catholicity, conversation, and communion, Griswold said that catholicity is "God's fullness made manifest in Christ, welcoming and enfolding us in baptism where we are caught up into solidarities not of our own choosing." In its Trinitarian fullness, catholicity also draws us into "the circle dance of dispossession, the very life of God...That fullness is expressed in the mystery of communion," he said.

"Communion is not only mystic and sweet, in the words of the hymn, but also costly," Griswold said. "We have exhausted clubhouse Anglicanism, we must go beneath the cultural surface." The collapse of that "Anglican certitude and the smugness that goes with it" opens up new possibilities. It frees us from worrying about whether or not we like each other because we draw upon baptism and the Eucharist for our meaning," Griswold said.

Yet he warned that we have, "devalued the power of the sacraments to shape us and become instead technicians of the sacred."

Conversation as sacred enterprise

"One of the saddest realities of the present day, both in the church and the world, is that we tend to lead with our conclusions, without soliciting from one another how we reached those conclusions," Griswold argued. "Conversation is a sacred enterprise because it is really about living the mystery of communion...engaging each other's perceptions of the truth."

Conversation takes "real discipline, beginning with self-scrutiny and self-knowledge," Griswold said. "Authentic community is built on the ground of conversation" and requires "time and commitment." And it is "profoundly sinful" to reduce people to caricatures "so we don't have to take them seriously, so we can discount their truth," he said. "A necessary condition of conversation is that each person enters with self-respect and we honor one another's capacity for self-giving and self-constraint."

As he has in other settings, Griswold said that conversation means turning around, being turned around, a verb of motion, being shaped through association with others, requiring "ever more deep, full listening of the heart and renouncing what is not large enough for God's mysteries, as Kathleen Norris writes."

Listening carefully and openly to other voices, especially voices that may disagree with us, "points out limitations of our own truth." He concluded, "My prayer is that we by listening with the ear of our hearts we may become a community of grace and truth."

Making room for mystery

In his second address, Griswold talked about "hardness of heart" as a stumbling block, "a heart unwilling to make room for God's mysteries." Yet, "listening to the word of God expands our boundaries...the word is larger than we are." It is this word, one of "creativity and boundless vitality," that is available to us throughout Scripture and in the lives of God's people, according to Griswold.

It is clear from the book of Acts, Griswold observed, that "the word of God was out there happening all over the place and the disciples were constantly trying to make sense of it...The word was constantly pulling them forward and expanding their notion of what it meant to be people of faith," he said. "But the word is also intimate, more intimate that we are to ourselves, as Augustine of Hippo says."

In his conclusion, Griswold said that "the word is already within us, waiting to be born into our consciousness...intensely present in the ebb and flow of events that make us who we are."

Griswold joined authors Gail Godwin and Frederick Buechner in a panel discussion at the end of the conference. It gave the presiding bishop an opportunity to say that he is "amazed at the graciousness of the spirit that is a reality in our church." Despite some sharp disagreements on issues, he said that church members are treating different points of view honestly." The conference itself, he pointed out, was marked by "calmness and reflectedness."

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