Zoom and the Mystical Vocation of Episcopal Priests
By: Ken Wilson
Tags: Cultue, Technology, Spirituality, Religion, Covid 19 Crisis

The Episcopal Church has been the poster-child for the institutional decline of Christendom. Evolution, however, reveals that new things don’t emerge out of nothing, but out of a previous something — necessarily, but not easily. It takes a shift of seismic proportions to infuse the kind of energy needed to change institutions rooted in the bedrock of Manhattan property (The Episcopal Church owns a lot of it) and not so long ago, the dramas unfolding on The Crown of Netflix fame. I wonder if it’s happening right now.

My wife, Julia Huttar Bailey, is an Episcopal priest and I’m a non-denominational co-pastor (with Emily Swan) of a five year old LGBTQ-affirming congregation. We’re in the pandemic scramble together helping our congregations connect in new ways through Zoom, FB Live and other virtual means. Compared to Julia’s congregation, mine is younger (I’m the third oldest member at 68), has live-streamed its services from the beginning, with an active FB presence and all the rest. Julia is in the dining room now sporting a Beats headset and helping her elderly parishioners connect to Zoom for Holy Week celebrations. I know her clergy friends, like Paula Miller, a third career Episcopal priest. Paula serves St. Michael’s and All Angels, a small parish in a working class neighborhood next door to Detroit. Today, Paula is prepping to bring her parishioners together in an Upper Room Zoom service observing the Last Supper with a brand new twist.

Episcopal congregations haven’t been on the leading edge of adopting new technologies. Websites are often semi-neglected, little attention paid to Search Engine Optimization, homilies rarely pod-casted. No fog machines and wooden stools on stage like the hipster churches. Many of these Episcopal churches lack vibrant children’s ministries with snazzy names like KidZone, but provide excellent care for aging members. Their social fabric is often tighter than the savviest small-group-generating mega-churches with sprawling physical plants that look like shopping malls visible from the freeway. It’s more like Cheers, where everyone knows your name. Especially the priests who gently tend their flocks like a shepherd. These congregations do a thing called “Exchanging the Peace,” right in the middle of the Sunday service, where just before communion, neighborly chaos ensues for five minutes as everyone literally hugs or shakes hands or otherwise greets everyone else.

Well not now, thanks to social distancing.

Their priests have, in the first few weeks of this the new abnormal, mastered Zoom, figured out FB live, and transitioned from brick and mortar church to what Phyllis Tickle called a “non-locative place” (more on that in a moment). And in the blink of an institutional eye, these priests have entered more deeply and powerfully into their go-between ministry as priests, enabling their members to do something that seems very mystical indeed. These priests have empowered many of their not-so-tech-savvy members to enter a virtual reality, hosted by the Internet, a non-locative place accessed through a portal through which one may learn to to play around, to roam within, a different manifestation of reality constituted by the energetic connections between nodal points. Which sounds very much like a spiritual place, doesn’t it? A place running parallel to, and mysteriously beyond the places detectable by our GPS devices.

This is the stuff of pre-modern mysticism. The aforementioned Phyllis Tickle, who coined “non-locative place” as a term for the Internet and the spiritual realm, was a closet mystic. She’d shoot me for saying such a thing, but Phyllis died in 2015 and transitioned to what she called “Otherwhere” — a realm beyond offense. Christianity in the East is more adept at the notion of prayer as a “going somewhere” phenomenon more than a “doing something” one. The standard prayer form in the Eastern Church is The Jesus Prayer, a simple chant that when used with intention, is known to assist people to “descend with their minds into their hearts,” an experience of portal-ing into a transcendent realm. In the thought-world of Episcopalians, the Eucharist (communion) is such a portal meant to transport one to a realm of divine mysteries. As is the Book of Common Prayer, with its “daily offices” — prayers at intervals through the day that provided the occasion for Saul of Tarsus, during his noon-day prayers on the road to Damascus, to encounter spiritual realities that changed his world and ours. In God we may live and move and have our being, but as creatures of flesh and blood and everyday consciousness, we need portals into the transcendent realm in which our space-time four dimension are nestled.

Institutions normalize to long-standing realities and it can dull their senses to change as it emerges. The Episcopal Church enjoyed enormous cultural ascendancy in the the post WW2 era, and the losses sneaked up on them unawares. Now it has adapted to the period of decline as a new long-standing reality. I wonder if this, too, may mask the signs of big changes as they are newly underway. Julia’s diocese (70 or so churches in SE Michigan) embraced a dynamic new Bishop, Bonnie Perry, who revived an Episcopal congregation in Chicago. The prophetic preaching at Bishop Perry’s consecration service, by the Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, was met with thunderous applause — not the done thing in such settings. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry is a powerful voice, known for his preaching at the last royal wedding, and a man of deep faith, conviction, and vision. But religious institutions don’t change with dynamic leadership alone. As my co-author, Emily Swan, wrote in Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance, it takes a massive energy infusion, a seismic shift in the landscape that affects everything all at once for better or worse (and usually both) — perhaps, such as we are witnessing today.

To that end, I wonder if my Episcopal priest colleagues appreciate the priestliness, the mystical meaningfulness of what they are doing, helping many of their less than tech-savvy parishioners learn that they can find meaning and connection and love (human and divine) by accessing a non-locative place through their computers and their smart phones. Julia spent an hour and a half recently to help a member in her mid-nineties log on to Zoom — an act of patient, priestly mentoring to enable connection in a time of social distancing.

We’ve been on a long slope toward social distancing for decades now, haven’t we? Front porches abandoned for back yard decks, people living next to other people for years before learning their names. High rates of mobility plucking us out of social networks just when we are starting to feel connected. And now, so many of us, driven into a kind of hiding from each other.

But with the shock of this seismic lurch into social distancing, we have Episcopal priests (who trace their lineage to the apostles by a line of descent) suddenly — at lightening speed, institutionally-speaking — helping their congregants find connection in a new-to-many-of-them kind of place. A place where love can happen, despite the isolation so many have been forced into.