LITTLE ROCK — God bless you, John B. Coburn, Churchman super-plus, Even when you're Bishop, you'll be one of us!
-Refrain sung at the close of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1976.
If there's an unofficial official American church, whatever the First Amendment says about no establishment of religion, it's got to be-to use its formal title-the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.
Much like the republic itself, the Episcopal church traces its descent back to the mother country, specifically the Church of England.
And much like the republic, the church has seen many a revolutionary change over the past couple of centuries. Through them all, it has remained a remarkably American institution, right down to its rambunctious divisions. For what would an American institution be without both remarkable upheavals and even more remarkable continuities?
While all Americans are not Episcopalians and never were, and fewer seem to be with every passing year, it's understandable why so many Americans take an almost patriotic interest in the church's affairs. One needn't share its theology to follow the adventures (and misadventures) of a church that included both George Washington and Robert E. Lee among its congregants, not to mention many another notable figure, including a dozen or so presidents of the United States.
It hasn't been easy holding the church together any more than it's been easy holding the country together. See the life and uneasy times of the Rt. Reverend John B. Coburn, who was presiding officer of his church's House of Deputies during one of the more tumultuous decades in the church's history-from 1967 to 1976.
It's a great honor, presiding over the Episcopal church's general convention-if the honoree can survive it. John Coburn's climactic convention came in 1976, just before he became bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts. With 1,007 deputies from 132 dioceses registered, that general convention may have been the largest legislative body in the world at the time.
By the time the convention adjourned, it had approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and a proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer, which in some eyes was the equivalent of revising Holy Scripture. The loss of some of the elegant language in the venerable old prayer book still pains. For that loss was not just the church's but another erosion of the treasure that is the English language.
You can imagine the commotion these historic changes engendered.
Women hadn't even been able to vote in the church's House of Deputies until 1970, when they were allowed to become deacons, and now they were to be ordained as priests.
Through all the days of debate, which seemed to go on forever, the Reverend Mr. Coburn presided over this historic convention the size of a small city with aplomb-not to say grace, wit, patience, endurance and, perhaps most of all, prayer. Most wondrous of all, the 1,007 deputies emulated their presiding officer's tolerance-dare we say love?-for those on the other side of these contentious issues. Not only did John Coburn survive that convention but so did the church. And they say theage of miracles is over.
It took a special kind of conciliator, a repairer of the breach (Isaiah 58:12), to hold the church together and reach out to those on the other side of the divide.
It was the church's great good fortune, if not much more, to have a soft-voiced John Coburn to lead it through the straits of discord. You didn't have to agree with where the church came out to be thankful that it had survived largely intact, if battered. And to be grateful it had a captain like the Reverend Coburn.
Maybe he came by his gifts naturally, for he was the son of an Episcopal priest and would be the father of another. Even before entering the priesthood, John Coburn was reaching out to the unorthodox (indeed, he might be considered among their number) in search of common ground on which to rebuild the old foundations.
Before taking the pulpit at St. James' Church in New York City, John Coburn spent a year teaching high-school English to drop-outs in Harlem; the text he used was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That book not only spoke to where those kids were in the world, but described a conversion experience, a struggle for self-discipline, anda commitment to a community. Those are all religious experiences even if many of the religious might not recognize them as such when illustrated by the life of Malcolm X-but John Coburn could.
To John Coburn, graduate of the Wooster School and later Princeton, where he played varsity lacrosse and majored in politics, the story of Malcolm X witnessed to a kind of grace he was able to see everywhere. Even in politics-even in church politics.
The Rt. Rev. John Coburn could be a determined advocate himself, even for ideas as mistaken as they were fashionable, but he never lost his tolerance for the other side. He didn't somuch deflect argument as rise above it. It was always wholly a pleasure to disagree with him; he made it a kind of spiritual experience. That is what made him not just another advocate but a healer. Very much a man of his time, his grace was rooted in an aspect of all time-in eternity.
His death at the ripe old age of 94 after a lifetime of devotion and devotions assures us that it is possible to leave this world with as much grace as it takes to navigate it.
Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:
Perspective, Pages 73, 78 on 08/23/2009