Press Releases
Interviews from Lambeth: The Bishop of Cashel & Ossory
Interviews from Lambeth: a series of interviews with the Church of Ireland bishops attending the conference
The Bishop of Cashel and Ossory, the Rt Revd Michael Burrows
In the penultimate in a series of interviews from the Lambeth Conference 2008, the Bishop of Cashel and Ossory, the Rt Revd Michael Burrows, talks to Church of Ireland Press Officer, Paul Harron.
PH: As we speak (Saturday 2/8/08), the 2008 Lambeth Conference is drawing to a close – how are you feeling at the moment?
BMB: Everyone is exhausted! We have been having 18-hour days for the last fortnight. The amount of encounter is actually very demanding on the mind, and of course we’ve had a lot of trudging around, so it’s been physically tiring. It has, however, been a remarkable time: the process, while at times rather frustrating and sometimes cumbersome, has held.
PH: Bishop, you wrote a pre-Lambeth piece in the most recent edition of the Church of Ireland journal ‘Search’ (Vol. 31 No.2) where you said that you weren’t greatly looking forward to the conference but hoped it would be sufficiently worthwhile to make the exercise worth it. Has it been worth it?
BMB: I still stand over the article and those remarks, but yes it has. As you know, we have been meeting in very small bible study groups and in larger small groups (‘indaba’ groups), so we have been talking ‘eyeball to eyeball’. There has been a significant building of trust and of appreciating other people’s integrity. How it all works out when we all return home is another matter. We will not have authoritative documents to take back with us but I imagine we will have a renewed sense of commitment. I personally have a new sense of the human reality of the Anglican Communion. I realise more than ever that, despite the frustrations and distractions, we are, like a dysfunctional family, incapable of falling out of love with each other.
I did have a sense of foreboding before the conference. I thought, ‘if things haven’t got any worse by the end of it that will be great’. I don’t feel that things have got worse on the key areas of contention, and in the areas of human encounter and shared worship they have got a good deal better. We do share a family resemblance. At the daily Eucharist I have felt strong affection for some who may have previously annoyed me. The genius of meeting across the table or around meal tables and agreeing and disagreeing in that format has been a healthy dynamic, not unlike within a family or indeed a diocese. That we will have sometimes passionate disagreements is inevitable. This has been a microcosm of the whole church, and while all have not been here, we have had a very large representation of the global church.
PH: What do you make of the absence of some bishops from the conference?
BMB: We have never been unconscious of the absentees. Indeed, we have had constant symbolic reminders of them, such as empty chairs set out within our groups to ensure that we do not forget them. If I had one criticism to make, I’d say that the worship – while powerful – could also have reminded us more of the sense of loss, acknowledging their absence. The worship was fairly constantly upbeat and we could have, perhaps, used the psalm tradition of lament to express that.
There is, perhaps, a kind of sense of loss for how things used to be in the Anglican Communion, not so much nostalgia, but maybe for the nature of Anglican coherence in a less obviously complicated context, but we live in a complex moral world today.
PH: As the conference concludes, what is actually coming out of it?
BMB: We will not have resolutions but a published reflection of what has been discussed – a narrative of the proceedings. This may be hard for the outside world to understand, but it is the price that has had to be paid for the fruitfulness of the method. There is some difficulty in having no report of resolutions. As we have not made utterances on the world or on society, arguably this narrative report will have less power: we’ll have no statements on, for example, the situation in Zimbabwe, in Iraq, on climate change or on ecumenical relations. Instead, we will have a balanced narrative of the experience of all there endorsed by an overarching letter of presidential endorsement by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
PH: Have you enjoyed the conference?
BMB: I was determined not to not enjoy it! It has been enjoyable and enriching. It has been a marvellous liturgical experience and I have also benefitted as a bishop from an enormous amount of in-service theological training. We have had a huge number of presentations to choose from, presented by highly informed people. I now feel ready to return home and get on with the work. I have a new sense of the reality and potential of the Anglican Communion and I would say that I now know better where people are coming from. It is one thing to understand something at the intellectual level, another at the experiential.
There have been some absolute gem highpoints of the conference. Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, gave a magisterial address on the subject of covenant: an electrifying insight from the Hebrew Scriptures to this Christian audience. He left us with a wonderful illustration which will stay long in my memory of Noah and the covenant with God wherein the one light of God shows the infinite variety of colours of the Creator.
PH: You refer to the liturgical experience – an area in which you are particularly interested: what stood out?
BMB: The variety of imagery used at the Eucharist has been memorable. The Kenyan liturgy, for example, referred heavily to the natural world.
PH: Final thoughts?
BMB: At the end of the day, the conference was not one of legislation but rather advisory in nature. Twenty years ago at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, Archbishop Robert Runcie in his final address said to go back and do in your dioceses ‘great things for God’. At the end of the conference, this Lambeth has energised and equipped us to do that
For further details about the Lambeth Conference, please click here.