Commemoration of the Ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi
Today’s assigned readings:
Genesis 11:1-9, Hebrews 6:13-20, John 4:1-15
Dear Friends,
Christ is Risen!
And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
Genesis 11:6-7
Liturgically, this is usually paired with the image of the tongues of fire at Pentecost. On the one the “curse” of languages resulted in the division of everyone. In the other the gift of tongues resulted in the ability to spread the Gospel in a unified manner.
Anyone familiar with the current Anglican Wars would question the whole gift of tongues as unity. It seems that the North and South are split, largely, over the issues of Race and Sex (as between gay and straight, African/Hispanics and White folks). The unifying gift of Language and the Book of Common Prayer holds none of this together. Someone has noticed (and I just tried to find a set of blog posts from last week - and failed) that, in fact, on the internet, the Anglicans get along much better than they seem to do “in real life”. Conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and progressives can, usually, socialise well together.
And today is the anniversary of the Ordination of Li Tim-Oi to the priesthood: but not everyone will be commemorating it.
I was living in Hoboken, NJ, when I first got connected to the internet. This was about 1990 or, perhaps, the winter of early 1991. I had a computer and I asked Mom and Dad for a new-fangled thing called a Modem. Back in those days the easy way to get one was to buy a Prodigy sign-up package. The computer was in the back room of my second-floor apartment: which was actually an add-on, sort of an expanded closet that had been built on the room of the first floor. It was under-insulated and tended to creak if the wind blew too hard. I remember sitting in that room in the chill of a North East winter, during one day when the weather had closed work: and I chatted with my first online-contact. And later, on Prodigy, I discovered other Episcopalians. Since I worked at the Episcopal Church Center, attended a parish in Greenwich Village and socialised all with a lot of folks from the Diocese of New York, these folks online were quite a shock!
They spent most of their time complaining about the people I hung out with.
A few of them were asking questions to which I knew the answers. But some of them were asking questions that needed to be referred to the people at work. So I printed out a bunch of the questions and handed them around the Episcopal Church Center.
And promptly caused a crisis: because one party, named Odessa, knew the people about whom she was complaining. When they got her name off the emails, she reported “There’s a spy from the Church Center on Prodigy!!!!!”
C’est moi.
Later, on the Episcopal Church’s Quest network - a part of Ecunet - we found that conservatives and liberals could debate loudly and longly. Then there was the infamous Northern Ireland Incident.
Back in the Day, when I was a political activist (and my name was Bill Bailey) my favorite issue was the British Government in the north of Ireland. As might be expected I was involved in several American organizations that could be seen as offering support for the Irish Cause - but I was never a member of the one group in the US known to offer financial support (and suspected of other sorts of support) to the IRA.
I also hosted a news list, at the suggestion of a member of the Hierarchy of my church (Desmond Tutu’s press secretary), that distributed about 70 stories a day clipped from the various newspapers in Ireland (north and south) and the UK. This list was run on the Ecunet service. This was distributed to about 7 (or maybe 
members of the Anglican Communion, Two Heirarchs, myself, and four others. Despite the small grouping - and the high-ranking support - the list became the subject of an international row as Robin Eames, the Archbishop of Armagh in the Church of Ireland accused me - through his press secretary, Elizabeth Harries - of supporting the IRA and using church resources to do so. Somehow, Jim Rosenthal, Press Officer in the Anglican Communion office, got involved in the whole thing.
For a couple of days in June and July of 1994, I was dealing with phone calls from Ireland and England and wherever else, faxes from press offices and official denials. And, evidently, Liz Harries even contacted the British Security forces because, seemingly, I knew too much about a certain incident - widely reported in the American Press, but hushed up in Northern Ireland.
In the end, the Archbishop of Armagh was informed, by Ecunet, of the good old American Freedom of the Press and politely put in his place by the owners of that service. But not without a lot of help from the British and Irish Press who took the opportunity to whollop the Archbishop in the belly with his own croizer. I spent a couple of days in all the papers in Belfast and a staff member from the NYC Comptroller’s Office told me that I could have had all the free drinks I wanted on either side of the peace wall in Belfast.
Now, 15 years later, everyone knows that what you say online is, nearly instantly, known everywhere. (When I became Orthodox, someone contacted Odessa and told her. I understand her reply was “We used to call him Bill Bailey.”) When an Anglican in Texas tries to denounce the liberals, all he has to do it send an email. When the Anglicans in New Hampshire try to fully include queers in the life of the Church, servers light up all over the world. When Anglicans in Africa try to set up their own Global Communion, they depend on the net to say just about everything they want to say in public.
If God had wanted to destroy human communication in Babel, he would have done better to have given them the Internet: It seems we have a problem when we get too close.
I discovered the same thing in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the technologically backward areas of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where the OC was strongest, the Church had developed a set of local customs based around a common tradition. One did certain things in Africa that one did not do in Russia. And vice versa. But no one seemed to care - we were all Orthodox together.
But then came the Internet. Suddenly it became possible for an Arab Orthodox Priest in Jerusalem to look at what an Arab parish in San Francisco was doing on Sunday. And it became just as easy for them to denounce each other. The internet revealed that Orthodox claims about “always the same everywhere” were simply not true. And Orthodoxy is fragmented now - like Anglicans and Romans - into “Continuing” churches and “World Orthodoxy”.
And today is the commemoration of the Ordination of Li Tim-Oi.
Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained a priest by Bp. Ronald Hall of Hong Kong in 1944, primarily because of difficulties occasioned by the Japanese occupation of China. A storm of protest after the war forced her to refrain from exercising her role as a priest. Towards the end of her life, she emigrated to Canada where she was able to resume her priestly duties.
When a priest could no longer travel from Japanese-occupied territory to preside for her at the eucharist, for three years Tim-Oi was licensed to do so as a deacon. Bishop R O Hall of Hong Kong then asked her to meet him in Free China, where on 25 January 1944 he ordained her “a priest in the Church of God”. He knew that this was as momentous a step as when the Apostle Peter baptised the Gentile Cornelius. As Peter recognised that God had already given Cornelius the Baptismal gift of the Spirit, so Bishop Hall was merely confirming that God had already given Tim-Oi the gift of priestly minstry, but he resisted the temptation to rename her Cornelia.
To defuse controversy, in 1946 Tim-Oi surrendered her priest’s licence, but not her Holy Orders, the knowledge of which carried her through Maoist persecution.
It was the destruction of communications prior to the war that allowed her to be Ordained - and, in fact, required that she be so. It was the restoration of the lines of communication that caused the storm of controversy. People from around the world were able to stick their noses in where, previously, they had been unable to stick them.
Improved communication without love is just as bad as no communication at all: a smaller world where people fight more is worse than a larger world at peace.
One of the common stories, told wherever I am in the Church, is of the guest list at the Heavenly Banquet. The general idea of the story is the most surprising thing will be finding out who else is there. It’s most often told in the Third Person: they will be surprised to find out that those others will be there too. Romans will be surprised to find Protestants, Southern Baptists will be surprised to find anyone else at all. Based on the experience of the internet, I think most of us will be surprised to find anyone else at all.
Much Love,
Huw