Life As Performance Art 38

Well...because life IS performance art, Gentle Reader. Yes, all the world's a stage, a film or TV set, a YouTube or Netflix menu. Of course it is going to be more, much more than that, but we have become so saturated with entertainment while always craving yet further diversion, that I can't imagine too many of us, after having been around for a few decades, really wanting to take any of this too seriously. Of course, it is serious, dreadfully, gravely and so awfully serious, but that perhaps is exactly why we shouldn't have to be. For example, my conversation yesterday with my parish priest, who took exception with a recent blogpost of mine where I wrote that the bloated and huge salaries of Anglican clergy and bishops help keep them firmly entrenched in the values of the middle class while permanently estranging them from the grueling reality of the working poor, or people who are not very likely to be found inside an Anglican church. My parish priest insists that her gross pay of $60,000 a year, and her take home value of not much over 40 grand, is really a modest paycheque and where did I get the idea that clergy are high earners? Well, I don't know which balance sheet she is reading from, but from a vestry meeting I attended ten years ago or so, the rector was listed as getting a higher than that salary, plus a generous housing allowance (he had his own apartment), and the math added up to rather close to 100 K. To my parish priest, I have this to say: unlike you, nor anyone else in this room, I have never in my life earned even a living wage and I have worked bloody hard all my life! I would be lucky to top $16,000 on a good earning year, and without the blessing of BC Housing, I would be living on the sidewalk. You might think you are squeaking by on sixty grand. I would be grateful to be getting half that, or the average income in Vancouver, which is roughly half of your sixty thousand. This actually highlights one of my major complaints about the Anglican Church. They are so out of touch with ordinary people's lives. By ordinary, I mean restaurant and coffee shop workers, Shoppers Drug Mart clerks and mental health contract workers stuck on just a little more than minimum wage. Rather different from the economic demographic in the Anglican Church. Should clergy accept a salary cut? I wouldn't cry for any of them if they had to, though I still don't think that would persuade a lot of them that they are called to serve a Jesus who became very poor for all of us. And not all the politically correct Botox that the creaking rich old lady that is the Anglican Church injects into her decrepit skin is going to do squat to make one iota of difference. As for me, sticking with the Anglican Church has become something of a zero-sum game, I suppose. It's almost like providing palliative care to a dying patient. I rather think that the Anglican Church is going to continue dying away until there are only a handful of faithful left, maybe having to meet in each other's beautiful West Side homes because all the church buildings will have been closed, deconsecrated and turned into community halls, condos or museums. But maybe, by that time, that remnant handful of faithful is actually going to get it right and will actually and really follow Jesus, and become a force for God to be reckoned with. We are nowhere near that quality of discipleship in the Anglican Church, nor is it welcome, and neither is anything of consequence going to come out of our churches until we have really begun to rend our hearts and not our garments.