The Sounds of General Convention - Mary June Nestler, Diocesan Staff

At last I've come up for air! It's the next-to-last day of General Convention, and I turn to this wonderful blog for the first time. It's been a great privilege to be here with the Utah deputation, whose members are so involved in nearly every aspect of what's going on.
I've been working hard as Secretary of Legislative Committee 14 on Ministry. Legislative committees receive resolutions as they are filed and perfect them before they go out onto the floor of the House of Bishops or House of Deputies. My committee was particularly busy this convention. We had meetings nearly every day at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m., when 38 bleary-eyed people gathered to hear testimony about the resolutions assigned to us and to craft the final versions. It's my job to take the minutes and to assist in the paperwork of moving the various resolutions through the legislative process so that eventually they wind up on the floor of the House of Deputies. Tonight I'll begin the work of editing a hundred pages of minutes so someone besides myself can make sense of them.
When not in committee, I take my place with the other seven Utah deputies on the floor of the House of Deputies, a vast hall seating more than 800 deputies, alternates, visitors' gallery, and press area. How wonderful it is to see old friends! We all greet one another as if the last General Convention were just last month, not three years ago.
Slow or fast, complicated or simple--the resolutions come. We do our best to find the page it's on in our very fat notebooks in time to vote on it. We're doing good work in what has been described by many as an amazing different tenor since 2006. Perhaps that has something to do with the departure from our Church of persons who felt themselves so disaffected with the direction we have been taking. As much as I hate to see any diocese leave us, I must say one positive result is a renewed sense of mission and ministry across the Church, and a kinder, gentler convention.
Here's what I love best about General Convention: The power of corporate prayer with several thousand of your Church brothers and sisters, and the sheer joy of raising our voices in song with Episcopalians and their guests from everwhere on the globe. The music at our daily eucharists has been terrific, with everything from our familiar hymns to the newest settings of spirituals. At the first eucharist I slid into a table at the back of the room and next to me were the Primate of Canada (equivalent to our Presiding Bishop), The Most Rev. Fred Hiltz, and a representative of the Episcopal Church of Scotland. A young person joined us, and another person from the Church Publishing Corporation. The five of us made an impromptu choir, singing in parts as if our lives depended on it. And the whole room of some two or three thousand people sang with feet moving and arms raising and faces smiling too. It's singing you can feel in your bones.
Sometimes we sing in the House of Deputies when we need a good stretch. A thousand people manage to remember the harmonies (we have only the words on screens), and I'm sure the heavenly choirs of angels stop to listen to us. I'm absolutely convinced that we'd have no more church dissension if we'd just sing together until our harmony turns into the truest harmony of all, the sweet music of the Holy Spirit.
The singing is great, but so is the silence. There's nothing more powerful than those moments a great hall falls quiet. Today a deputy spoke of the murder of her daughter by her son-in-law as she addressed a resolution on domestic violence. You could have heard a pin drop as her heartsick words were uttered into the microphone, whose amplification made them all the more heavy. Our chaplain, The Rev. Frank Wade, knows how to pray, leaving us in silence when that is right, voicing our prayers into a quiet House over us so they rest quietly on us. At times we simply are in silence, and the breath of the Tennessee deputation behind us becomes our breath, breathed into the heart of God.
The singing and the silence punctuate our business. The sheer size of this convention reminds us that we are a Church beyond ourselves. We hear stories of ministries that hold up the world, and we are encouraged to recommit ourselves to the healing our world so desperately needs. That's what General Convention is! A giant pep rally, where the spirit is the Spirit.
Some of our Utah folk are at the U2charist tonight. I'm going to post this blog and head for the computer in my room, where committee minutes are waiting for me. Thanks so much to all of you who have been reading and responding to posts, and most especially for your prayers.
One more day to go! Mary June Nestler