That's not a snide remark or even a criticism, but an observation of how the "ism" of Anglicanism has lately disappeared before our eyes. Anglicanism has been described as resistant to doctrinal precision or even to doctrine per se. It purports to be all things to all people. One man's Anglicanism is another man's abomination. One anathematizes another with the same damning cry -- un-Anglican! -- each with equal indignation and fury, one for not conforming to what should be obvious, the other for demanding conformity at all when that is obviously the one thing inadmissible to Anglicans.

With the Archbishop of Canterbury's Advent 2007 letter, containing his long awaited response to the ongoing battle between Provinces of the Anglican Communion touched off by the consecration in 2003 of a noncelibate homosexual as Bishop of New Hampshire, Anglicanism has been scrutinized as a thing. What sort of thing is it? Perhaps it's just the British Empire at prayer. At least that makes sense, except it makes it a thing of the past. And what, pray tell, is the Anglican Communion?

"Communion" is a churchy synonym for "group." Anglicanism, if it is any sort of real thing, is a consortium of legal entities -- a grouping of national corporations (called "churches") that have an unspecified relationship with each other. Within our own national franchise in the United States there are certain legal stipulations which members must uphold in order to maintain their status as members. It used to be assumed that these stipulations included a series of affirmations of faith or "beliefs", though strict conformity to statements of faith has rarely been enforced. In recent years it has been claimed that strict conformity to explicit theological statements was itself antithetical to Anglicanism. Whatever Anglicanism was, it was not that.

The Archbishop's Advent epistle is richer and more eloquent that most of his public utterances, and yet it is surprising that in his definitive treatise on the nature of Anglicanism there are no references to traditional authorities, such as the Book of Common Prayer or the Thirty-Nine Articles. He mentions the Windsor Report and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral and he refers to the Lambeth Conference. Most of his letter displayed a general sort of "catholic common sense", or maybe it was just common horse sense -- here's how different groups come to wonder if they're both speaking the same language, here's what fosters credibility in dealing with an ongoing partnership. Nothing more authoritative than that. The references to staying the course so that the Covenant process bears final fruit seemed empty.

The one live remark in the letter, to my mind, was the following pivotal paragraph:

"The exchange between TEC and the wider Communion has now been continuing for some four years, and it would be unrealistic and ungrateful to expect more from TEC in terms of clarification. Whatever our individual perspectives, I think we need to honour the intentions and the hard work done by the bishops of TEC. For many of them, this has been a very costly and demanding experience, testing both heart and conscience. But now we need to determine a way forward."

Next to this the rest of the Archbishop's eloquence paled. This was the one potent remark of his entire letter: good intentions, wrought through hard work, are self-authenticating and stand on their own. Compared to the existential reality of raw intentionality all theological deliberation is half-truth and shadow. Far from disciplining TEC for tearing the net of Communion and introducing confusion into its life, TEC must be honored for its pain, and the Communion dare not be ungrateful!

One Central Florida clergyman responded with the following paraphrase of the ABC's letter in this abbreviated outline:

"Trying further to pin down TEC is futile. We will not exclude those who violate doctrine. We will exclude those who violate discipline (structure). Anglicanism has failed."

There's that word again -- Anglicanism. While it's not difficult to sense the grief and outrage of this disappointed priest, I suspect even he might be hard pressed to state what exactly it is that has failed. Anglicanism, whatever he imagined it was, has failed to materialize and, failing that, has disappeared into a mist as if it never was -- an ecclesiastical Brigadoon that suddenly pulls on our heartstrings and just as suddenly vanishes.

The long bluff of the Anglican Communion has been called. There is not a conformity of faith, but at any given moment one might observe parallel expressions of faith. Thus, while we may be joint partners in specific ventures or rejoice in a common heritage, we have no basis to call ourselves a Communion. We are simply a gathering of national or regional corporations that share some things in common -- almost by coincidence. We may cheer each other on, but does that make us a Communion?

Is Anglicanism something or nothing?

The Advent letter is an elegantly phrased definition of a church on paper. Perhaps Anglicanism is a paper church. This heated battle of four years (or was it four decades, or four centuries?) has ended abruptly in a "pass" for the Episcopal Church in a matter calling for discipline. At the same time the secessionist churches have been declared anomalies -- theological non-entities -- while their sponsoring jurisdictions are urged to come to Lambeth without them, thus confirming their dubious status.

For a moment the Archbishop appeared to be lecturing the American Church, like a parent repeating the same stern warning to an errant teenager, but then handing over the keys anyway. It was never really in doubt that he would. The child may have learned some lessons about parental diplomacy, but nothing about curfews and drunk drivers -- nothing that would keep him alive on the highway.

A family that cannot or will not discipline its members is a family in name only.

The unwritten rule is that one family member may not "exclude" another. With the Advent letter that term now has some specific meaning: to "exclude" means to pass judgment on another's good intentions. Now at last we have a precise equation of the Biblical "judge not" and the postmodern "exclude not". While that may sound like a breakthrough in understanding, it may really be the opposite. In reality it is the denial of boundaries and hence the emptying of the metaphor of "family". It rules boundaries out of order, except for rhetorical effect. The Archbishop himself mentioned boundaries in passing, but these are boundaries on paper. The Covenant process may still play itself out, but there can be no incentive to adhere to something like a real covenant, unless it is a paper covenant.

Communal Anglicanism has come to the birthing stool and given up the ghost. If it was ever anything besides the religious mode of the British Empire (before the sun finally set on it), Anglicanism has devolved into a set of rubrics. The genius of the English Reformation is that it was not a confession, like the great Lutheran and Reformed confessions, but a permissive settlement in which the catholic heritage of Christendom might be interpreted within specified parameters. This free acting out of a common heritage is apparent in the construction of the 1979 American Prayer Book. However, the "permissiveness" is not now that of the Common Prayer tradition, but of the 70's American popular culture.

When I was ordained, I was the most licentious of rubrical legalists, deciding at one point that I would craft an Anglican service based on the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and drag my unwitting congregation into my own Western Orthodox Church. How did I justify this? From the opening acclamation of the new Eucharistic rite ("Blessed be God etc.") that was clearly lifted directly out of the Divine Liturgy. Under the guise of liturgical renewal I approached the Prayer Book more as a theological toolkit or an audio visual closet than as the historic rite of an historic people. When my altar guild received contributions for new vestments, I had myself fitted for Greek-style priestly vestments, lavish in color and iconographic meaning, but ludicrously out of place in a cinderblock shell in modern suburbia. I was a theological bull in an ecclesiastical China shop.

In years following I would attempt to recreate Anglicanism in the image of popular TV evangelicalism or John Wimber's soft rock charismania, and finally good old fashion crypto-Roman Anglo-Catholicism. It was all legal, even if much of it was shallow and unedifying. Most of my clerical friends were doing something like this. One friend had a 700 Club style "word of knowledge" during the peace -- much more entertaining than announcements.

Were we searching for Anglicanism, or just exploiting the permissiveness of the post-70's Western Church? Our teachers in seminary could have told us what Christians, and Anglican Christians in particular, fervently believed at any time in history, but not what they themselves believed at that moment -- unless it could be derived from one of the pop-ideologies of the 1960's. Even if some of us later became orthodox and generally drifted to the right, we were formed by this same laxity of commitment, feeling entitled to let our theological hobby horses run rampant through people's lives, justifying ourselves with self-righteous platitudes.

The Elizabethan Settlement of religion, expounded for centuries as THE Anglican hermeneutic, appeared to work until the homosexual crisis forced people to choose between the popular culture and the Bible. This was an outrageous confrontation for the church to pose in the form of a parliamentary showdown, and then to purport to believe its own oracles. When Gene Robinson's election was approved, this was the trumping of holy writ by the mandate of culture. No amount of acknowledging the good intentions of the national church community could fudge this.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has tried to do just that -- fudge the crisis of Anglican self-definition. Perhaps he has done so with all the best intentions, or then again, perhaps with sheer political calculation. He is clever enough make a go of either. The one thing he has certainly done in his long awaited letter is bear witness to the self-validating quality of personal experience -- and that of those who otherwise would be disciplined! -- and he has declared their experience inviolable. Experience is now the one transcendent reality remaining after the disappearance of Anglicanism.

The Anglican faith, if it may be so called, turns out to be just what I thought it was when I was a young bull in a China shop -- a set of parameters through which we make our own theological statements and create our own spiritual experiences. Since then I've gone looking for the English Reformation and the Reformed Catholicism of which Dr. Toon speaks so often and so eloquently, and sought to recreate it. That's just my personal preference, you understand, but I know there are many others. If there were enough of us, it might turn into a real thing.

How many of us must there be before we reach critical mass -- before we can call it Anglicanism? Is there anyone in particular who has to be part of it before that name can be legitimate? Will we have to go to court before we can use the name?

I think Anglicanism may have turned out to be a myth. It was something more like Congregational Catholicism that I practiced as a young priest. Maybe that's all there ever was. Maybe that's all there is now.

---The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, and a regular columnist for VirtueOnline.