My first General Convention was 1976 in Minneapolis, a date that lives in the sacred memory of our Church, the Convention that opened the priesthood to women and gave the nod to what some of us still call The New Prayer Book. I was on that "mountain" in the visitors' gallery overlooking the Deputies. President John Coburn called the House to five minutes of silence before tallying votes on two 3 x 5 cards representing the clerical and lay orders. I joined hands with fellow seminarians as we, like Isaiah, cried silently for God to tear open the heavens and come down, and it felt as if He (She?) was about to do just that. I still feel the weight of that Spirit bearing down, then vanishing amidst tears and applause. Hallelujah! hosanna! and right on Sister! The Church had ended her long exile crossing back over Jordan into a new land of Promise.

We were indeed in the Last Days, but it was not the last time that Spirit would be summoned to transubstantiate symbol into reality -- or was it reality into symbol? As a 25 year old starting his second year in seminary I was not aware that the Episcopal Church had that Spirit on retainer or that the General Convention was the triennial festival of Broken Glass Ceilings.

Since 76, or 73, or earlier for all I know, GC delegations have gone off to Convention with butterflies in their stomachs, wondering what will we stir up this time, some rubbing their hands with glee, others averting their eyes nervously. Back home congregations and incumbent clergy braced themselves, some with high hopes, some with dread, everyone asking "What are they going to want from us this time?" or "What fires am I gonna have to put out now?"

To break a glass ceiling is the principal act of worship at the Church's triennial Convention, a sacrament that manifests a new thing, even if it's the same old thing. It affirms our faith that our sacrifices of right intentions make us Gifts of God for the People of God, and of course for the whole world.

This triennium was to be no exception.

Members of the media were invited to a late afternoon press conference to greet the outgoing and incoming Presiding Bishops. One of the lead off questions to Bishop Curry had to do with what he felt was the significance of his being the first African American Presiding Bishop? He gestured respectfully to his predecessor seated quietly on his right, deferring respectfully to her as the "first first," and expressing his gratitude to her for blazing the trail before him. It was an appropriate non-answer to a non-question.

That's when the real question crystalized in my head: he's the first what for whom? Answer: for the 87% White mainline church embarrassed by a past from which they cannot extricate themselves because they know full well it's the one thing that makes them who they are today, including major players at the legislative meeting of an elite Church tasked with changing the world -- just like the fat cats in every generation.

Why was "our first" the first thing on so many people's minds? Yes, it's a good thing that a mostly White church can elect a Black leader, but is that why he was elected -- to redeem the White majority from a sin from which it cannot, or will not, repent -- a history that continues to define their present, that enables them still to manage social capital, even while their accustomed moral capital loses value by the hour? And as the Convention anticipates its next "first" -- early this coming week -- does it not suggest that they don't believe in the very redemption promised through unbloody sacrifices of good intentions? Perhaps controlling what gets placed on the altar is just something they feel they have a right too.

When ritual iconoclasm becomes our principle sacrament, are we not testifying that, after all our ritual journeys to Mt. Carmel, all our symbolic self-lacerations, our god has not answered us, and his righteousness still has not been credited to our account. Perhaps our god is not god after all, and we're preaching a hollow gospel we ourselves no longer believe?

The Episcopal Church has broken yet another glass ceiling. This has become the Church's ritual of self-validation. It has hitherto had a very short shelf-life, a show-bread that molds quickly, all the more conspicuous in these desert salt flats circled by mountain breezes. We hunger and thirst after a righteousness in the eyes of our peers, in our professional circles among deep thinkers and high rollers, and yet we are always lacking something for the journey. A sacrament of perpetual self-validation reveals only a Real Absence of divine grace.

I wish I had asked our dear Presiding Bishop-Elect: does your demographic profile -- your race -- bear the image of God as the universal uniquely incarnate in the particular, or are you constrained to satisfy the terrible hunger for of some new god, perhaps a god that is him/herself attached to your image? Could you be foreordained to be the reverse image, the photographic negative, of the White man or woman's racial shame? Could you become trapped in that hollow image, carved not by you but by everyone around you who bows to that image for their salvation? Are you free to wear the Apostles' mitre, or condemned to be a feather in the White Man's cap?

I like our new Presiding Bishop very much. As a thirty-five year conservative Episcopal cleric, married as are all clerics to an institutional bride of harlotry, I feel a sudden hope, and not the hope expressed in yesterday's thunderous applause, genuine as it was. There's a gentleness and simplicity about this man, even in his raucous eruptions of self-deprecating humor, a plain spoken clarity, an instinctive capacity for showing respect, a simple joy at being who he is and where he is right now.

Perhaps this is the gift he brings to his high office and the power of the image he bears in his person -- he seems comfortable in his own skin. He does not need to triangulate the hollow shell of a church in free fall, or crave the applause of his two million his closest friends, to purchase the illusion of being someone he's not in order to whitewash the tombs of somebody else's prophets.

I believe he was elected yesterday not because he's the first but because he's the best. I believe along with everyone else that the still lily-white Episcopal Church needs a Black man to carry the crozier of the next Presiding Bishop. But the Church needs a Black man who's free to be Any Man, and not just the Episcopal Church's first of a kind, the next bludgeon to splinter a false ceiling. Only then can his image convey the image of the God-Man as a Real Presence breaking down dividing walls of hostility. Perhaps then, at long last, a righteousness we can believe and accept will be credited to our account, and we can be freed from the yoke of a broken old creation.

Maybe that's what it means to repent of the systemic transgression of our fathers and mothers going back to the third and fourth generation.

The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in Orlando, Florida. He is completing a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Central Florida