"Arise, go to Padanaram and drop dead." (Gen. 28:2-3, slight paraphrase)

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This lady steps in it more than her predecessor, and that's saying something.

Maybe it's a hazard of being a pilot from Big Sky country. She's used to walking through the pastures with her head in the clouds.

Or maybe it's the university professor whose head is six miles under water with the squids and octopuses -- the "deep place" Frank Griswold could never find.

Griswold was just dumb -- too much money and too little brain. Schori as we know is the apostle of Clarity. This week she cleared up the perplexing matter as to why the Episcopal Church is in numerical decline. Here is her assessment:

For all their pretensions, Episcopalians are not sufficiently inspired by their own existence to see it replicated in the next generation.

That's not quite the way she puts it. I'm sure she would protest at the cynicism of such a phrasing of her comments. But who's the cynic?

Katharine Jefferts Schori presides over a denomination whose numbers are falling like lightning from heaven. Perhaps in her words we have "clarity" regarding the reason. Maybe it's not the fact that Episcopalians have watered down (or polluted) the gospel. Maybe it's not all the trendy innovations and social experiments. Maybe it's the religious expression of something more sinister from deep within our culture: a death wish.

Well not "death wish" in the Charles Bronson sense; more in the sense of Malcolm Muggeridge: not a form of active suicide or even a passion for danger; more a self-imposed decline, a systemic "failure to thrive".

Edmund Browning was the last leader to pretend at an evangelistic thrust for the Episcopal Church, but he laid it on a bit thick. He inaugurated a Decade of Evangelism in 1990. Then he inaugurated it again in 1991 after some hack mentioned that the first year of a new decade was the year one, not the prior year zero. By year six the whole experiment had been abandoned, and people were embarrassed to talk about it.

Frank Griswold was all fudge, suggesting that new members would flood into the Episcopal Church as soon as the last category of victim was "included". This way when no one showed up we could blame the far Right, and this would further validate our solidarity with the victims.

Schori makes it simple: Episcopalians are too smart and too noble to be bothered with anything as self-serving as mere survival. Leave that to the squids and octopi. Episcopalians want to "encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion". That's why she flies a solo plane on her pastoral visits rather drive an SUV like the other Cro-Magnons of Christendom.

What is the Episcopal Church in 2006? An airport Sky Club for homosexual and heterosexual white collar professionals. What do these have in common? They don't reproduce their own numbers. Homosexuals are sterile by definition. Upper-middle class professionals barely break even. They are also far more likely to abort than, for example, Catholics and Mormons.

These latter reproduce for "theological reasons", according to Professor Squid. I personally doubt that. I don't think any species reproduces for a "reason". Species reproduce because that is what they do. It's not a mandate; it is more like an essence. It's the most fundamental affirmation of life there is, at the top of Freud's list of Reasons Why. If it ain't happening, then it's time to look for reasons -- not a stated "reason", but something more like a historical or biological cause.

In nature survival and reproduction are one and the same. The urge not to reproduce is a fundamental negation of the life of that species or group. It's a failure to thrive -- a flat, clinical way of saying the beginning of the end.

I know that in nature not every last creature reproduces, or "wills" to. We adopted a female alley cat two years ago when she was a kitten. The cat has never been spayed and in two years hasn't had kittens. The animal rescue volunteer at my office says "Good luck!" Meanwhile the other neighborhood cats are prolific to a fault.

My newly married daughter, a professional schoolteacher, declares she will not have children. She has about two hundred already, and at the end of the day she's happy to come home to a husband and an old movie. Two sets of prospective grandparents, along with assorted great-grandparents, say "Good luck!" Maybe she and her husband will adopt a cat.

In both cases the species in question are not under threat. Nature has a way of making exceptions in individual cases and still guaranteeing the survival of the species, at least for the time being.

Only a single species is capable of "reasons" for survival -- ours -- but as Muggeridge observes, this could have a way of achieving its opposite.

Fifty-odd years ago Americans home from the war began to talk about "planning" their families. By the time the pill came along, "family planning" had become part of a formula: how may children can you afford based upon your preferred lifestyle? It grew out of the Myth of Progress at the beginning of the 20th century, where Western Man was moments away from controlling first his environment and ultimately his destiny.

After Roe v. Wade "family planning" became Planned Parenthood, which really meant how to "unplan" the unplanned. "Family planning", a recent adjunct to the American Dream, had become a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

Death now had a life of its own. As for the Myth of Progress, that didn't survive the turn of the 21st century.

What happened to the feverish optimism that rushed home after World War II? How did liberal optimism turn into liberal guilt in a single generation? How did we end up with Christendom and no Christ? Upon winning a titanic feat of arms, how did we end up spiritually disarmed, so that now we are powerless against our own guilt? And what are we guilty of, by the way?

"Everything," reply today's liberals. Then they set out to save us without a Savior.

This is a snapshot of a culture that has lost its will to survive. Its chief representatives imitate the ideals of the culture -- freedom, justice, peace -- but these have become awkward caricatures. The flesh may be willing, but the spirit has vanished.

All that's left of "justice and peace" is a slogan by the present generation of leaders to promote themselves. They themselves don't seem convinced by it. Pursue Millennium Goals, but outsource them to gangster bureaucrats. And don't push it too hard -- seven tenths of a cent on the dollar is enough for heaven on earth these days.

To summon up the glory days of an earlier era we'll say something nasty about the President. There's courage for you!

If this is the high water mark of our heritage, then I too would rather be a squid.

---Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon in charge of Pastoral Care at St. Luke's Cathedral in Orlando, Florida. He is a columnist for Virtueonline.