A few days ago, I was sitting near the window.  Hob (aka "Squeeebs"), the newest cat, decided to practice her parkour.  Climbing into the bowl of a torchiere is not a good idea.  My phone was handy, so I decided to photograph her before extraction.  After all, not everyone would believe a cat would attempt such a stunt.

Instead, I caught this image of her riding the lamp towards my head, just before I caught the lamp.

I don't know Rev. Thew-Forrester. I don't know anything about changing the liturgy, or reading from the Quran, or the literal existence of Satan. I know even less about electoral procedures for selecting a bishop.  But I have spent a good deal of time reading & thinking about Zen, and Buddhism, and the Episcopal church in which I was raised.  I'm not an expert.  I'm not a practitioner.  But I've think I know enough to offer 2 cents worth.

Zen isn't a religion. It's a practice. Firstly, it's a way of stilling yourself -- physically, mentally, and emotionally. Practice enough, and one can get one's conscious mind to quit yammering, if only briefly. Why bother?  So you can devote the time and effort that was going to yammering, into something useful.  Maybe what you devote it to is prayer.  Maybe it's self-examination.  Maybe it's playing saxophone, or raking gravel, or scrubbing toilets.  Doesn't matter, because you're doing it with your full attention.  If you play music, and practice enough, you might have had the experience of performing something and being completely subsumed in it.  You weren't consciously playing your instrument, or thinking about the music -- you just played, and music emerged.  Zen meditation is like that.  Instead of practicing an instrument so that it no longer "gets in the way of making music," you practice stilling yourself so that you no longer "get in the way" of whatever you're doing.

Secondly, (and this is mostly my personal opinion, but I think it reasonably accurate) Zen is a way of gaining access to alternate means of apprehension.  Humans, unlike any (other) animal, have that constantly yammering forebrain.  It's normal for us.  In fact, it's so deeply normal that we don't question it anymore than we think about not having fingers that curl in both directions.  It just is.  So, to get to a point where you can still the yammering, you have to learn to think in a radically different manner.  In fact, I suspect "think" is the wrong word.  Regardless, you can't get there without challenging assumptions that are fundamental to our common understanding of how humans work.  Lacking a Vulcan Mind-Meld, your teacher can't just tell you how to think in this radically different manner.  All he can do is give you problems that are designed to constrain your "normal" thinking, to put your understanding into a place where it doesn't work, forcing your unconscious assumptions into view.  You have to actually recognize that your understanding doesn't work, then notice the subtle shadows cast by your assumptions, recognize your assumptions, then overcome them.  If you do that, then you will immediately apprehend that the lessons your teacher gave you were "false" (that is, constructed to disagree with your normal worldview in such a way to encourage you to examine that worldview).  But, you didn't go to your teacher to learn the "false" lesson.  He couldn't give you a "true" lesson, so he gave you the means to construct the "true" lesson for yourself.  You gained the thing you sought from your teacher, without him ever communicating it to you directly.  You now have access to the alternate means of apprehension.  You can now act from that apprehension.

I think it's this second point that gets Rev. Thew-Forrester in difficulty.  A Buddhist might call that moment of apprehension, "Enlightenment."  Or, "recognition of the buddha-nature in the self."  A Christian might call it "Communion."  Or, "recognizing the unity of God and receiving unity with God."  A "Zen Episcopalian," then, isn't someone trying to think "What Would Jesus Do?"  He isn't even someone trying to know what Jesus would do.  He's trying to become someone who simply does what Jesus would do.  Becoming that someone forces him, or anyone, to treat the lessons he receives from his teachers as deeply (I want to say "deep, before the Dawn of Time" in an Aslan voice) questionable.  That's going to make people uncomfortable.  I not an Episcopalian, so I can't say if his path to God is acceptable for a priest or bishop under Episcopalian rules.  But I thought I might be able to contribute a perspective that would allow Episcopalians a better-informed conversation about that decision.

If I understand correctly, a Securitized Debt Instrument (the evil engine of the economic meltdown) is similar to a stock mutual fund.  Mutual fund buys stock from companies A, B, and C.  I buy a portion of the fund.  The idea is that, while Company A may be down, B & C probably aren't.  That means I lose less money than if I had purchased stock from A, directly.  Buying into the fund, rather than buying stock directly, dilutes my losses.

An SDI then, is something like a mutual fund that buys I.O.U.s (mortgages, for example) rather than stock.  But it's the same idea, otherwise.  If Homeowner A defaults on a mortgage, B & C probably haven't.  I lose less money than if I had sold the mortgage to A, directly.  Buying into the SDI, rather than selling a mortgage directly to A, dilutes my losses.

That makes sense.  Clearly, I reduced my losses in both examples.  So what-the-hell-happened in the real world?  I have a couple of ideas:

• It only works if the risk of default is correctly assessed.  The idea is to mix loans with different risks.  Assume the guy who set-up the SDI chose A for high risk of default, B for moderate, and C for low risk of default.  If B is actually a high risk for default, then buying into the SDI doesn't dilute my risk.
  
• Diluting the risk makes more people eligible for loans; specifically, people who wouldn't have been eligible without the SDI.  This is (probably) good -- it allows people just outside the envelope of home-ownership to purchase a house, with the social benefits that entails.
• There are always more high-risk-loan opportunities than moderate & low-risk ones.  That creates pressure to reclassify moderate as safe, high as moderate, and "bad idea" as low-risk.  Picking-up new sales at the bad-idea/low-risk boundary increases the pressure still more.
  
• SDI-guy didn't sell the mortgages.  Banks did.  And the banks did it fully expecting to sell those loans to SDI-guy very quickly.  Banks, then, had reason to sell as many loans as possible, largely without caring about default.

So what happened?  Well, I Am Not A Finance-Guy but here's my take: SDIs (and other financial techniques) expanded the loan market by diluting the risk associated with making a loan.  That maybe created a bubble, or contributed to it.  In a bubble, everything's great -- right up until it isn't.  That makes the SDIs look safer than they are, and the "risk reclassification" seem legitimate ("That expired bologna-loaf hasn't made us sick so far, so it must still be good!").  The mix that SDI-guy called high/med/low was actually more like oh-God-NO/bad-idea/low.    Enough of those defaulted, that everybody called in his markers.  At which point even more loans defaulted, and banks started refusing to issue new loans (aka "credit") in order to cover their own markers (as they are legally required to do), and here we are now.

The thing is, in the beginning, SDIs worked really well.  It's just, as usual with us humans, we had to push it too far.