Grateful for encounters and challenges – Bishop Harvey on first anniversary

GRENADA

Bishop Clyde Harvey has described his one-year anniversary as bishop of St Georges-in-Grenada, July 29 as a very rich spiritual experience.

The fifth bishop of the diocese revealed that he spent the year trying to understand the “gaps” not just affecting Church in Grenada, but the island as well.

He believed that if he had not discovered these “gaps” it would have been “foolish” of him to fix them had he not had a better understanding of why the “stagnation” happened.

Bishop Harvey made these comments in an interview with Grenada Broadcasting Network’s (GBN) To The Point live Facebook segment July 23.

He expressed gratitude to everyone who helped him gain a better understanding of things, “from the senior people [with] who[m] I’ve had conversations [to] the Prime Minister…to the lady who walks into my office somewhat depressed, maybe even mentally ill and she sits there and she tells me her story and her story is the story of Grenada…. All of these things are realities here and I’m very grateful for every encounter that I’ve had and for the challenges that I have faced.”

Bishop Harvey said that he considers all these events God’s way of reminding that it’s about the diocese and Him, not bishop Clyde Harvey. He said that even before he was appointed bishop, he had a sense of Grenada as a place of promise, a notion that he continuously reinforces to citizens.

Commenting on the challenge of a lack of males in the Church, the bishop responded that this absence is a universal problem. He believes that it is not a reflection of the society. A deeper concern, he pinpointed, is how to “correct” this in the Caribbean Church.

“The young male has a problem and part of that I think is that in every society we have lost our sense of ritual access to adulthood.” He continued, “I mean that in societies usually there were ways in which the society said ‘You want to be a man, you want to be a woman, this is what you have to do.’ So in African societies, men went through rituals and when you came back from those rituals, you were acknowledged as a man. We have no such rituals in our societies anymore. I think that we have to be able to look again at how do we shape our young men. What are we asking them to do?”

Bishop Harvey used the example of jailing male perpetrators accused of child sexual abuse. He said society failed them because they were not taught what it means to “relate”. He clarified, “…We have to look at human relating and what it means, and we have as a Church to develop patterns of relationship, and family life falls into that…family life is a form of human relating…so your sexuality is your way of relating….if a young man goes astray and he abuses a four, five-year-old child you know something is wrong there. You just don’t throw him in prison. You have to be able to help him to find a true and honest, respectable pattern of relating for himself.”

Bishop Harvey affirmed that if Grenada can get it right, then the island will be an example for the whole Caribbean.