The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold III, the Episcopal Church’s 25th Presiding Bishop from 1998 to 2006, fills his days with teaching and writing, international travel — and babysitting his granddaughters.
 
With his wife, Phoebe, Bishop Griswold has returned to Philadelphia, which has played an important role throughout his life. He was born in Bryn Mawr in 1937 and served three area churches before his election as the Diocese of Chicago’s bishop coadjutor in 1985. He was elected Presiding Bishop by the 72nd General Convention, which met in Philadelphia in 1994.
 
Bishop Griswold spoke with The Living Church at Daylesford Abbey, where he and former staff member Barbara Braver led an Advent retreat.
 
He has written a book centered on prayer and the sacramental life. Praying Our Days: A Guide and Companion, which the bishop describes as a “contemporary manual of prayer,” is now in its second printing. He is considering a request to write a book focused on varied dimensions of pastoral and liturgical ministry for clergy and those considering the possibility of ordination.
 
But when his older daughter, Hannah, and her husband call from New York City with a request for babysitters, the smitten grandparents drop their projects and come running, he said.
 
“One of the blessings of living close by in Philadelphia is the possibility of frequent visits back and forth with our family,” he said. “Phoebe and I find that our two granddaughters are a special joy. They have led me to revive an interest in puppetry, and making up stories, particularly about naughty children.”
 
The Griswolds’ younger daughter, Eliza, is a journalist and poet, and currently a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
 
The bishop readily admitted that he missed being a public voice representing the Episcopal Church in the United States and abroad, as well as ecumenically.
 
“On the other hand, I’m grateful to be able to spend more time with family, enjoying my granddaughters,” he said. “I’m also grateful not to have the responsibilities of the Presiding Bishop to attend to.”
 
Before leading the Advent retreat, Bishop Griswold spent a month in Japan. While there he delivered the Bishop Williams Memorial Lecture at Rikkyo University, the Anglican University of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai (NSKK).
 
His topic: The centrality of truth in the formation of a Christian vision of the world, which he understands as a lifelong process of growth and discovery. In addition to preaching in local churches and teaching on such topics as how interfaith dialogue can foster world peace, Bishop Griswold engaged in a new venture — dialogue with Buddhists on such subjects as the quest for the Ultimate.
 
The bishop said he was deeply impressed by the outreach ministries of the NSKK, particularly its hospitals and schools and ministries to the most vulnerable. In 2007, Bishop Griswold spent a month teaching at the Anglican University in South Korea.
 
His wife accompanied him on his Asian trips, but also pursued her own interests in that part of the world. She flew to Hong Kong for a conference on human trafficking sponsored by the Anglican Observer to the United Nations and South Korea to meet with Anglican women who are helping women escape prostitution. Phoebe Griswold is also President of the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, a position her husband characterizes as “engaging and demanding.”
 
For the past three years, Bishop Griswold has also spent a month each year teaching and learning about Christianity in Cuba.
 
While his time as Presiding Bishop helped him appreciate more profoundly how the gospel could be embodied on the local level, he was happy to have the time to spend engaged in deeper dialogue, he said.
 
“Every [local] church tends to see the Church in its own particular context. Fidelity there looks so different from what fidelity looks like here,” he said.
 
In deference to his successor, Katharine Jefferts Schori, Bishop Griswold declined comment on current events in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.  He did, however, revisit some themes from his tenure as Presiding Bishop.
 
Contrary to some Americans’ assumptions, he does not believe that Nigerian Anglicans are fundamentalists. “In Northern Nigeria, your Muslim interlocutors are very clear about their theology,” he said, “so you have to be very clear about yours.”
 
Anglo-Catholicism has nurtured his sense of Christians living in communion.
 
“I see the Catholic tradition as alive and constantly unfolding rather than as constrained by the past,” he said. “The Eucharist is about [drawing together] this gaggle of unlikely souls, many of whom would find it difficult to put up with each other, if not for sharing one bread and one cup.”
 
Echoing the words of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, his longtime friend, he said that both communion and baptism “draw us into solidarities not of our own choosing.”
 
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