Posted on 06/18/2008 4:32:44 PM PDT by hiho hiho
The rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, in the eye of storm over gay 'marriage', explains why he decided he must bless a gay relationship
Robustly heterosexual since early adolescence, unable to see that any love surpasses the love of women, and once branded by the odious Daily Mail as 'Dud the Stud', I may seem miscast in the role into which I have now been thrust, that of the turbulent rebellious priest who defies bishop and archbishop to bless two gay men, also priests, in their civil partnership.
Yet there is a sense in which I have been moving towards this point for more than thirty years. The 1970s shaped my thinking. Many factors were combined, among them existential philosophy, the campus war against American involvement in Vietnam, the challenge to apartheid and to discrimination based on race, colour and gender, and the sexual liberation provided by the contraceptive pill.
The Sunday Times in its golden age under Harry Evans was a major influence, creating a critical mindset that no longer accepted authority without question and the blue-back Penguin books provided a theoretical underpinning for future action.
On the bottom shelf of my bookshelf is one such fundamental text, The Death of the Family by existentialist psychiatrist David Cooper. The study of theology at King’s College, London, was rigorous, critical, comprehensive, and above all engaged with a rapidly changing world. As Dean Sydney Evans posed the existential “Who am I?” he taught us not to accept the “I” as a fixed point but a point in motion, always becoming.
For today’s Church of England it is as if the 1970s never existed; the lessons have been forgotten. There has been a retreat from exploring the depths, pushing the boundaries to the point where words strain, crack and sometimes break as we struggle to express in a suffering world the foolishness of God and the all-embracing love found in Jesus Christ.
There has been a return to uncritical fundamentalist use of biblical “proof texts”, ripping verses from their theological and literary contexts. There has been a flight to the safety of rigid law and inflexible dogma and a consequent desire to unchurch those who will not conform.
So on a day late in 2007 when my friend and colleague Peter Cowell asked me to bless the civil partnership that he was to contract with David Lord in May this year I was ready to answer “yes”. I did so not to provoke the so-called traditionalists and to deliberately disregard the guidelines published by the English House of Bishops, not to defy the Bishop of London, whose sagacity I respect, or Archbishop Rowan, who I have known and admired for 25 years, but because to respond in any other way would have been a negation of everything I believe, of everything that makes me who I am, as a man and as a priest.
We were in unchartered territory, seeking to find the words that would express the love of Peter and David and their commitment to each other. New words could not carry the burden and we turned to the old, to words shaped by centuries of use, redolent with meaning.
This bringing together of two men would be like a marriage but not a marriage, for I am clear that marriage is between a man and a woman, and the words I will say must be said with integrity. The words, vow and covenant, binding and union, were put under tension, slipping, sliding, perishing. They were imprecise, transferred from one relationship to another. We could not speak of procreation but we could speak of “the mutual, society, help, and comfort” that the one could have of the other, of loving, comforting, honouring and keeping, for these are good words and not limited to or by marriage.
On 31 May, my birthday and the feast of the Visitation, when Mary said “My soul doth magnify the Lord”, 300 people gathered in St Bartholomew the Great to celebrate the Eucharist, to witness Peter and David commit themselves to each other in an exclusive loving relationship.
Amazing flowers, fabulous music, a ceremony both solemn and oddly homely, familiar words reordered and reconfigured, carrying new meanings. Nothing jarred, nothing felt even vaguely inappropriate. New and untried but not wrong. Not a gay rally or demonstration, but a truly joyful celebration.
It is not we who have whipped up the whirlwind, replacing words of love and inclusion with those of hatred and exclusion. We set out to express, experimentally, pushing at boundaries, a love of a type which is not unusual or perverse but which is perfectly ordinary and accepted outside the Church. Why, then, can it not be accepted inside the community that is based, not on law, but on the loving presence of God in Jesus Christ?
Those who cannot ever accept same-sex unions and would rather divide from those who do, branding them as blasphemous and unchristian, have inevitably turned on us, and especially on me. I am clearly not naïve, so I must have been malicious, politically-motivated, intent on pushing forward my ungodly agenda. Every aspect of my life and ministry is being raked over, the Daily Mail’s old allegations of sexual impropriety, my failure to be elected as an alderman, my writing a book on clergy discipline, even the complaint from neighbouring flats that I will not silence the church clock which chimes at midnight and again at seven as it has for centuries. First discredit your opponent, then defrock him, and, as he is Rector of Smithfield, why not the stake?
I did not seek the role, the interviews, the publicity, but more than thirty years ago I began a journey, a process of becoming, that focuses on Jesus the Christ, not as lawgiver and judge but as the one who loves us and holds us and will not let us go until we know ourselves as loved by him despite our foolishness and imperfections, and because of that, when Peter Cowell asked me, I did not hesitate, not even for a moment to answer “Yes, I will.”
There is a difference between love and perversion.
What really irritates me is the new public perception, no thanks to the homosexual lobby, that two (platonic) male friends must be gay.
They can paint it anyway they want to but it remains an abomination unto the Lord, and that’s the bottom line.
Anglican ping!
In the mid 1980s, I saw a lecture by a religion professor. He had a rather interesting idea: The Moral Majority was a sincere effort to heal the divisions in this country that still remained after the Vietnam War. Of course, the war was only part of what divided the country; forces set in motion in the late 1940s or early 1950s included the sexual revolution. Some of this was good: the civil rights movement that ended Jim Crow and allowed women to enter the professions. Some of this was bad: drugs and sexual promiscuity (the AIDS epidemic could not have happened before about 1970 because the gay community identified liberation with wild promiscuity, starting circa 1970).
How pathetic that the Anglicans have to be saddled with a dogmatic idiot who is apparently proud of the fact that he has learned nothing in the last 30 years.
Sadly, a lot of preachers are like this, and they are the primary reason why protestantism is largely a dead faith walking. These A-holes killed Christ for the sake of a hippie piece of a-- in college and a mess of pottage thereafter.
“and a mess of pottage thereafter”
More likely a mess of pot.
The rest of your comment stands as a reminder never to trust a lesson in history delivered by a "religion" professor. Try a real historian next time, if you can find one.
Poland is far from it.
It would have been better for him to go with the millstone to the bottom of the sea.
I remember a Greek or Russian church had a gay wedding and when the bishop found out about it he got rid of the priest and had the church burned to the ground. I don’t think the priest was inside at the time.
He just wanted a 3-some
Yes,it's my understanding that in Poland and,perhaps,several other Eastern European countries faith and decency are still very much alive.However,as is happening in Ireland,I fear that the destructive,corrosive influence of EU laws/bureaucrats just might change that.
>> The 1970s shaped my thinking. Many factors were combined, among them existential philosophy, the campus war against American involvement in Vietnam, the challenge to apartheid and to discrimination based on race, colour and gender, and the sexual liberation provided by the contraceptive pill. <<
Oh, silly me. I thought you (the “priest,” not you, hiho^2) were just being a stupid, apostate, heretical, modernist hippy. How dare I leap to such unfounded conclusions! (/sarc)
No comment about a man with the title “Rector” giving his blessing to a gay union...
“It is not we who have whipped up the whirlwind, replacing words of love and inclusion with those of hatred and exclusion. We set out to express, experimentally, pushing at boundaries, a love of a type which is not unusual or perverse but which is perfectly ordinary and accepted outside the Church. Why, then, can it not be accepted inside the community that is based, not on law, but on the loving presence of God in Jesus Christ?”
I find it interesting how many people confuse strong emotions with gospel truth, and lust with love. Yet the scriptures have very little involvement with emotions except as engendered by the Holy Spirit. In fact, the gospel has Christ telling his followers that if they are not willing to leave family behind to follow Him, they are not worthy disciples. Nor are His commandments couched in terms of feelings but rather acts or refusals to act, regardless of feelings. When we do the right things, we will have the right feelings, sometimes before, much more often after. We are called to trust the Lord’s injunctions and act on faith, which basically means we won’t emotionally want to do so. A man may “love” his mistress and a woman her paramour but no one would argue (I think) that their relationship is holy and deserves the blessings of church authority. Yet if someone feels they are in love, then according to too many nowadays, God must surely be at the bottom of it and therefore approving. Sad commentary on how little this pastor knows his scriptures and the role of emotions in knowing how to follow Him. They want us to trust our emotions and let God follow rather than trust God and let our emotions follow.
Silly me, I would have thought that a clergyman's thinking would be shaped by a book, rather than by a decade. Some quotes from that book, one that people used to believe that every minister should read and follow [all quotes from Young's Literal Translation, which is for the most part a good word by word transliteration that allows the reader to see whether other translations may have changed the original meaning]:
Leviticus 18:22 "And with a male thou dost not lie as one lieth with a woman; abomination it [is]."
Leviticus 20:13 "And a man who lieth with a male as one lieth with a woman; abomination both of them have done"
Romans 1:27 "and in like manner also the males having left the natural use of the female, did burn in their longing toward one another; males with males working shame, and the recompense of their error that was fit, in themselves receiving."
1 Corinthians 6:9 "have ye not known that the unrighteous the reign of God shall not inherit? be not led astray; neither whoremongers, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor sodomites"
Matthew 19:4-5 "and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall be -- the two -- for one flesh?"
I Timothy 1:9-10 "having known this, that for a righteous man law is not set, but for lawless and insubordinate persons, ungodly and sinners, impious and profane, parricides and matricides, men-slayers, whoremongers, sodomites, men-stealers, liars, perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that to sound doctrine is adverse"
Maybe I'm missing something, but I find it hard to see how a minister would choose to revere the 1970s over the Bible. I can't imagine reconciling homosexual "marriage" with Christianity.
Does this mean he was an oversexed vicar? Or, that he was a wanker from pre-teens to adulthood?
At any rate, the only thing he will accomplish is to make more congregants sick at their stomachs so that they'll have to leave.
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