Theological Reflections on Gay Marriage: Prologue

Yesterday the Huffington Post blog site posted a link to a Ruth Gledhill article in the Times (London), which publishes some of Rowan Williams’ 2000-2001 letters to a member of his former diocese in Wales (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4473814.ece). The current Archbishop of Canterbury wrote the letters while Archbishop of Wales.

In the letters, Rowan Williams states that after two decades of study and prayer, he had reached a “definitive conclusion” about gay marriage: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.”

It is hardly accidental that this correspondence is being released now, as the Lambeth Conference has just closed. There are incredible, terrible pressures from all quarters for the Anglican communion, and, in particular, its American Episcopalian branch, to “repent” of its welcome of gay* persons. Media coverage during the conference noted that some members of the Anglican communion are taunting other members for allowing the Anglican church to be known as the gay church—as if any church standing in solidarity with Jesus should find it embarrassing to be ridiculed for standing with any despised and marginalized group.

As I have noted before, in my view, future generations of believers, as well as historians, will look back on this period of history in bafflement that this issue above all—the need to define gay human beings as the despised and excluded others—should have energized the Christian churches at the turn of the 21st century. Believers of the future and historians will surely ask how it was possible for large numbers of those who claim to follow Jesus to have imagined that excluding anyone—in ugly, obtrusive, taunting, demeaning ways—could be not merely the prerogative but the holy duty of a follower of Jesus.

If civilization perdures beyond the current period, then civilized people will have to ask, as Rowan Williams himself does in his 2000-2001 correspondence, why Christians ever thought it possible to make persecution of gay human beings “the sole or primary marker of Christian orthodoxy”—when Jesus himself never once mentions homosexuality. And when Jesus himself preaches constantly that practical compassion, the kind he practiced by sitting at table with despised sinners, is the hallmark of true religion.

Reading about Rowan Williams’ honest, carefully and painfully discerned, assessment of gay unions (as opposed to the official stance he is pressured to take as an archbishop trying desperately to hold the Anglican communion together) encourages me to try to capture some theological reflections about gay marriage that I have been developing since the recent California Supreme Court decision. These musings reflect ongoing discussions at the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) blog café, in which some contributors defend the traditional hard line of Catholic teaching that all homosexual acts are intrinsically evil because they are not ordered to procreation, and others propose that marriage exists primarily to resolve social issues that arise when couples have children (see http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1046, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1968, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1919, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1816).

My musings also reflect the predictable, but nonetheless disappointing, decision of the California Catholic bishops to release a statement on 1 August calling on Catholics in that state to throw their weight behind Proposition 8—the amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage (www.cacatholic.org/news/proposition-8-on-californias-november-ballot.html). (Can conferences of bishops be wrong, even immoral in their conclusions? The Austrian bishops’ endorsement of Hitler in 1938 certainly proves that they can be spectacularly wrong—even defending morally indefensible positions.

When conferences of bishops are spectacularly wrong, and defend immoral positions, can faithful Catholics reject those positions? Franz Jäggerstätter certainly thought so—and paid the ultimate price for following his conscience against the moral advice of the priests and bishops who advised him to serve the Nazis.)

Before I launch into the theme of gay marriage, a proviso: I may very well be offering thoughts here that have been worked through a lot more systematically by other theologians, including other openly gay ones. I need to confess that I simply don’t read a lot of theology these days—haven’t done so for some time.

This has everything to do with the experience of marginalization, with feeling pushed beyond the boundaries of what is considered right and proper within the church and the theological academies that continue to dance to the church’s tune. But it also has to do with what feeds my theological imagination and my heart: truth be told, that never has been theology, except in the case of a few classical authors whose prose I find irresistible, including Augustine and John Henry Newman.

No, I’m not much of a theologian. I am, though, a reader. Always have been; always will be. I read indiscriminately—history, novels, poetry, drama, blogs, diaries, cookbooks, the backs of cereal boxes. And many of those sources fire my theological imagination far more than does any theological work I’ve ever read. I’ve learned more theology from Jane Austen than I’ll ever learn from Lonergan.

There was a time in which I read a few gay theologians—notably John McNeill. I did so during the period in which I was struggling to decide how to deal with the brute and immovable fact that my first, and decisive, experience of falling in love was not “right”—it was oriented to the direction of intrinsic disorder, and nothing I sought to do could change that direction.

Yet the direction resulted in such gifts in my life that it seemed downright ungrateful to the Creator to reject those gifts—and myself—when the gifts were precisely what Paul calls the fruits of the Spirit: the love I experienced brought me joy, peace, a generosity of soul that I did not have when I cramped myself into the self-hating box the church calls sanctity for gay people. And the more I came to terms with myself and the recognition that God was the giver of these gifts, the more the gifts seemed to abound—though, at the same time, the more the outright rejection and scorn of many in the Christian community also seemed to grow, in direct proportion to my struggle to claim my identity and my love as God-given.

I did read John McNeill in this period, and benefited greatly from his work. My ignorance of other gay theologians has nothing at all to do with disdain for their work. It has more to do with my inability to find much that feeds my spirit in a great deal of the theology published today. It also has something to do with a kind of test I set myself during that coming-out struggle: a test to find my own path without allowing the arguments of openly gay theologians to sway my conclusions, should those conclusions be flat wrong, and should the church be right in its condemnation of me and my ilk.

(I have always deplored ghettoization. I resisted the label of ‘gay theologian’ for a long time, not because I wanted to remain closeted, but because, at some level, it simply shouldn’t make a difference, one’s sexual orientation. I’m a theologian who happens to be gay. Just as I happen to be Southern, Anglo, a pretty good cook, an exceedingly impatient human being, and so on. Nonetheless, if part of the price the mainstream makes me pay for claiming and celebrating who God makes me and the love God has given me, then I am happy to be known as a gay theologian.)

Finally, I haven’t really read other openly gay theologians carefully in recent years, because Steve and I donated our entire theological library—which did include quite a few books by gay theologians that I had bought without ever reading—to Philander Smith College a few years ago. Philander Smith is a small, struggling Methodist HBCU. It needed to build its library in the years in which we worked there, because its accrediting body had cited the library’s weakness on a previous accreditation visit.

Since Steve and I collaborated with several other faculty members on an NEH grant that resulted in a hefty gift to the college to buy books in the field of humanities, it began to seem right and just to us that we put our own money where our mouth was, and give our cherished theology books to the library. For Steve, this was a more painful sacrifice than for me, because he had collected very good books systematically over a period of years.

For me, the sacrifice came more from losing a few books that were old friends—in particular, the social gospel collection I had gathered for my dissertation work, in the margins of which I had made copious annotations I’d like one day to see again.

And here I think I’ll break this lengthy posting into two, so that my reflections on gay marriage form the second part of the posting . . . .

* Generic use of the term to include LGBT persons in general.

The Men Who Rule Us: Collusion of Male Church Leaders in Protecting Male Power and Privilege

Today is Steve’s birthday, and so a day chopped up with preparations for a small party this evening. Fortunately, I had enough steam in me to bake his cake yesterday—a chocolate torte I invented for his 40th birthday, now nearly two decades ago, which has become his customary birthday cake each year. It’s sitting in the middle of the table looking handsome, if I say so myself, with fresh raspberries—a fruit he loves, since he grew up with it—piled in the center where the cake sinks as it cools, topped by a few pecan halves.

Time has been at a premium the last two days, as we traveled back from seeing his family—a difficult trip, because Steve’s father is very seriously ill now. And on our return, I found an elderly family member of mine had died (a first cousin of my mother), so a good bit of yesterday was occupied with visiting relatives, talking over shared memories and old times, making promises to see each other more often than at funerals—promises none of us ever seem to fulfill.

My blog thoughts are scattered today, due to the birthday preparations, the visitation last evening, the figs that seem intent on coming ripe each year at the hottest time of summer, when no one feels energetic about picking them, the glut of wonderful local produce (tomatoes, cantaloupes, crowder peas, okra, cucumbers, peppers, squash, eggplant, pole beans, watermelons, peaches, corn, butterbeans, and on and on) that demands to be bought/picked/cooked/blanched/frozen/turned to soup these days.

As I cooked this morning, sweat pouring down my face in the hot kitchen, I wondered how the women in my family and the women of other families who cooked for my family managed it. It’s intense. All the best produce ripens at once, and at the time of year in which it is least pleasant to be near a stove. No wonder my father’s mother and my mother’s oldest sister, who usually cooked for my maternal grandmother, cooked the entire day’s food early in the day, before it was too hot.

Dinner sat on the stove from breakfast time until dinner was eaten at noon. Then the leftovers of dinner sat again on the stovetop for anyone with appetite enough to eat them lukewarm at suppertime. What didn’t get eaten was very likely to reappear again in a day or so as delicious vegetable soup full of all the fresh vegetables that had been cooked a day or so before.

If the church constituted by each family—the house church—is the body of Christ, every bit as much as is the church in its entirety, then the women who have historically cooked daily meals for their families are every bit as much priests as are those who stand at the altar on Sundays. The claim to fame of ordained priests (in the Catholic church, at least) is that that they and they alone can “confect” the sacrament—can “make” Jesus for the rest of the church, by consecrating the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

I’d like to know what women who have for generations labored so hard to cook meals for their families are doing, if not confecting the body of Christ in their own households? The church stays alive through the daily, unacknowledged, loving but laborious work of millions and millions of female hands, making Christ present at their tables, building the household church, the body of Christ, by transmuting the raw elements of the table into savory meals. In refusing to ordain women to the “official” priesthood, the church turns a blind eye to one of the most elemental realities of the life of the body of Christ: the way in which women function as priests at their own family tables, century after century.

These reflections are obviously pitched against the previous days’ meditations on clericalism. I continue to think, these days, about the issues of power and control that are so neuralgic today for the ordained, predominantly male clergy of the Christian churches—of how power and control seems to trump the other considerations of the gospel that are so much more central, such as doing justice, loving tenderly, and walking humbly with God.

I sometimes think that those reading this blog may wonder at my constant insistence that the emphasis on power and control within the pastoral leaders of one church bleeds over into other Christian churches. I wonder, that is, whether some readers of this blog may think I am reaching, when I attempt to point out parallels and overlaps between the concern of pastoral leaders in one church to maintain their dominance, and the similar concern of pastoral leaders in another church. Are there truly discernible interconnections today between, say, the stolid determination of many United Methodist bishops to hold the line against openly gay clergy, the insistence of many Anglican clerics that the priesthood must be closed to openly gay candidates and the episcopacy locked away from grasping women, and the certainty of the Vatican that ordaining women or affirming openly gay Christians would sever our ties to apostolic tradition?

I’m convinced there are such interconnections. How otherwise to make sense of the fact that Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Evangelization, recently felt free to inform his Anglican brethren gathered at the Lambeth Conference, that Anglicans acting independently of the Vatican in ordaining women bishops and gay clergy are suffering from spiritual Alzheimer’s disease? Since Dias rows for another team, one is hard put to understand his willingness to put his oar into Anglican debates, unless there is some strong presumption among the men ruling the churches that they have a shared interest—one transcending denominational boundary lines—in maintaining the order, their order, without which they imagine the churches cannot continue to function.

Orthodox patriarchs have made similar rumblings about the Anglican departure from “the” tradition that dictates all male, all heterosexual (at least, ostensibly heterosexual) clergy for all churches, per omnia saecula saeculorum. This is astonishing in some ways, this confidence of the rulers of one communion that they have an unquestioned right to meddle in the internal affairs of another communion, when it comes to preserving the hegemony of men, straight (-identified) men, in the priesthood.

It’s as if all other issues pale in comparison to this one—issues such as how to understand the Eucharist, the nature of the church, the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. In the minds of the men who rule the church today, the church stands on one foundation alone: continuation of the domination of clerical life by straight-identified men. Astonishing, given that the gospels show no concern at all for this “doctrine,” and that Jesus never utters a word about the male-female divide on which contemporary Christians are willing to hinge the very future of the church.

Dias belongs to a church that, after all, has chosen to declare Anglican orders invalid, on the basis of assumptions that the Church of England has broken apostolic succession. Given this theological approach to Anglican clerical life—one that invalidates all Anglican ordination from the outset—why would the Vatican even think it necessary to try to involve itself in warning Anglicans that making women bishops and ordaining (openly) gay priests is going to drive a wedge between Rome and Canterbury?

The why is obvious. Nothing counts more, in the minds of the men ruling the churches today, than the unbroken tradition—their tradition—of (ostensibly) heterosexual male rule of the churches. Their rule.

+ + + + +

Before I close this posting, I did want to take quick notice of two news stories that have picked up recently on themes I’ve explored in previous postings. One of these is the story of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s burial with his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John. As I noted several days ago (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/flying-saints-and-anglicans-crossing.html), it was Newman’s express wish that he be buried in the same grave as that of St. John. When Newman died, his wish was honored.

As my blog posting also noted, when announcements came down recently that Newman was to be disinterred and reburied, I suspected that St. John would not be accompanying him. In other words, I had the sinking certainty when I read the announcement that Newman’s express final wishes would be disregarded when his body was exhumed and reburied.

And so it is coming to pass. Recent reports demonstrate that the push to have Newman parted from St. John in a new burial place is coming from the Vatican itself—the same Vatican that has been slow to consider Newman for canonization precisely because of persistent rumors, from his own lifetime up to the present, that Newman was gay (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/07/vatican-orders-cardinal-newman-to-be.html).

And not all Catholics in England are looking favorably on this decision to violate Cardinal Newman’s final wishes. As well they shouldn’t. What is more sacrosanct than the burial wishes people express in their last wills and testaments, or other documents dictating those wishes?

Ironically, the determination to remove Newman from St. John now, as his canonization cause proceeds, only underscores the nature of their relationship—a relationship that, even though there is every reason to believe it was a chaste one, would nonetheless have caused both men to be denied entrance to the seminary today. My own hope is that the opening of Newman’s grave and the violation of his final wishes will have some unforeseen consequences that will ultimately result in a more compassionate approach to gay human beings on the part of Rome.

Since I have blogged repeatedly about the murder of Larry King in Oxnard, California, in February this year, I’d like to note that this week’s Newsweek cover story has to do with Larry King and bullying of gay youth in American schools (www.newsweek.com/id/147790). As do many commentators within the LGBT community, I find the Newsweek article deeply flawed. It emphasizes Larry King’s gender-transgressive behavior far more than it does the even more troubling interest of his murderer in Nazi history. It fails to note the ways in which straight-identifying males in our society still far too often have the unquestioned right to bully, and even assault, both females and males they identify as feminine.

It is good that what happened to Larry King continues to receive attention. It is not good that our society still too often gives some males, straight-identified ones, the unquestioned right to bully and do harm to others. And above all, it is not good that our school systems seem incapable of eradicating or preventing such gender-biased violence. We have a long, long way to go. And the men ruling the churches aren’t going to get us there, obviously. They’re spending too much time defending their power and privilege to bother with questions like how to stop schoolchildren from murdering each other.

Flying Saints and Anglicans Crossing the Tiber

Wow. The saints are really getting around these days. First the Vatican up and flies Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati from Italy to Sydney for World Youth Day. Party on down, Bl. PG!

Now, there’s talk of exhuming John Henry Newman and moving him to a more veneration-friendly site inside the city of Birmingham. Newman is now buried at Rednal Hill outside Birmingham, at his oratory’s country house. Sharing the burial site with him is his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John, regarding whose death Newman wrote, "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine."

In the year after St. John’s death, Newman made a written statement of his own express wishes for burial. The statement declares, “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will.”

St. John was buried in a coffin draped with a pall bearing Newman’s cardinal’s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur. The lifelong friends share a tombstone with the inscription Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.

It will be interesting to see whether Newman’s express wishes to be buried with St. John will be honored when Newman’s body is moved for wider veneration. Somehow, I doubt that St. John will be making this particular trek into Birmingham with Newman.

All this against the backdrop of the current deliberations in Lambeth. I have refrained from blogging much about what is going on with the Anglican communion, (hough it fascinates me) for two reasons. One is that I flatly do not trust all the publicity being generated by the media about Lambeth. The other is that there are so many facets to the story of what is happening in the Anglican communion today (in my view), that one can easily miss the real treasure for the bright bits of tinfoil over which the media wish us to twitter.

The untrustworthiness of media accounts: I blogged extensively about this issue during the recent United Methodist General Conference. Simply put, the mainstream media are in the pocket of well-heeled special interest groups like the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). This and other groups deliberately working tensions within the worldwide Anglican communion to try to stop forward movement on ordination of women bishops and gay clergy have been adroitly successful at planting media soundbites about the dissolution of the Anglican communion.

As Lambeth begins, some blogs are reporting that IRD is jetting hold-the-line Anglicans to Lambeth from dioceses around the world. At the last gathering of the worldwide Anglican communion, a bishop in attendance told me, IRD and its allies set up a state-of-the-art media center in the conference grounds. From that center, instant messages could be beamed out around the world, to elicit instant pressure from the interest groups among the faithful seeking to hold the line on women and gays. The center also connected to delegates on the scene, to assure that they were bombarded with constant instructions about how to vote on various issues.

Or so I was told, and I do not doubt the word of the bishop telling me about these activities. Very similar reports arose at the latest United Methodist General Conference. The right wing of these churches is well-funded, and is intent on manipulating the consciousness of the public (and of church members) regarding issues such as women bishops and ordination of openly gay clergy and bishops.

And because IRD and its allies have abundant money and strong ties to important neoconservative political leaders in many places, the media listen,when IRD issues statements. Much of the fanfare about schism in the Anglican communion is a media frenzy emanating directly from IRD—which wants to divide the Anglican and Methodist (and Presbyterian) churches, insofar as it cannot force these churches to toe the neoconservative political line.

This is not to say that there are not strong divisions in worldwide Anglicanism. It is not to say that some kind of fraying will not occur in coming months. What I do want to underscore, however, is that anyone following the story of what is happening in the Anglican communion would be well advised to go beyond media soundbites, in trying to understand all the ramifications of this story.

In my view, when saints start jetting around the world and when their bodies are exhumed for easier veneration, something momentous is happening. The wish to move Newman is clearly linked to the Anglican story. This move is, in some respects, an in-your-face declaration on the part of the Roman Catholic church to the Anglican communion: see, we have the saint (and the sanctity); is it any wonder that those concerned to maintain fidelity to the ancient ways are now crossing the Tiber back to Rome?

When saints fly and jump from grave to grave, one can be assured that Christianity is, well, in a state of flux. The problem is to understand the precise nature of this flux.

There are dimensions to the story of the proposed move of some Anglican/Episcopalian bishops and whole parishes to Rome that are as baffling as the choice to make Blessed Pier Giorgio fly to Sydney or to dig up Newman’s body. Not a few of these bishops and parishes represent precisely the kind of macho-homophobic Christianity that tormented Newman throughout his life.

Newman was nelly. The muscular evangelical Anglicans of his day—the Greg Venables—made no bones about it. In their view, the whole Oxford contingent, with its love of ecclesiastical lace and its infatuation with the smell of incense, had more than a little lightness in its loafers. In Newman’s period, the muscular Christians, for whom God made male and female and thus it ever shall be, would have as lief gone over to lace and incense as they’d have condemned the rapacious capitalism of captains of industry during the Victorian period.

And yet, today, it’s supposedly going to be these very folks—the saviors of Christianity from decadent, limp-wristed, lisping clergy—who are going to swim the Tiber. It’s supposedly going to be these folks who now kiss the ruby slippers of Benedict XVI and who flock to Birmingham to pray at Newman’s tomb—at the tomb of the saint their forefathers repudiated in his lifetime.

There are, of course, other Anglican contingents purportedly ready to go over to Rome. Those opposing the ordination of women bishops not uncommonly include many Anglo-Catholics who have always felt strong sympathy for Newman. If defections occur—if both Anglo-Catholics and muscular macho-homophobic Anglican evangelicals head to Rome—it will be very interesting to see how the tensions between the two play out once they are united in a new Roman Catholic configuration.

And how those tensions affect the Roman church itself. After all, one of the effects of taking in these refugees fleeing women bishops and (openly) gay clergy will be the implementation of more and more Anglican rites within the Roman communion. Which is to say, people will be praying differently than other Roman Catholics do—at a time when the Vatican is stressing the need for liturgical conformity and the return to older rites.

And the Anglicans will bring with them the pesky question of married clergy—to be specific, the pesky question of why Rome eagerly accepts married Anglican clergy defecting from Canterbury, while absolutely slamming the door against married clergy in the Roman rite.

A prediction: not a significant number of Anglicans will defect. But the exodus will be painted in media accounts as highly significant, as the splitting up of the Anglican communion. And another prediction: some of those who cross the Tiber will regret having done so, when they see how things work in the imperial system they are willingly reimposing on themselves. As Newman himself said after his conversion, those who want to ride serenely in the barque of Peter had best not look too closely what goes on in the engine room. If the worldwide clerical abuse crisis should have taught us anything, it is that imperial systems of governance, even in churches (or especially in churches?) all too often act imperious: they blithely ignore the will of those they govern; they willingly dupe when the imperial system is at stake—they willingly lie and dissimulate—and collude with worldly powers whose hands are not always immaculate.

Catholicism is, unfortunately, not the high-minded, morally upright business Newman dreamed it was, when he turned to Rome. And for that reason, one wonders about the unforeseen consequences of the choice to move his body. This choice is, of course, part and parcel of the same media-circus mentality that led the Vatican to jet Pier Giorgio Frassati to Sydney. It’s part and parcel of a strategy of image management that reduces the Christian message to easily appropriated soundbites—the kind of crude, instant, reduced and packaged-for-consumption information the clergy imagine the laity need in order to stay faithful.

But in the case of Newman, wider veneration may open up some unanticipated interest in the theology of a man who has not been canonized, in part, up to now precisely because his theology is simply so inconvenient for Rome. It was Newman, after all, who pointed out that in the Arian crisis, the sensus fidelium preserved orthodox understandings of the divine-human nature of Christ, when the clergy by and large had abdicated orthodoxy.

It was Newman who wrote that doctrines are not true if they are not received by the faithful. It was Newman who insisted that when the sensus fidelium differs significantly from a position handed down by the magisterium, the proper approach of the magisterium is not to enforce conformity, but to ask why the Spirit is speaking in such a different way among the people of God.

And it was Newman who once raised his glass at a banquet and proposed the following toast: to the Pope, yes. But to conscience first! These are hardly theological sentiments now governing the polity Rome wants to push on the faithful. What moldy, inconvenient theological ideas might we now cause to tumble forth, when we open Newman’s grave?

And, once again, what to do with St. John? Newman explicitly asked to be buried with his lifelong friend. It is no secret that another reason the Vatican has not moved forward quickly with Newman’s canonization cause is that he was thought to be, as a graduate-school classmate of mine once said, a bit of a homosexual.

What strange new energies might the Vatican be releasing now, in exhuming Newman and making him a saint, just as it receives converts from Albion’s shores fleeing the gaying up of the Anglo churches? What will it mean to the gay community to have, at last, one of us—one who wrote about the sorrow of losing a companion as deeper than the sorrow of losing a spouse—canonized at this strange, interesting moment in Christian history?

Ironically, Newman is just the nightmare so many of those muscular Christians now fording the Tiber are trying to escape . . . . Even as Rome opens it arms to the muscular Anglicans, it shoves the icon of a gay saint into the hands of those now arriving on Tiber's eastern shores. Perchance this will give gay-fleeing Anglicans a chance to pause and reflect more carefully about what it means to live within an imperial structure that brooks no opposition and conducts no polls to ascertain how its teachings are being received by the faithful.