calling all Anglicans

[ionesmum]

What do you make of the statement today re the gay issue?

Also, what do you make of the CofE in general?

I'm struggling to stay with the church at the moment, and could really do with some fresh perspectives on things.

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lol Bloss! Hmmm I'm not sure you'd be too chuffed if I compared you to the Catholic church at the time of Galileo...! Or Darwin for that matter!

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Of course - we are just finding some ecologically-sustainable sources of stakes suitable for the job.

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Has it ever occurred to you Bloss that the Bible might be wrong about some things? First of all, the apostles do not agree with each other about everything. Second of all, how unChristian is it to judge a person merely by one single aspect eg. their sexuality; a particular personality trait; gender; colour of skin? I could go on, but therein lies the root of all prejudice.

Cam: Without wanting to answer on Bloss's behalf, I think that people from Bloss's point of view see the Bible as the definitive word of God, which had to be obeyed above all - and if that causes hurt, bigotry and people's lives to be ruined, then that's the fault of society and not the Bible.

It was a view I held myself for many years, until I did a lot of work with gay and transsexual people and decided that, if God really created these people to live lonely sexually unfulfilled lives, then I didn't want to believe in that kind of God any more.

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Bloss: I simply found that living that way was terribly inadequate when faced with the complexities of life. An example:

I meet my husband when I am 14 and he is 27. We are living in a very strict Christian community. We start to fall in love, and to our delight, there are prophecies which confirm that we are meant to marry and have children. We marry when I am 18 and are blissfully happy. We spend hours in prayer.
Then it starts to unravel. I start to feel trapped and confused because I realise that I don't want to spend my life with this person, that I am too young. He starts to doubt his sexuality. I fall in love with someone else; he tells me he wants a sex change. We spend a lot of time in psychiatric care and eventually I break and say that I can't remain married to him any more. I leave the marital home when I am 21.
I turn to you for advice, I am desperate to find a man to spend my life with and have a christian family with - it has always been my greatest desire and hope.
You tell me, "I'm sorry, you've blown your chance. The Bible is quite clear that you have to live alone for the rest of your life."

Another example; my best friend David. We start a romantic relationship after my divorce. We are really close friends anyway. One night I ask him to kiss me, he breaks down and starts sobbing. He says, "All I have ever wanted is to be a family man, but I can't do it. I know I'm gay and I hate it. It's the last thing in the world that I want. What I want... is to want you. But I don't and I can't change it."
David spends a lot of time in therapy; he takes a lot of antidepressants and antipsychotics. He doesn't want to be gay and he wants to die. He thinks God hates him.
He turns to you for advice, because he wants to know how he is supposed to live for the rest of his life. All you can offer is that, well, the Bible is quite clear; God wants him to live alone and, if he finds true love and companionship, he can't have it.

We are both 21. And our lives are over. That's really the best you can offer.

I found God to be more forgiving and merciful than the Bible would have me believe. And as a postscript, David is now my daughter's Godfather.

Mp, you should become a priest. Really. The church so needs people like you.

Bloss, the last time we had a debate like this you and I came to some kind of understanding. We are never going to agree what it means to obey God but we have more in common (our love of Jesus and our desire to give our lives to him) than we have differences, and our church has room for both points of view. For years this was how the worldwide Anglican Communion functioned - particularly in relation to women priests/bishops, it still does. Now we have a situation where one group has bullied its way to force its views on homosexuality on another, and that is what is so disturbing.

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MP, they are incredible experiences you describe

Not remotely incredible, Bloss, just the normal, complicated messiness of human lives touched by marital breakdown, or the dawning reality that one is actually never going to love in anything other than a relationship with someone of the same sex. Normal stories, lived by normal people.

My ex-husband and my friend David have both left the church, because they felt it offered them no comfort or mercy. And according to your analysis, I am also living a dreadfully sinful life - as I am divorced and living with a divorced man. If I was to accept your analysis, the the christian life would offer me no comfort either. Fortunately, all of the christians who have supported me in my life do no see things they way that you do. Otherwise I would have been lost to God a long time ago.

A life of celibacy for every gay person or every unfortunate soul grieving for their failed marriage! What a depressing gospel message.

Karl Barth (who, I think most will agree, was pretty conservative) wrote that those of us who marry have a vocation to that marriage, but only if we marry the person that God has intended for us. Therefore it is possible to be in a marriage that God does not intend for us to be in, because we have made a mistake (being only human), and that therefore is not a marriage in the eyes of God. He also said that if two people are intended by God to be together but do not officially marry, God sees that as a marriage because of what is in the hearts of the people involved. Pretty enlightened for the 1930's IMO.

MP, I am so glad and give thanks that God has shown you how merciful and loving he is. I pray that your ex and your friend will one day be able to know this too.

My mum works for an AIDS charity where most of he rcolleagues are gay. To them, 'Christian' is another word for 'bigot'.

Ionesmum: Ah, Karl Barth, how I enjoyed slagging him off in essays at university many years ago! And when I got bad marks I was always convinced that was because the tutors were biased towards him!

I'd have to disagree with Barth's idea because it's too idealistic and rather deterministic (even if it's a unusually merciful line for Barth to take!). I think that there are lots of people we meet in a lifetime that we could marry, and some would make better marital partners for us than others. I do believe that marriage is sacred and that the vows we made are extremely serious, and that is the reason why my partner and I feel unable to marry again at this time.

The church doesn't have a 'forgiveness' ceremony and the second-marriage-blessing is rather a fudge. It's a bit of a no-man's-land. We both think of our ex-spouses every day and love them greatly. We both think that we have a special relationship with them that we don't have with anyone else. We are both very grateful for our spouses and our marriages. The church doesn't seem to be able to deal with that although I'm sure that in time, it will be addressed.

Part of me quite likes 'living in sin' though - at least my daughter won't grow up with white-dress fantasies that there is a special prince waiting for her somewhere...!

MP, I'm no fan of Barth either. I'm sure you can imagine my reaction to the bit where he says that women must be obedient to their husbands to model how men should be obedient to God! I quoted him to show that someone who was very conservative in his views had none-the-less come to a different conclusion as to what 'marriage' means. I'm not a predestinationalist myself but I am happy with the idea that I have a vocation to be married to my husband - after all, we've been together nearly twenty years'!

When I was studying Barth a colleague had recently gone through a separation. Her ex was a minister and she was shunned by her church after the split, and she really struggled because she had meant her marriage vows and still felt as though she's broken her promises to God. She couldn't accept Barth's reasoning either.

I agree about a church needing to have some kind of forgiveness service. I have attended healing services, (not the 'signs and wonders' kind but the anointing with oil kind!) which I found helpful in allowing myself to be forgiven, but it's not a public declaration by the church that you are forgiven. And the church does seem to take the line that former spouses alomost don't exist, and that the former marriage is something to repent of, and that's not always the case, as you show. And I so agree that he church belessing thing is a fudge, but then so is a lot of Anglican practise!

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Bloss, please! I don't think you truly believe that MP and I demand that God does as we wish before we agree to love him. I love God because I do; I've always known him, so it's a bit like trying to explain why I love my mum and dad. I can say that as I have grown older I have grown to love him more, but as you know I haven't found it easy. He's shown me things about myself I'd rather have not known, and taken me to some places that I find frightening. But he has never stopped showing me his grace and mercy - the one time I thought he had, I realsed it was I that had turned away.

It's very easy for you and I as straight women to tell a gay person that they cannot enjoy a fulfilling (hopefully) lifelong relationship like we have with our dhs. And it's easy for us as mothers to tell a woman in MP's position that she has forfeited the right to the joy of having her own child. What baffles me, Bloss, is that you seem to be saying that God intends for us to suffer. As God created us out of no other reason than love, how can that be?

Yes, I do believe promiscuity to be wrong, but I'm not about to declare myself out of communion with those who may think differently. And I am pro-life - but sometimes this may mean terminating a baby to save the life of its mother, if the alternative would be for both of them to die - as happened to my cousin, which broke her heart.

Life isn't balck and white, Bloss. I understand that some of your friends have been able to resign themselves to a life of celibacy and/or childlessness, but maybe that was the right choice for them given where they come from theologically. Not all of us pick apart the Bible and live our lives by it, and I hve no problem in believing that a gay couple can have a vocation to their relationship, that a divorced woman can have a vocation to motherhood, and that being pro-life is not always as simple as being anti-abortion.

Given that, do you believe that my views allow me to be part of the Anglican Communion?

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Bloss: A lot of what you write about God reminds me of a quote I once read by an Australian philosopher called Reece (I think):

"If there was an almighty all-powerful super-being who declared to me, 'Bow down and worship me or I will blast you to hell', I hope I would have the courage to say; 'Go ahead and blast.'"

The fact is, Bloss, it's nothing to do with 'loving' a God who imposes the kind of rules and regulations that you believe in - it's just that you create a picture of an almighty monster, which to me is incoherent. I simply don't BELIEVE such a dreadful creature exists. It is a far cry from my experience of a merciful and loving God.

By the way, I am lucky enough to be the mother of an adorable girl - and I am expecting another later this year. And to me, being a mother has been the height of anything I have ever experienced spiritually or emotionally. The highlight of my week (of my life!) is kneeling at the communion rail as a family with my partner and my daughter. I have been massively and undeservedly blessed.

Ionesmum: Point noted about Barth. His views are not a million miles away from the Roman Catholic view (which is that certain marriages were not really marriages to start with, because of x, y and z, and therefore the partners are free to marry again).

As you say, there is a certain amount of brushing-under-the-carpet of ex-spouses!