Michael Ramsey: Fret not, only believe

In a recent post I listed some of my Anglican mentors. I have subsequently had reason to revisit some of the writing of one of them. I came across something I think is worth sharing:

The Christian gospel is largely concerned with the issue of fretting and not fretting. We live in a fretting world, and the gospel can be paraphrased "fret not, only believe".

. . .

There is certainly much to fret about. In the world there are ugly and frightening spectres; the contrasts of affluence and poverty; racial conflict mounting higher; the drift of the Western democracies into spiritual aimlessness. Who would not fret with these spectres at the door? Not only the world but the Church as an institution makes you fret. Many, I know, find it difficult to serve it with happy contentment. Sometimes it frets by its old-fashionedness, its inability to reform itself, its shirking of challenging issues. And sometimes it frets in the opposite way: by a seeming loss of historic values, by a playing down of the supernatural, by a concern to be "with it". If we are ourselves conceited, we fret about what others in the Church are doing or not doing in a "we and they" superiority; if we are humble, we include ourselves within the criticism. In either case, we may fret; and a kind of nervous fretting can bedevil the Church's life. So the world may fret you, the Church may fret you, and there will be the frettings of a more personal kind always round the corner. Tiredness, monotony, staleness, the small results which seem to come from immense expenditure of labour. So, all in all, there will be times when you find yourself saying, "Who will show us any good?"

So a mist comes to hide from your awareness some of the realities in which you believe: sin and judgement, mercy and joy. The answer is drawn from the scriptures, from our divine Lord, from the lives of the saints, and from your own experience as a Christian. The answer is a deep, sparkling well of truth, which is Christ himself, and from it our fears are washed away and our thirsty spirits are refreshed.

– Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today

A Response to the Orlando Shooting

Again this past weekend we have been confronted with the evil and violence of human brokenness and sin as 49 people were killed and 53 injured by a gunman at an Orlando nightclub. According to those who knew him, the shooter appears to have been a troubled, angry man prone to violence. He was also given to angry anti-gay rhetoric. And he expressed a somewhat confused affinity for groups espousing violent versions of Islam.

There is no doubt this was a calculated terrorist attack. The groups with whom the attacker verbally aligned himself are evil perversions of Islam specializing in terror. While these groups represent a strain of "extremist" Islam, we need to be clear that they do not represent all of Islam or the majority Muslims.  And we need to be wary of responding to their violent rejection of all who differ with them with a similar rejection of those with whom we differ. We must counter their ideology and theology of death with an ideology and theology of life and peace (Romans 8:6).

There is also no doubt that it was not a random attack. It was a targeted attack against gay and lesbian people – people who are all too often the targets of physical violence and violent, disdainful rhetoric. We can give thanks that another attack apparently targeting a Gay Pride parade in Los Angeles was thwarted by police. But, we also need to recognize that the Orlando shooter did not need inspiration from foreign terrorists to conclude that the presence of gays and lesbians is somehow an egregious moral threat. Rhetoric like that is common enough in America – and in American churches. We need to find better ways to talk about and to one another, regardless of our convictions about human sexuality.

I suggest that the best way to respond to the Orlando shooting is with the basic Christian disciplines of hope, love, and peace.

Hope. If we have died with Christ in baptism with the promise of sharing in his resurrection, we have a hope stronger than life or death or anything in between. With St. Paul, we can live convinced that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). With that assurance, we can dare to live without fear, including without fear of those who are different from us or with whom we disagree.

Love. Free from fear, we are free to learn to love. The love Christians are called to practice is not a sentimental feeling, but a determination to die to self in order to make space for the other. It is the way of the cross that calls us to love even our enemies and those who wish us harm. And it is a love that challenges us to consider where we have hurt or offended others. Love seeks more to understand than to be understood. Love demands that we take care how we carry others in our hearts and on our tongues. How we think and talk to or about one another matters (Matthew 12:36; cf. Matthew 5:22, James 3:2-9, 1 John 4:20)

Peace. As with love, there is no sentimentality in following the way of the Prince of Peace – it is the clear-eyed determination to bless rather than curse, to seek peace and pursue it (Psalm 34:13-14 & 1 Peter 3:8-22), and to not be conformed to this world, but transformed into a people who return good for evil (Romans 12). There have been mass killings in the United States inspired by violent strains of Islam. But, there have been more that had nothing to do with Islam or any foreign terrorist group. We need to come to terms with the violence of our society. We need to reconsider our own ready embrace of violence as a solution and the idea that if we all just armed ourselves more we would be safe. That is not the way of Jesus.

Hope, love, and peace are basic disciplines of the way of Jesus. Living lives of deep hope, love, and peace is our best and most faithful response to the violence and hate that represent conformity to this world – from without and from within. And they will prompt us to take action accordingly.

Why Anglican/Episcopalian? Mentors

My understanding of God, the world, and humanity has been formed and my imagination – which is another way of saying my capacity for faith, love, and wonder – has been shaped and expanded by several representatives of the Anglican way:

C. S.  Lewis
Charles Williams (friend of C. S. Lewis)

Dorothy Sayers (greatly influenced by C. Williams and a friend of Lewis)

Charles Gore ( an influence on Charles Williams)
Austin Farrer (theologian who preached at Lewis' funeral)

Evelyn Underhill

William Temple

E. L. Mascall

Martin Thornton

Madeleine L'Engle

Michael Ramsey

N. T. Wright

Rowan Williams

Other contemporary Anglican theologians I have read appreciatively are John Milbank, Sarah Coakley, Kathryn Tanner, and Mark McIntosh. And two contemporary converts to the Episcopal Church, Stanley Hauerwas and Miroslav Volf.

To that list of 20th century authors I would add these classic Anglican worthies:

Richard Hooker

Lancelot Andrewes

John Donne

George Herbert

Jeremy Taylor

Thomas Traherne

F. D. Maurice

Phillips Brooks

From even further back (before the break with the Roman Catholic Church) I have been influenced by Julian of Norwich.

I am inspired and informed by representatives from other traditions – Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Reformed, Lutheran, etc. – but I have found myself most at home with these.

I have also been influenced by more personal mentors – Fr. Mark Dyer of Christ Church, Hamilton, MA (later Bishop Dyer of the Diocese of Bethlehem and, still later, professor at Virginia Seminary while I as a student there) and Fr. Steve Ellis of St. Anne, Stockton, CA who helped restore my faith and instructed me toward confirmation in the Episcopal Church

They are in many ways a disparate group of folk who would not agree with each other on everything if could magically gather them together in one room. But, they share some common traits.

Each of them exhibits a commitment to a vision of Christian faith I've identified elsewhere in a series of blog posts, Anglicanism is . . .

One way or another reading each of these authors evokes Christmas for me which is one of my basic tests for whether or not someone is onto something. They bear witness to the hope that now that Christmas has arrived in the coming of Jesus Christ there is the promise that we might be overcome by Christmas any time, any place, even in the midst of whatever winters we endure as we await the final Advent of the King. 

There is more to this sense of Christmas. There is in the writing of each an emphasis on the centrality of the Incarnation. The Incarnation, of course, includes the way of the cross and the crucifixion. But the Incarnation has rich purpose, meaning, and wonder in itself.

To varying degrees most of these mentors also bear witness to the goodness of being human in the midst of the splendor of God's good creation. As Richard Hooker wrote, "All things are of God (and only sin is not) have God in them and he them in himself likewise." There is goodness and beauty in humans and the all creation because God who created it all is Good and Beautiful.

I [Wisdom – traditionally identified with the Word who became flesh in Jesus] was daily [God’s] delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race.

(Proverbs 8:30-31)

Consequently, they tend to hold to a sacramental appreciation of all created reality as having the potential of mediating the divine Presence.

At the same time, none of them is bashful about naming the reality of human sin and the very real sinfulness and brokenness in the world that corrupts the goodness of creation. They write of the need for atonement, redemption, and the hope of restoration.

Thus, in each is a serious engagement with spiritual disciplines that make for sanctification in the context of God's grace revealed in Jesus Christ.

Each is more or less an exponent of what Evelyn Underhill called 'practical mysticism':

“Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe that the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception–this 'ordinary contemplation', as the specialist call it–is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly alive. It is a natural human activity.”

Nearly all of them represent a high church, catholic Anglican way of seeing things that draws abundantly from the deep well of Christian thought, practice, and worship.

For the most part they each express an expansive orthodoxy – solidly orthodox with an appreciative engagement with non-Christian ways of thinking and being (which is not the same thing as unChristian ways of thinking and being, which they are not shy about challenging both within and without the Church).

Each also holds to a typically Anglican reticence which is wary of claiming to know overmuch about God or God's ways. They accept that God has been revealed in Jesus Christ and the scriptures that bear witness to him, but each retains a posture of humility and awe in the presence of the untamed, wild God at the heart of it all who is, as Lewis says of Aslan, "Good, but not safe."

No doubt we could name other common themes, but these are the ones that occur to me at the moment. In any event, their themes and presentation of Christian faith resonate deeply and inspire me. I am an Anglican and Episcopalian partly because of these  and other 'Glorious Companions'.

Why Anglican/Episcopalian? Liturgy

Canterbury Cross

"Every Christian communicant volunteers for translation into the supernatural order, and is self-offered for the supernatural purposes of God. The Liturgy leads us out toward Eternity, by way of the acts in which [we] express [our] need of God and relation to God. It commits every worshipper to the adventure of holiness, and has no meaning apart from that."

– Evelyn Underhill

As has been the case with many others, one of the things that drew me into the Episcopal Church and the Anglican tradition was the liturgy.

Liturgical worship has come usually to mean worship that is structured and follows a set pattern as opposed to forms of worship that seem less structured and more spontaneous. It is a style of worship Anglicans/Episcopalians share with the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and the Lutheran Church. It is not the kind of worship I knew growing up. But, when I first experienced it, I was hooked. 

I was taken with the poetry and drama of it all. Here was worship that incorporated beauty. There was a sense of majesty and mystery. There was room for wonder. There was a sense of being caught up in the glory of God who was transcendent yet incomprehensibly near. There was an intimation of something deep and true and eternal. Though I had grown up going to church and have much to be thankful for in that heritage, I remember feeling like I was worshiping for the first time.

The liturgy directed my attention away from myself – including my obsessive questioning – and focused it on the mystery and wonder of God. It focused my attention on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It opened me up the the promise of New Creation in Christ. It wasn't about my felt needs or conscious concerns. It was about my need to get out of and beyond myself and into “the bracing atmosphere of God” (Evelyn Underhill).

Related is the way the liturgy emphasized the communal over the individual. For one thing, it wasn't about whatever the pastor or worship team cooked up for a given Sunday, but something more rooted and enduring. Even more, it was about common worship–the people gathered together to offer petitions, thanksgiving, confession, and praise. I remember being struck by how different were the prayers of the people which called on the participation of the people from the pastor-centered prayers I had grown up with. Receiving Communion from a common cup reinforced the understanding that belonging to Christ meant we belonged to one another. It was less about me and Jesus than us and Jesus

And because the liturgy is less sermon centered, there were multiple avenues for the Holy Spirit to get my attention. The sermon might be good or bad, the hymns might be wonderful or just OK, the receiving of Communion might be more or less profound, but generally the Spirit would break through somewhere. Or it might be simply hearing the scriptures read, or the recitation of the Creed, or the Confession/absolution, or the passing of the peace, or some phrase or idea in the Eucharistic Prayer. Certainly, now that I am a regular preacher and celebrant, it is freeing to know that it doesn't all hang on whether I am 'on' as a preacher on any given Sunday.

Receiving the bread into my outstretched hands and sipping wine–wine!–from a common cup reinforced all of this. And wine. I remember feeling it infusing my chest as I swallowed. So different from the shot glass of communion grape juice I had grown up with. There was an awareness of its potency. And, indeed, the idea that Christ is somehow really and transformatively present in the bread and wine is potent indeed. The mystery of God was made mysteriously tangible. The weekly Eucharist became and remains a central and essential aspect of my piety.

I appreciated the weekly recitation of the story of salvation contained in the Eucharistic Prayer.

I was moved by the history represented and the sense of worshiping with the Church of the ages.

I was also moved by the full-sensory aspect of worship which included sight, sound, smell, and taste.

Kneeling for confession and for receiving Communion was profoundly instructive.

So was adopting the sign of the cross. In The Liturgy Explained, Thomas Howard wrote, “By making the sign of the cross, on our head, breast, and shoulders, we acknowledge ourselves to be crucified with Christ, in our thinking, our affections, and our actions.”  I came to think of it as a sort of physical “Amen.”

I have come to experience the liturgy as an elaborate spiral dance in which we symbolically circle around and around the altar, like Moses approaching the Burning Bush, drawing closer to the exuberant, self-giving, eucharistic Mystery at the heart of all who calls us to “the adventure of holiness.”

Liturgy does not guarantee spiritual vibrancy or holiness. Certainly one can find Episcopal churches (or Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Lutheran) that, on the surface at least, give little evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit. And it would be misleading to claim that every time I participate in liturgical worship I am aware of a profound spiritual experience of the bracing atmosphere of God. But, then, the liturgy reminds me that it is not really about my experience anyway. I do know that over time I have been formed and transformed by participation in the liturgy.

Why Anglican? Anglican Values

Canterbury Cross

This is not exhaustive and none of these is unique to Anglicanism. But, taken together, they begin to give a picture of what the Anglican tradition of Christianity is about. Among other things, Anglican Christianity is:

Biblically Focused

“The Holy Ghost rides most triumphantly in his own chariot [i.e., Scripture].”

– Thomas Manton (1620-1677)

“The first [proposition] is this: If we believe in God at all, it is absurd and impious to imagine that we can find him out by our own reason, without his being first active in revealing himself to us. Therefore all our discovery of him is his self-manifestation, and all rational theology is revealed theology.”

– Austin Farrer (1904-1968), Saving Belief

Rooted in Tradition

Recognizing that the Holy Spirit's inspiration is not limited to scripture, Anglican Christianity looks to a broader foundation in the tradition of the Church, particularly the first five centuries:

“One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith.”

– Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626)

Reasonable

However hobbled by human sin, reason is an essential means of understanding what God has revealed to us:

“The Holy Ghost is not a bird of prey sent by God to peck out the eyes of [humans].”

– Nathaniel Culverwel (1619-1651)

“And this is the second proposition: If God does reveal himself to us, we cannot acknowledge or master what he reveals without the use of reason. Therefore all his self-manifestation is also our discovery of him, and all revealed theology is rational theology.”

– Austen Farrer (1904-1968), Saving Belief

Centered in Worship and Prayer

Anglicans do theology “to the sound of church bells, for that is what Christian theology really is all about – worshipping God the Savior through Jesus Christ in the theology of the apostolic age.”

– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Anglican Spirit

Sacramental

“Christ said 'this is my body.' He did not say 'this is my body in this way'. We are in agreement with you as to the end; the whole controversy is as to the method. As to the 'This', we hold with firm faith that it is. As to the 'this is in this way', (namely by the Transubstantiation of the bread into the body), as to the method whereby it happens that it is, by means of In or With or Under or By transition there is no word expressed [in Scripture]. And because there is no word, we rightly make it not of faith; we place it perhaps among the theories of the school, but not among the articles of the faith...We believe no less than you that the presence is real. Concerning the method of the presence, we define nothing rashly, and I add, we do not anxiously inquire, any more than how the blood of Christ washes us in Baptism, any more than how the human and divine natures are united in one Person in the Incarnation of Christ.”

– Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) Response to Cardinal Bellarmine (via The Byzantine Anglo-Catholic)

“The Eucharist demonstrates that material reality can become charged with Jesus' life, and so proclaimed hope for the whole world of matter....The matter of the Eucharist, carrying the presence of the risen Jesus, can only be a sign of life, of triumph over the death of exclusion and isolation...If the Eucharist is a sign of the ultimate Lordship of Jesus, his 'freedom' to unite to himself the whole material order as a symbol of grace, it speaks of creation itself, and the place of Jesus in creation.”

– Rowan Williams (1950- ), Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

Called to Communion

“God hath created nothing simply for itself, but each thing in all things, and every thing each part in other have such interest, that in the whole world nothing is found whereunto any thing that is created can say, ‘I need thee not.’”

– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), The Nature of Pride

“That [humankind] is a community, that we all stand in a relation to each other, that there is a public end and interest of society which each particular is obliged to promote is the sum of morals.”

– Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Sermon IX. Upon Forgiveness of Injuries

“The Church is saying to the world, ‘he form of human community that's ultimately in accord with God’s purpose and God’s nature is one in which these principles apply: the principle of mutual enrichment when we receive the gifts of others, and see and meet the one another's needs, and the converse, the mutual impoverishment that happens when we forget or ignore the gift or the suffering of others.’ The Church says to the world, ‘this is the kind of community that makes God known; one that shows God's own nature and purpose. God’s nature as one who is beyond all partisanship, all self-interest, whose whole being is selflessness: that mystery which the doctrine of the Holy Trinity supremely reveals for us. 

What that leads to is that every action in which that becomes real is, to use the language of a later generation, a kind of sacrament: an effective supernatural realization of God's nature and purpose within history. While we speak of the sacramental acts of the Church gathered for worship, I think that the Bible encourages us to believe that every action in which God's justice becomes manifest is also sacramental in the sense that it shows God's future. For us to be aware of that, to work and pray with it, is where the sacraments in the narrower sense become important. The community gathered around the Lord's Table is a sign of God's future.”

– Rowan Williams (1950- ), ‘No One Can Be Forgotten in God's Kingdom’ a speech at the TEAM Conference in South Africa Friday 9th March 2007

Catholic and Protestant/Evangelical

“Our special character and, as we believe, our peculiar contribution to the Universal Church, arises from the fact that owing to historic circumstances, we have been enabled to combine in our one fellowship the traditional Faith and Order of the Catholic Church with that immediacy of approach to God through Christ to which the Evangelical Churches especially bear witness, and freedom of intellectual inquiry, whereby the correlation of the Christian revelation and advancing knowledge is constantly effected.”

– William Temple (1881-1944), Encyclical, Lambeth 1930

(via Contemplative Vernacular)

Liberally Catholic and Generously Orthodox

Anglican Christianity seeks to embody a liberal catholicity/generous orthodoxy. It is catholic/orthodox in its commitment to the consensus of the first centuries as expressed in the early councils and the creeds. It is, as Charles Gore wrote, “conspicuously orthodox on the great fundamentals of the Trinity and the Incarnation. [Anglicanism] accepts the ecumenical councils as criteria of heresy.” It is liberal/generous in its ability to reexamine how that consensus is applied in concrete historical contexts: “. . . standing ready with the whole treasury of Christian truth unimpaired to meet the demands which a new age makes upon it with its new developments of character and circumstance.”

Anglican Christianity avoids the extremes “represented by a dogmatism that crushes instead of quickening the reason of the individual, making it purely passive and acquiescent, and on the other hand by an unrestrained development of the individual judgment which becomes eccentric and lawless just because it is unrestrained.”

– Charles Gore (1852-1932), Roman Catholic Claims

Passionate, but Patient

Anglican Christianity is characterized by what Rowan Williams calls a “passionate patience” that is reticent to declare too handily exactly how God is to defined or to presume too easily to know what God desires in all instances. Continuing with Williams, “There is in the Anglican identity a strong element of awareness of the tragic, of the dark night and the frustration of theory and order by the strangeness of God's work.” [ . . . ] “The result is a mixture of poetry, reticence, humility before mystery, local loyalties and painful self-scrutinies.”

– Rowan Williams, (1950-  ), Anglican Identities

Quotes on the Trinity

Sketch by William Blake

Some quotes I’ve collected on the Trinity:

1. “[The doctrine of the Trinity] is the ‘least worst’ language we have found for talking about something very disturbing and inexhaustible.”

– Rowan Williams, Living the Questions (the Converging Worlds of Rowan Williams),

The Christian Century, Apr 24, 2002, David S. Cunningham

2. “The Trinity cannot be explored except from the centre. And what is the centre? It is the Love of God. The name of Love has been fearfully profaned, and yet no other name will do."

– Austin Farrer, Lord I Believe: Suggestions for Turning the Creed into Prayer

3. “Trinitarian theology, in so far as it is concerned with what ‘kind’ of God Christians worship, is far from being a luxury indulged in solely by remote and ineffectual dons; it is of cardinal importance for spirituality and liturgy, for ethics, for the whole of Christian self-understanding.”

– Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology

4. “A doctrine like that of the Trinity tells us that the very life of God is a yielding or giving-over into the life of an Other, a ‘negation’ in the sense of refusing to settle for the idea that normative life or personal identity is to be conceived in terms of self-enclosed and self-sufficient units. The negative is associated with the ‘ek-static’, the discovery of identity in self-transcending relation. And accordingly, theology itself has to speak in a mode that encourages us to question ourselves, to deny ourselves, in the sense of denying systems and concepts that are the comfortable possession of individual minds.”

– Rowan Williams, Wrestling With Angels: Conversations In Modern Theology

Icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev

5. “Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God―a ‘foursome,’ as it were―for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God.”

– Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity

6. “In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, we find another resource for hospitality. The trinity shows God in relationships with Himself. our Three-in-one God has welcomed us into Himself and invited us to participate in divine life. And so the invitation that we as Christians extend to one another is not simply an invitation into our homes or to our tables; what we ask of other people it that hey enter into our lives.”

– Lauren F. Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath

Vision of the Trinity, Hildegard of Bingen

7. “Christians, then, do not believe in just any Trinity but in the Trinity of these three Persons–the Christ who does not grasp at equality but humbles himself, even to death on a cross, the One he called Abba or father, outpouring love, challenging human assumptions about hierarchy, the Holy Spirit of love, truth, and freedom, all one God glorifying each other.”

– William Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God

8. “When the invisible working of the Persons of the Trinity incorporates us, our relations with the Father in virtue of our union with Christ take on the more external form of fellowship, not co-inherence, but in a way that continues to respect the creature’s finite boundedness. So incorporate, our lives as ministers of divine benefit have a Trinitarian shape: united with Christ, we are called to distribute the good gifts of the Father in the power of the Spirit. Rather than look for some more direct parallel to the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, this just is the shape the Trinity takes on the human level.”

– Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity

9. “The mystery of God, indeed, the mystery of existence, is the mystery of communion of God with all, all with God. The heart of Christian life is the encounter with a personal God who makes possible both our union with God and communion with each other. The mystery of God is revealed to be a matter of invitation and incorporation into divine life through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit; at the same time it is also invitation and incorporation into new relationship with each other, as we are gathered together by the Spirit into the body of Christ.”

– Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us

10. “I have not even begun to think of unity when the Trinity bathes me in its splendor. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me.” 

– Gregory Nazianzus, Oration 40

11. “Suddenly the Trinity filled my heart full of the greatest joy, and I understood that it will be so in heaven without end to all who will come there. For the Trinity is God, God is the Trinity. The Trinity is our maker, the Trinity is our protector, the Trinity is our everlasting lover, the Trinity is our endless joy and our bliss, by our Lord Jesus Christ and in our Lord Jesus Christ. . . for where Jesus appears the Trinity is understood.”

– Julian of Norwich, Showings

12. “When I pray, when I breathe with God, I become part of the intimacy of God’s life. The Spirit of God who breathes within me draws me into the circle of love between the Father and Son. Through prayer I am drawn into the dance of the Trinity.” 

– Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

13. The Threefold all-kindly
My walk this day with God,

My walk this day with Christ,

My walk this day with Spirit,

The Threefold all-kindly

Hō! Hō! Hō! The Threefold all-kindly

My shielding this day from ill,

My shielding this night from harm,

Hō! Hō! Both my soul and my body,

Be by Father, by Son, by Holy Spirit:

By Father, by Son, by Holy Spirit.

Be the Father shielding me,

Be the Son shielding me,

Be the Spirit shielding me,

As Three and as One:

Hō! Hō! Hō! as Three and as One.

– From The Celtic Vision by Esther De Waal,

How I Came to Change My Mind on SSU: Part 19. Conclusion

I started this series by enumerating some obstacles to changing my mind on the received Christian understanding of same-sex attraction and the possibility of blessing same-sex unions. Those obstacles are real. I have tried to address some of them and offer a case for rethinking the Church’s understanding in a way that I hope is faithful. But, I admit that the case is not straightforward. If you are unpersuaded, that is OK. I have no illusion that mine is the only faithful understanding.

But, as I have pointed out repeatedly (here and here), much depends on how we engage scripture and tradition. All of us need to be wary of imposing our biases and prejudices onto both. We need to be wary of selective readings. Just as importantly, we need to be conscious of the “rules” we use to interpret both and how we incorporate what we have learned about the world – and the people around us.

I have argued that the testimony and example of faithful gay and lesbian Christians must be taken into account – that means all gay and lesbian Christians not just the ones who say what we want to hear. It is such testimony that has persuaded me to rethink this topic. I find the evidence of brother and sister Christians who live lives of self-control and self-sacrificial love in committed, monogamous, same-sex relationships compelling

I have sometimes heard people say they would love to find an acceptable case for rethinking sexuality. Why? Of course it could be because of the power of personal desires that they want affirmed. It could be because of the social pressure to affirm what many in our society seem unwilling to condemn. But, couldn't it also be that we have been shaped by the Church's story – rooted in Jesus and the rest of the New Testament – of self-sacrificial love in the context of mercy and grace; and, given what we now know about same-sex sexual attraction, the prohibitions against it seem incongruous to that story? This series has been my attempt to demonstrate why I think the last question can be answered in the affirmative.

This is not a matter of mere "inclusivity," an ideal that is inadequate as a Christian principle. The issue, it seems to me, is whether or not entering into a committed, monogamous, permanent Same-sex Union provides a fertile context for the cultivation of redemptive, sanctifying disciplines that lead to deeper love of God and love of neighbor as exemplified by Jesus. It is about pursuing the holiness of God-centered, self-emptying, cross-bearing, other-oriented love incarnated by Jesus Christ and cultivating the disciplines that enable us to embody that love in thought, word, and deed. If so, do they not build up the community? I have come to believe the answer to that question is "yes."

When I started this series, I did not expect it would take exactly one year to complete. But, I am done.

"As long as Christian morality is thought to be mainly about whether and when people should go to bed, no bishops are going to be crucified. And this is depressing."

– Herbert McCabe (Roman Catholic Dominican priest, theologian and philosopher), Law, Love, and Language

Previous:

Part 18. Creation and New Creation

Part 17. Abomination (ii)

Part 16. Abomination (i)

Part 15. Sodom

Part 14. The Rest of the New Testament

Part 13. Romans 1 (iv) Idolatry, self-control, and same-sex sex

Part 12. Romans 1 (iii) Natural and Unnatural Sex

            Self-Control: Neglected Fruit of the Spirit

Part 11. Romans 1 (ii) Unnatural Passions

Part 10. Romans 1 (i) Context

Part 9. Jesus on Marriage and "God made them Male & Female," (ii)

Part 8. Jesus on Marriage and "God made them Male & Female," (i)

Part 7. What Did Jesus Say?

Part 6. Back to the Bible

Part 5. Why I Am Disinclined to Vote for Revising the Marriage Canon

Part 4. Some Thoughts on Interpreting Scripture

Part 3. Positive Testimony

Part 2. Negative Testimony

Part 1. Obstacles