I was more than a little surprised to listen to a radio broadcast where the person being interviewed explained:
"We are not talking about religious marriages but about civil marriages, so the Church needs to stop getting itself so involved!"
Surely the 'religious marriages' are marriage services between male and female and the 'civil marriages' are surely what many see the civil partnership being and so what we really need is for those who want their 'civil marriages' to stop bringing the Church into the whole shooting match rather than the other way around?
Now I know that some want to (and even do) add a blessing in private (after all, history is full of people blessing what others have considered 'unblessable' so no change there) and we leave the two sides to merely continue doing what they consider right (or to be their right). An uneasy position but one that sees both sides in their corners rather than in the middle fighting.
Yesterday (is it something about me? I've checked the car for anti 'just about everything or anything stickers') having just finished a funeral I was putting my tat into the car when a man walked up to me and immediately attempted to engage me in conversation (I'm the italics, he's the bold!):
Hello, I'm gay, are you offended!
Not at the moment unless you're not trying to pull me and then I might be just a little!
Well, suffice to say this lovely bloke was trying to communicate with me regarding his views that as I had a dog-collar I had to be the enemy. He went on to point out that he was offended by the Church making judgements about his lifestyle and how this was 'natural' and was not morally wrong. I kept smiling and eventually, having made a point which he obviously struggled with, found myself free to carry on my merry way. All in all a very sad encounter for an number of reasons and at a number of levels.
As a postscript I have a sneaky suspicion that he perhaps thought he knew who I was as he did mention a name as he approached and towards the end, before scuttling away, seemed to think he'd received a very different response from that he either expected or hoped for. Still, it added to the confusion of the normal daily round I guess and hopefully my question regarding what the population of a desert island might be if it were inhabited only by those in 'natural' relationships might be a hundred years on.
Great to dialogue, isn't it? Greater still if they'd dialogue with the right person (or at least remembered what their photo' looked like so that they engaged with them - mind you, now I'm more worried that I might look like the person they were at odds with and if it's who I think it is - now I'm offended!!!)
Blast :-(
2 comments:
A challenging encounter at a moment when you were probably still in funeral mode.
I'm sure that he at least went away, convinced that not all Clergy are anti-Gay, whether this gives him any consolation, only God will know.
I think that such challenges, actually help us to think through what we might say next time, or would have liked to say at least. It even helps us to think about the sad situation where the church is seen in the light of being judgemental, without any shades of grey.
I think that many Churches have basically got the knickers in a twist over human sexuality and have given ammunition to those who want to pillory it, by some of the comments recently in the media by senior churchmen of different denominations.
The Gay man probably doesn't differentiate. To him, a Dog Collar is a representative of something he considers repressive and out of touch. Good job that God can differentiate.
As a gay unpartnered man I'm often asked by my straight friends whether I have ever fancied them and they always seem a little sad when I answer in the negative.
I love your response - shows you have a good sense of humour and it would probably be quite disarming to such a potentially agressive approach.
CJK
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