• It’s Time

    Just watch this video – there’s people and places that you may well recognise.

    I’m very pleased to be one of the faces in the video above, which has been produced by the Equality Network to galvanise the last months of the campaign for equal marriage in Scotland. Political leaders, celebrities, thinkers and so-called ordinary folk are uniting around the idea that same-sex couples should have access to the same rights, priviledges and responsibilties as straight couples.

    It’s time for the law in Scotland to allow same-sex couples to marry. It’s time for the law to be changed to allow a couple to stay married when one goes through a gender transition. It’s time for gay and lesbian couples to have not merely the same rights as straight couples but also the same social status. In short, it is time for change.

    The video has been many months in the planning and producing. I think it is exciting, joyful and a credit to all involved.

    One of the most impressive thing about the equal marriage campaigning in Scotland is that it has been relentlessly positive.

    I was partly preaching about this yesterday, the day that the Sunday Mail (which is not the Mail on Sunday!) came out gloriously in favour of the equal marriage campaign with a double page spread and an excellent leader column. The Sunday Mail is the widest read paper in Scotland, the Sunday sibling of the Daily Record. I’ll post that sermon on here in a day or two. For now, I’ll just watch the video above one more time.

    Equal Marriage is mainstream. Not, as someone suggested to me recently, merely the concern of a tiny minority.

    This is an idea whose time has come.

    Update
    Beth’s blogging about this too – she was there!
    And so is Christine McIntosh – she thinks it is time for change

10 responses to “Triduum #6 The Vigil”

  1. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    Oh suppose the sleep over! The bible readings to read – the stories to tell! The living re-tellings it would invite.

    And suppose the exhaustion on Easter Day… and Monday

    1. kelvin Avatar

      Thanks Rosemary.

      BTW, after you had finished polishing the eagle this morning and had gone, I discovered that we have a pelican.

  2. Beth Avatar

    The pelican has not been polished, however, Rosemary, none of us being quite that tall.

    I do suspect I would like the all night vigil if we ever did it.

  3. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    Where is the pelican??!! Up somewhere?? Oh, I would love to polish a pelican.

    I’d love to sit up half the night reading aloud and telling stories – but I fear the exhaustion. But I would never, ever resist if invited. As long I was invited and allowed to read and tell stories. It could be so fabulous. Unique. Deep. Newsworthy. (and those are all the lures I have to throw.)

    You do realise my first words are now liable to be not ‘alithos anesti’ but ‘where is the blessed pelican?’

    1. kelvin Avatar

      I think that those of us who know where the Pelican is must keep our counsel and give Rosemary the pleasure of Pelican Spotting on Easter Day.

      What treat could be more lovely?

  4. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    Still pelican searching – it is tough on those N rather than S – if you see me with my monocular don’t laugh – oh. all right then, go on, do laugh!

  5. ryan Avatar
    ryan

    Ooh, is it a Pelican in its Piety, which I gather was a popular Christ-symbol in medieval europe and also amongst the Larry Graysons?

    1. kelvin Avatar

      Not only is she a Pelican in her Piety but I actually found that we have two.

      I also found that it’s possible to Pelicans in their Piety right under Rosemary’s nose and she won’t necessarily see them.

      Someone suggested to me a while ago that we should have an inventory of the flaura and fauna represented in the iconography of St Mary’s. I suspect such a task would be a revelation. There’s a badger, for example, which few see but me.

  6. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    I am chronically unobservant – I notoriously fail to see things right under my nose. Last week I failed to see the pepper grater. It was upright on a table of less than two foot diameter. There was a table lamp, a plate and the pepper grater. I could not see it. It is sad on one whose speciality is religious architecture, isn’t it? But Low Sunday shall be find the pelican day.

  7. Beth Avatar

    Rosemary, I’d have nudged you in the right direction yesterday morning if I hadn’t rudely run off just as our conversation got to pelicans. (The pleasure of the hunt is all well and good, but it can get to the point of being an exercise in frustration.)

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