What is in Kelvin's Head?

Coming Out as Congregation

11/10/2012

Today is a day that is sometimes known as National Coming Out Day. (The nation originally was the USA, I think, but this one has spread a bit around the world and still keeps the same name).

Rather than write anything personal, this time I think it is worth noting that institutions need to come out too. In particular, congregations and even whole denominations need to come out and articulate the fact that they have LGBT people, are accepting of LGBT people, have LGBT leaders, and are never going to hide that fact again. It is important. After all, we would not have come as far on the equal marriage question as we have done without straight people coming out as supportive.

I dare say that some folk get a little weary of me saying that St Mary’s is a place that in a particular way welcomes LGBT people. Indeed, I was reminded by someone with an overview of the diocese recently that there are plenty of other churches which offer the same kind of welcome and acceptance.

My response to that is simple – show me.

Show me where on your congregational website you say anything to counter the notion that frequently appears in every which way in every media outlet going, that churches are opposed to gay relationships. Tell me about the gay group that meets at your church. Introduce me to the youth club kids organising a straight/gay alliance. Point me to out LGBT lay and ordained people in authority roles. Let me hear about gay voices that are heard in your congregation. Tell me when your pastor last said something positive about all this from the pulpit. Speak the word only and my soul shall be saved.

You don’t need to do it all and you don’t need to do it all the time, but if you want to claim to be an inclusive congregation or a welcoming church or whatever other euphemism you have for the welcome that dare not speak its name, you need to do some of it sometime.

Now, just so you are not simply listening to my voice, take a listen to a conversation that I heard last Sunday. It is a conversation involving Gene Robinson (who incidently told me how warmly he remembers his visit to St Mary’s). There’s an interesting bit where he talks about the US church coming out and about how him coming out to the Anglican Communion was like a young child going home to daddy and saying, “Dad, there’s something I need to tell you,” and then wondering whether or not he would still be loved.

Take a listen here.

Gene Robinson, LGBT, National Coming Out Day

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

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kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

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kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

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Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)

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Erp

12/08/2009

I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.

Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.

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RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.

I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.

And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.

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Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

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Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.

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Steve

14/08/2009

I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.

There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

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