What is in Kelvin's Head?

Same-Sex Blessings Authorised for Trial Use

11/07/2012

Through the wonders of the internet, I was watching last night as the US based Episcopal Church General Convention voted to allow a formal liturgy for Same-Sex Blessings to be authorised for trial use in such dioceses and congregations which chose to allow them.

It was an undramatic moment, it has to be said – they managed to get themselves into a mire of procedural motions before the vote which was clearly testing everyone’s patience.

No-one who has followed the goings on of the US church will be at all surprised by this development though I suppose it might well be a moment when some of the shrill grumpy voices pipe up.

Here in Scotland, interestingly, we don’t seem to be going down the line of producing a special liturgy for same-sex couples to be blessed with. The gay community in Scotland owes a great debt to my ecclesiastical neighbour the Rev David McCarthy for suggesting some years ago in a Synod debate that if one simply chooses option A at each stage of the Scottish Episcopal Marriage Liturgy you get a service which curiously does not mention gender much at all. A little massaging of words like wife, husband and marriage and you have a liturgy ideally suited for blessing same-sex couples.

Certainly, I’ve known a couple of couples recently who are indebted to Fr David for having made this suggestion. It is ingenious and has meant that there is no great pressure building up in our church to produce a formal liturgy of blessing separate to the marriage liturgy. I’m not sure that they actually toast “The McCarthy Liturgy” at their wedding breakfasts, but perhaps they should do.

I think that it is all to the good that we are not going down the line right now of producing a separate liturgy, particularly in the light of current conversations about equal marriage which are taking place in the political sphere and with which many people from the churches are engaged.

I have to confess to thinking that the actual liturgy that the US based church has authorized is a little unexciting. Maybe though, that is the point. If you devise a dazzling liturgy for blessing gay couples, everyone else will want one too.

You can find the blessing service online. (Go to page 67 to find the liturgy). Strictly speaking, that is the version that went to General Convention – it has been modified a little since then. I can’t find a clean version of the newly authorized liturgy, but no doubt one will appear soon. If you know of a link to such a file, do please post it below.

So, what do you think?

equal marriage, LGBT, Same-sex blessings, the episcopal church

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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