What is in Kelvin's Head?

Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill Passes by 105 to 18!

04/02/2014

The Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill has just passed in the Scottish Parliament by 105 votes to 18.

I’ve watched the debate all through this afternoon.

It is difficult to put into words what it feels like.

As I was growing up, I never knew what I never heard. You don’t know what you are missing sometimes. It is only as gay rights have been argued for, fought for and achieved that I’ve realised what it meant to grow up feeling, knowing, that society was inevitably going to treat me as someone who had less value and less opportunity than others. In short, I became an adult in a world which was silent about people like me. That’s why it is so shocking and emotional and staggering for that silence to be broken in public life, most notably by parliamentarians speaking up for LGBT people and gradually, progressively, legislating the old legal discriminations away.

Now, today, a huge thing has happened. I can now get married, should someone want to have me. Inevitably, my view of marriage and relationships has been coloured by being formed in a world where I was excluded from the possibility. I never got to think or dream about what I’d wear, where it would be or who I would be standing next to. I never got to imagine being with someone through thick and thin, for good and for bad, ’til death us do part. And I still can’t imagine what it would be like to hear and feel the full acceptance and love of the world around me should I ever be able to stand at an altar and declare that I want to be with someone forever.

For some of the silences still remain. For the last three years I’ve been named on the Pink List as one of the most influential gay people in the UK. Were I to achieve national recognition in any other area, I could probably expect my bishop and other leaders in the church to contact me privately, congratulate me publicly and the institution that I work for to be proud of me. Instead of that, at the moments when friends have been cheering me on as a national newspaper recognised some of what I’ve done, I’ve heard from the institution I work for that same silence that I know all too well.

However, I’m hopeful. I’ve seen the military change. I’ve seen the police change. I’ve seen newspapers change. I’m seeing schools change. And as it has happened, I’ve changed. I’ve become more of the person I really am. Like others who identify as gay or lesbian, I’ve become more whole.

Today is a great day. It is a day when things have changed forever.

I used to campaign quite actively for gay rights in the church. Some time ago I came to the conclusion that the right thing to do was to throw my efforts into changing the law. I was right to do so. Though many who love me greatly were sympathetic, many of them told me I was mad and that it would never happen in my lifetime. It hasn’t just happened in my lifetime. The possibility that I could marry has come in in time for there to be the possiblity that I might one day benefit from it. That great legal change is now accomplished.

Today is a joyful day for gay and lesbian couples in Scotland and for their supporters. The Scottish Parliament has now made it possible for same-sex couples to get married and no words can express how much I welcome that. It is a significant step towards Equal Marriage and will make it possible for many couples to celebrate the best day of their lives.

The campaign for marriage equality now moves into the churches in Scotland and those churches have a golden opportunity to show that they support equality, support gay and lesbian Christians and support the settled will of lawmakers. Increasingly, support for marriage equality is becoming the touchstone of moral behaviour for decent people.

I hope that it is not long before I can marry same-sex couples in St Mary’s Cathedral but we must remember that today the Scottish Parliament passed laws which make it difficult for many religious bodies to opt into the legislation. It will be the case that many same-sex couples will need to have a legal marriage at the local Registrar’s Office and then come to church for a religious ceremony. I look forward to celebrating many joyful nuptial masses for same-sex couples and in due course to conducting legal marriages.

In the Scottish Episcopal Church marriage service we ask a simple question not to the couple but to everyone present:
“Will all of you support and encourage N. and N. in their marriage?”

Let the word go out from Scotland: “WE WILL!”

equal marriage, LGBT, marriage, Scotland, Scottish Episcopal Church

23 responses to “What if this is the end of the Eucharist?”

Thomas Scott

06/05/2020

Just noticing here that DGD (of happy memory) seems to have left out of his catalogue of joyous, sad, perilous, and solemn occasions any instance of celebrating during a plague or pestilence. I’m not worried about the mass. The eucharist need not be celebrated as though it were a car battery, as if not offering it now would somehow allow the power to run down. It is not at risk, we are, which I think is your point. The questions asked are worth asking, of course.

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Mo Nicholson

06/05/2020

Mo Nicholson. This is an intriguing discussion and what I would like to add to it is the observation that I have had to learn the hard way that participation in the Eucharist being made impossible in no way diminishes an individual’s ability to worship God or be in fellowship with other believers. I am barred from receiving Holy Communion in the Catholic church because allergies make this impossible for me. The pain induced by this has little to do with feeling separation from God, in fact nothing at all as I do not feel that. It comes from feeling excluded from the community, different sections if which regard it as desirable or tolerable that a member of the community should be excluded in this way. This experience has made me understand as never before that if we place prime value on liturgical celebrations, ir indeed anything else, above charity, compassion, welcome and inclusivity, in other words love, then we have become the sounding gong which St Paul warned against. If we truly believe that God is love, as I do, then it is obvious that it is love for one another which makes us true children of God our Father, and in light of this we could begin to look at these present challenging circumstances as simply an opportunity to love more, to reach out to one another in whatever way possible in the knowledge that this is what actually matters and always did. Only perhaps we were tempted to almost make a fetish of our rituals, sacraments and so on. And perhaps this can show us a better way more adapted to the world we are supposed to serve.

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Lynsay Downs

06/05/2020

You and your conversation with Dave Roberts prompted me to write this. Does it resonate for you?

https://astonishing.community/2020/05/06/conversations-in-coronatide/

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1. Kelvin
  
  06/05/2020
  
  Thanks Lynsay – yes, it does resonate with me very much.
  
  I’ve shared it on facebook. I think it is really helpful.
  
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Fr Keith

06/05/2020

Thanks again for such a thoughtful piece. With the Eucharist central to much of, at least Anglican/Episcopalian, worship in recent generations, we perhaps forget that the Church in these islands was, between the Reformation and the liturgical revivals of the 19th and 20th centuries, sustained by Mattins and Evensong as the regular diet of worship on Sundays. I’m not advocating a return to such times, but there is, as you suggest, work to be done on non-Eucharistic worship (though not defining it as a negative). Thanks again.

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Fenland Boy

07/05/2020

For the record, I’m not in favour of lay presidency at the Eucharist. I believe, for better or worse, in an ordered church.

Why are you concerned about lay Presidency?

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Chuck

08/05/2020

May I say respectfully, lighten up. Many Anglicans/Episcopalians lived on the edges of civilization in the nascent U.S. and various elements of the British Empire. Priests to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and to baptize were seldom seen, at most twice a year in many areas. (Bishops, only every several years.) The Church carried on in this manner decade after decade. If circumstances require, the Church will carry on again despite our profound sense of loss.

I should add, to those who grew up under threat or reality of war, persecution, oppression, famine, other disease, etc, the present difficulty is not unfamiliar in many respects.

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Miriam MacCarthy

08/05/2020

Thank you! It is wonderful to read these serious, personal thoughts about the Eucharist. My feeling is that it has become celebrated to the point of boredom. Church, and what we do in it, is in danger of becoming simply a habit. It could just as well be crackerjack for a fast-asleep congregation. My heresy is that the direction Jesus gave is to “do this in remembrance of me”, and that means everything we eat at any time, whether alone or with others, in thanksgiving. If that is seriously done, it has vastly more meaning. It really gets ones attention and requires preparation. Would not become popular or usual, I predict!

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