A dear friend of mine is getting married. We grew up together, journeying through life’s ups and downs—sometimes losing touch but never the bond that connects us.
She grew up Catholic; I was raised as an evangelical Protestant and eventually converted to Catholicism. But she gradually left the church. Years of theology rooted in patriarchy proved too much to accept when she began to recognize her same-sex attraction. A church that labels her way of loving as “intrinsically disordered” could not offer her hope.
As we prepare for her upcoming nuptials, it occurs to me that this will be my children’s first experience attending a wedding in which they will be old enough to participate.
At ages ten, eight and six, they will witness for the first time two people promising to love and support each other without reservation, and allowing their relationship to nurture others in their community. Though my friend’s marriage will not be recognized as sacramental by the church, I hope that my kids will find the presence of God there.
Upon meeting Jesus, I would rather explain my efforts to be inclusive and affirming than explain actions that are exclusive and harmful.
I want to teach my children that the love of God is the energy that holds and sustains the world in all its nuance and newness. As we navigate life, we can choose to remain trapped in our ideologies or we can open ourselves to the grace of transformative encounter with those who have been labeled as “other.”
In my own discernment, I have realized that upon meeting Jesus, I would rather explain my efforts to be inclusive and affirming than explain actions that are exclusive and harmful. I do not want to be like those who caused Jesus to “grieve at their hardness of heart” (Mk. 3) because they held fast to a particular dogma at the expense of their neighbor’s well-being.
Too often, we stand our ground on what we take to be right, avoiding the complexities of moral life that can be revealed through encounter with our neighbors. Jesus tells us that a good tree will bear good fruit (Mt. 7:17-20), but if the judgment that straight Catholics express to their LGBTQ neighbors pushes those neighbors away from the community and toward self-loathing (or even toward self-harm and suicide), then the tree bears bad fruit.
Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of San Diego wrote recently in America magazine that it is “a demonic mystery of the human soul why so many men and women have a profound and visceral animus toward members of the LGBTQ communities. The church’s primary witness in the face of this bigotry must be one of embrace rather than distance or condemnation.”
I affirm the need for embrace, but I am not sure the animus is so mysterious. When straight Catholics are told repeatedly that “those” people are unworthy of the sacraments, this creates a dualistic mentality that separates us, “the good ones,” from them. I want to avoid sending this message to my children for the sake of their moral formation, as well as to reassure them that they are loved unconditionally.
When straight Catholics are told repeatedly that “those” people are unworthy of the sacraments, this creates a dualistic mentality that separates us, “the good ones,” from them.
I do not deny the duty of the church to speak on matters of sexual or gender ethics, or more specifically on the sacrament of matrimony, but the lives of LGBTQ Catholics need not take up so much room in lay Catholic discourse. As a straight woman, I do not need to form my conscience around what is good with regard to LGBTQ persons. That is between them and God.
Disapproval or condescension would be evidence of my own susceptibility to the accusing and judgmental “bad spirit” Pope Francis warns against in his book Let Us Dream. Such responses to people who experience life differently than I do fail to reflect the invitational and expansive love of God.
And though this piece is not meant to comment on the teaching of the church per se, it is worth noting that for all the church’s appeal to “natural law,” we are learning that nature rarely exists in binary forms. Rather, nature is fluid and dynamic.
Opposition to same-sex marriage and the denigration of the LGBTQ experience in the Catholic church sometimes seems more ideological than natural. Perhaps this is why many in the church are so successful at maintaining the othering of the LGBTQ community. Whenever we absolutize something that is not an authentic reality, our efforts at evangelization can turn false and dangerous.
As we watch my friend get married, I want my kids to see that “others” have just as much claim to the image of God as we do. When I receive the inevitable questions regarding the differences observed between these partners and my husband and me, I will call attention to the similarities. They love each other, just as we do. Teaching my kids to look for those similarities, rather than maintaining rigid dichotomies, is to help them participate in the both/and thinking—the unity in diversity—that makes us truly Catholic.
I will celebrate my friend’s wedding with my children because her choice to love her partner, and our choice to love them, unites us all within the beautiful contours of God’s unfailing eternal love.
St. Augustine, who recognizes that cultural customs should change over time to align with the eternal love of God, once defined love as willing that one “be exactly as much as [one] is.” Hannah Arendt’s paraphrase of this idea is a good starting point for relating rightly to others: “I will that you be.” Your existence is good, your experience valuable.
I will celebrate my friend’s wedding with my children because her choice to love her partner, and our choice to love them, unites us all within the beautiful contours of God’s unfailing eternal love. It reminds us that paradigms of exclusion are antithetical to the Gospel, and that love (that is, God) disrupts all dualisms and gathers all together in the Body of Christ.
Indeed, if we believe that it is grace that draws us toward God, then love means affirming the embodied experience of our neighbors and trusting in the life-giving love of the divine with regard to the soul. It requires encountering others with humility, ready to learn what new face of God they invite us to see.
This was a wonderful article and I’m probably going to use some of these ideas myself in the future! Some of your turns of phrase (“Upon meeting Jesus…”) resonate very hard with me.