Living in Love and Faith

It was an irony that for the very first time I was actually looking forward to attending one of the bishop’s Clergy Study Mornings, and couldn’t find the link to the Zoom gathering. Eventually Marion chased it down on the diocesan website, and I arrived twenty minutes late, just missing the opening worship: quel dommage.

The topic for our investigations was the Living in Love and Faith material produced by the Church of England in advance of a potential revision, or not, of its policies in the field of human sexuality. Chaired by the Bishop of Dorking, we spent a couple of hours hearing about how the material was devised, and engaging in a miniature version of the ‘course’ the Church envisages parishes and institutions following in order to take the process, the ‘conversation’, forward.

I think I will have to get the book associated with the LLF matter: in the little I've read I can already see both some coherent and wide-ranging thinking about the topic and also some obvious gaps, but even at this stage it is at least impressive that the Church is bothering to do this at all. Clearly it’s bothering to do it because it has despaired of reaching any sort of consensus by the normal means, scarred as it was by the terrible precedent of the ordination of women and their consecration to the episcopate, but never before, I think, has any religious organisation engaged in a similar exercise of exchanging different viewpoints and experiences, in such detail and at such luxuriating length. The videos we were shown bear testimony to the colossal variety of personal narratives which disrupt any simple set of categories we might want people to fit into. Nevertheless, we all suspect that we are unlikely to do more than learn to disagree with one another less vituperatively – which is not nothing, as Cardinal Ratzinger would have put it, but is a limited result.

I am not sure what we will do with all this at Swanvale Halt. When I first came here a gay male couple were part of the congregation, though they split up within a year or so and disappeared. I gather that when they first joined the church my predecessor had given the assembled masses a lecture from the pulpit (metaphorically, if we had had a pulpit) to the effect that she would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who gave them a hard time. The collection of grey heads looked at her nonplussed, as nobody had thought of doing so. Their main concern was, and is, managing to walk round the corner to the shops and back without falling over, and what anyone else gets up to in their bedrooms is something they are perfectly happy not to think about at all.