A welcoming and loving space

A reflection during Pride Month

The year was 2013. Within weeks after having been called as rector at the church I served near Memphis, a parishioner whom I’d known for many years dropped in for a conversation.

“Are you going to allow same sex marriages,” he asked.

In our conversation, I learned something I’d not known about him: He had a partner, and they’d been together at that point for nearly 40 years. Although they shared a very lovely home, no one knew about them outside of a small circle of friends. For the sake of both of their careers, the relationship was closeted. By that point, he was worried that his partner’s health was failing, and they wanted to be able to protect each other.

I told him how very sorry I was that he and his partner had been unable to publicly express their love for each other. But in 2013, there was no way for them to be legally married in Tennessee. “A minister can pronounce words over you here,” I said, “but they have no legal effect.” Since travel to another state where they could be legally married seemed unlikely, I gave him the names of a couple of local family law attorneys who could help him and his partner draft legal documents to protect them and to allow them to make decisions for each other should either become incapacitated. Given their ages and health, that was critical information he needed.

Two years would pass before same sex marriage would be allowed in all 50 states. By then, this parishioner’s partner had advancing dementia and was incapable of consenting to marriage. They had been able to take care of managing some financial affairs, with the support of his partner’s adult offspring.
When his partner’s untimely death came, we sat in my office as he grieved a loss that was unfathomable to me: forty-two years of never being able to publicly acknowledge their commitment to one another. We wrote the obituary, and planned the funeral service. For the first time, he publicly called this man he’d loved so very much – and for so very long – his partner. I cried and grieved with him.

Around the same time, a much older minister shared that he was gay. As a young man seeking ordination, he’d been unable to “come out.” To give him the “cover” that he needed to proceed in his denomination’s ordination process many years prior, he married a lesbian, and later, they adopted a child – the family life that his denomination expected. He and his wife divorced after about 10 years, and he finally began a very closeted relationship with a man he’d met and with whom he’d fallen in love in college. Thinking that in his advancing years he might want to “go public,” he dared to share his secret with a few “church” people; when a couple of them backed away from him, his worse fears of rejection had been realized.

When the minister died some years later, few of the people who gathered to celebrate his life knew his story. Although present and greeting some of those gathered, the minister’s partner was unacknowledged in the obituary or in any other way – despite having been committed to this minister far longer than the wife from whom the minister had been divorced. After giving his partner an innocuous hug, I left with a deep grief for the ways in which the Church had truly not cared for her people.

When I shared my thoughts about observing Pride Month this year with our Becoming Beloved Community Steering Committee, that team asked me about issuing a proclamation for the diocese. With all due respect to the Steering Committee, a proclamation seemed highly impersonal to me. What seemed more appropriate was sharing something much more personal. For me, it was a time to revisit the sadness I’d known since college friends first came out years ago after brief heterosexual marriages had ended: Although years had passed, and our friendships continued to be strong, I’d wondered how we all could have been more supportive, loving and accepting during our very young years, to perhaps help spare those friends some of their pain. I still wonder how we all, especially the Church, might move toward being more loving.

What I chose to have inscribed on my bishop’s ring are words from John’s Gospel that speak profoundly to me: “Love one another as I have loved you.” These words of Jesus require something that is often challenging: to see beyond our differing backgrounds and perspectives and to love all of God’s people, across all human-made boundaries. This year for Pride Month, I invite us all to hear the personal stories, and to show Jesus’ radical and unconditional love. Someone who is hurting in our world needs the Church to always be that kind of welcoming place. My prayer is that in June – and throughout the year – all of our worshipping communities will create a welcoming and loving space for persons who are already in our midst, and persons who have yet to meet us.