The long-pursued Harriet speaks with Lord Peter, the man who loves her and now wonders if he has done good for her by finally convincing her to marry him. From this conversation comes my favorite passage of my favorite book:
I’m only trying to tell you, in the nicest possible manner, that provided I were with you, I shouldn’t greatly mind being deaf, dumb, halt, blind and imbecile, afflicted with shingles and whooping-cough, in an open boat without clothes or food, with a thunderstorm coming on. But you’re being painfully stupid about it.
And there it is, possibly the most literarily and emotionally perfect definition, despite it’s lack of current terminology for various impairments, of what it means for two people to commit their lives to one another.
Notice this: there is nothing in there from this profoundly Christian author about whether their various physical “parts” fit together. There is no male or female. There is only commitment, covenant, a willingness to face all life challenges as long as they have each other and each other’s backs.
That is what marriage is about. And that is what the United States did, and the United Methodist Church still does, deny to those who don’t fit the standard male/female binary. We denied them the possibility of real, legally founded and protected, intimacy. We denied (and still deny in the UMC) the legitimacy of the kind of commitment that lasts well into old age, grows deeper in life’s vicissitudes, bonds together in shared joys and builds lasting families that add to the corporate good around us.
On this one-year anniversary of the Obergefell ruling on same-sex marriage, I personally say, “Yes. It was time.”
It is time to recognize the humanity of all.
It is time to honor the God-given need for intimacy that sits deep within each human being.
It is time to “stop being painfully stupid about it.”
The question common to all humanity, “Will you still love me if you really know me?”
Committing ourselves to one another for life, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer is the best way ever known to say to the other, “Yes.” “Yes I will. You and I together will be naked and unashamed. You and I together will recreate the glory of the Garden of Eden in perfection of relationship between us, you and me, and between us and God.”
I grieve that those who love power more than God chose to hold my own beloved denomination, The United Methodist Church, hostage to an archaic, limited, boundary-building interpretation of the Bible. The Bible is so many ways is a series of writings of how God has burst, over and over again, into walled-up human understanding of the nature of God and said, “Once more, my friends, you’ve got it all wrong.”
We’ve gotten it wrong on slavery, on race relations, on females, on the “white man’s burden,” and now on the nature of human sexuality.
I stand firmly with those who say, “On this stance, the United States managed at last to honor it’s commitment to justice for all. We will honor love, and we will honor those who are willing to live in full commitment to one another in the state of holy matrimony.”
In the midst of the mess that the US is right now, we got this one right.
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