Making An Ash of Themselves

As an Anglican, I have been quietly observing the recent round of negotiations regarding issues relating to gay clergy in the American wing of the church, and hoping (some would say praying) for the best. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, a sombre time of reflection and renunciation, moving in time towards the great feast of Easter, when light and plenitude returns to the world. The body surrenders much, and the mind is sharpened by its austere experience of a denuded world.

It is time the Anglican communion surrendered its links with those within its body, who believe that gay men and women are not equally worthy of God's love, and seek to seriously delimit their agency within the life of Anglicanism.

For the sake of staying enlarged as a governing body, the Church's current Archbishop, the very fine Rowan Williams, has been tempted to make increasingly absurd deals and accommodations, with fundamentalists who, to my mind, reflect none of Christ's extraordinary charity.

Christ's body was broken on the cross, and arose again. The Anglican communion should not fear a similar rupture, over what is right and meet to do. And that is to include, indeed love, homosexuals fully, without condemnation. The only sin is the sin of intolerance.

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