Rector’s Submission to the Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection
There is a website called sacredsites.com which lists the world’s holiest sites, and it carries the banner Places of Peace and Power. Of course, it might just as well read Places of Violence and Bloodshed. It is no coincidence that shrines, from the Temple in Jerusalem to the Temple in Amritsa, have traditionally been the scenes of massacres and reprisals. Enemies have long known that the best way to inflame one another’s passions and inflict optimum damage is to attack a sacred site. It is, of course, why the Shiite shrine in Samarra has been repeatedly attacked, and why Sunni shrines have been desecrated in retaliation, why the Washington Post reports that thousands of men and boys immediately descend on these sites armed with pistols and assault rifles and grenade launchers.
We set ourselves up for this, because the ‘sacred’ seldom has anything much to do with God, and everything to do with us. We decide what is sacred: we come to associate this piece of ground, this cave or rock or river, this building or animal or text, with the divine, and then feel obliged to protect it, to build walls and dig moats and wield anathemas and fatwa’s in its defense. And when someone crosses over the line we have drawn, and invades our sanctuary or defiles our temple, then, like the Maenads, we feel justified in divine frenzy. Surely, we imagine, God must bless our destructive purges and reprisals, even our bombs and our bullets, because after all, we’re only trying to protect God.
Now in any conversation about marriage, it seems only a matter of time before reference is made to “this sacred institution,” but as with every other sacred institution, this is a work of our own religious imagination: long before temple or church or mosque, marriage was. And if ancient people, without religion as we know it, also considered marriage sacred, it was because they sensed that, in human love, they were touching something sublime and eternal and far greater than themselves. The reason why the Christian Church considers marriage a sacrament is as a metaphor for the love between God and God’s people, between Christ and the Church, and that metaphor is unencumbered by gender, and capable of many expressions.
I find myself increasingly uncomfortable when the sacred is invoked because, as with most things sacred, it immediately becomes a means of including some and excluding others, and of conscripting God into the age-old myth that some people will feel better about themselves by stigmatizing and demonizing others. And defending a sacred institution always seems to admit of excess: for some it renders rage and violence not only tolerable, but appropriate and praiseworthy. I have been ordained for nearly thirty years, and I am increasingly convinced that God is generally disengaged from, and uninterested in, most of what we decide is sacred, and that our mere act of deciding seems to guarantee God’s absence.
In the last few weeks I have been asked by two gay couples to perform their Holy Unions. Curiously, there have been no discussions about photographers and flowers and carpet runners, but simply the expressed need for these couples to have their love blessed by God and by the Church. For me, this is where I encounter the truly sacred, not in institutions and buildings, not in holy lands and their inevitable holy wars, but in holy people, God’s children, glimpsing in one another something of God’s own beauty and truth.
The institution of marriage has been damaged: it has been devalued and trivialized by selfishness and infidelity, by substance abuse and unemployment, and a host of social ills, but I do not believe it will be – can possibly be – damaged by faithful and committed love between any of God’s children. That deserves our recognition, our protection, and our celebration.
TPG+
