Oh what a week! Meta on top of meta, and yet, I say, love, on top of love. Love which knows no bounds, love which passes, may I say, no understanding.
Follow me over the fold for a moment of late-evening reflection.....
Love. It is a word that has a bad rap. Love, in its pure form, is one that suggests total acceptance; total embracing of who a person is; the total embracing of a human being just as they are.
Plenty of people fall short of this kind of love. I know I do. I have failed to love according to my own standards, which I will admit are informed by the standards that Jesus of Nazareth suggested.
I have been participating in some diaries about how Christians cannot be liberals, or how they can, or how screwed up the whole idea is. I generally do NOT participate in that kind of meta. But I did, and here I am.
I am the kind of liberal that would make socialists blush. There are Roman Catholics that would blush when I would say that the Catholic Worker Movement is "right" of me. Father Field, an Episcopal Priest and once Rector of my former parish on Bowdoin Street, who made sure that the (then monastery) fed the poor was once given a hard time by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. Like my fellow faggot Oscar Wilde once said, "nothing succeeds like excess". The soup kitchen and drop-in centre, by the way, at St. Johns, was killed by middle-class folks who could care less and killed it after about 100 years. This is the church, and the organ bench, which accommodated Dr. Everettt Titcomb from 1910 until 1960. His most amazing rump sat on the same organ bench that I did.
One of the weird things that happened in American Anglicanism is this: we produced some of the most amazing women, men, gay and lesbian, ever to haul themselves into a pulpit. We also produced men like me, and like Dr. Titcomb, who sat at the organ every week and composed and directed and saw to it that people had a good Mass.
Let us enjoy what those of us have done, and let us not have to say why we have done it.
Peace, love, and blessings.