Officiating at a sacred ceremony
A few years ago, I had the privilege to be a Virginia-state-sanctioned officiant at the civil wedding of two people who loved each other very much. They were high school classmates fifty years before I pronounced them married. Through my wife’s experience at the same school at the same time, I had known both classmates for many years. But I never imagined the role I would play in their lives beyond the ivy-covered walls of their school.
After their graduation in the late ’60s, each went their separate ways — one rose through the officer ranks of the U.S. Army, the other chose a civilian life. The arcs of their lives soared across many decades, neither one knowing that both were riding arcs of inevitability, arcs that would eventually converge, leading them back to a high school reunion where they would meet again, fall in love, and, with my stumbling attempt at a blessing of their union, become later-in-life partners. A married couple. Happy. Fulfilled. Ready to share together whatever the world would throw at them. I reveled in their love for each other, and I was humbled by their request to join them together.
Under Catholic doctrine, I was party to an illicit ceremony
This past Monday, the Vatican, speaking for God, announced that what I had done three years ago, in a civil ceremony, would not be “licit” in God’s plan had the couple I married been Catholics.
Because what I had done — bonding in matrimony two wonderful, loving, caring, human beings of the same sex — ran counter to the Vatican’s view that same-sex marriages are not part of God’s plan for families and raising children. As reported in a Monday NPR story, “The church says its answer regarding same-sex couples “declares illicit any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such.” To quote Steve Martin, “Well, excuuuuuuse me.”
Some questions (Will take Godsplained answers only):
And so, I would like to take a moment to ask these questions, given the assumption that God or the Creator is perfect and therefore infallible:
- Why would a perfect god or creator imbue its creations with free will — including the free will to love — only to set one category of them up for social ridicule, derision, and inhumane sanctions simply because their free will led them to love another human being of the same sex?
- Is free will conditional depending on who you love?
- Is the creator’s perfect love for its creations same-sex-exclusionary by some divine program that defies human logic and emotion? [NB, I could repurpose this same argument with respect to all biases against those who are different in race, age, ability, creed, origin story, etc.]
- Why would a creator or god, who managed to bring forth an entire universe that is so incredibly balanced in its physical properties that even the tiniest imbalance in the initial conditions of creation would have resulted in our not being here at all, be concerned about same-sex marriage?
- Why would such a creator decide that certain humans — smaller than grains of sand in the limitless Universe — should be subject to an exception to perfect planning?
- And what would cause such a god or creator to personally contact just a select few humans to let them in on this exception and then let them pass the word around? This sounds like the ultimate game of telephone.
- Why would a creator of an entire universe impose such an incongruous injustice on this speck of blue in the vastness of space?
- How arrogant can any fallible human be to believe that they know the creator’s plan down to the nth degree?
No satisfactory answers
Only more unanswerable questions
The two women I had the honor to marry love each other’s spirits and characters in ways some heterosexual couples will never achieve. And two men I know are the best fathers their adopted little girl will ever have. Adoptions by same sex couples may be the saving grace for a baby or child at risk, a child for whom a stable, loving home represents a portal to a new and better life.
Wouldn’t the marriage of those adopting couples be viewed as loving, stabilizing, and valuable? And, if meeting those criteria, wouldn’t such a marriage and adoption be blessed by a loving god through that god’s church? The Vatican’s own statement includes the phrase, “The presence in such relationships of positive elements which are in themselves valued and appreciated….” And yet those are not sufficient qualities to merit the blessing of marriage?
I would not want to second-guess the Creator’s program
My default mode of thinking is humility. I don’t know what a “perfect plan” looks like; I’m only human. It seems improbable to me — only my opinion here — that a god or creator capable of pulling off a perfect plan can be second-guessed or interpreted perfectly by the fallible human beings they created. Knowing that I don’t know so many things…that my capacity to fully grasp the whos and whys and wherefores of the universe’s exquisite operating system, suggests to me that I am in no position to judge the operations of the human heart…the human mind…the human need to love and be loved, unconditionally.
It just seems to me that when any religion attempts to mansplain God’s unknowable plan in a way that constrains, demoralizes, and demeans the richness of unconditional love — untethered to gender — that that religion has failed in its own plan to be an example of unconditional love.
