UNDER THE DISCO BALL: PART ONE

I am so tired.

I need to go to bed but I can’t sleep until I write a little. There’s really a lot to write about, but I know so very little about how to say it, how to compose the thoughts and pictures in my head into something approaching order.
Names shall be changed to protect the guilty.
Incidentals in general shall be changed.

If you’ve read a little of this blog you’ll know by now I am an Anglican, that I became one because I no longer felt affinity for Roman Catholicism, and because, as a writer and artists sooner or later I would speak out publicly against my Church and be labeled a dissenter. I couldn’t have that. I needed to belong to a church I could actually belong, that desired what I desired. no matter how liberal I seem my prime motivation is the Gospel and the carpenter who preached it, so belonging to the right church, being the Catholic I needed to be was essential.

Wherever you worship is where you worship. We all need to go wherever we consider home to be. I hold the belief that the home we make must not be a home that excludes others and I’m sorry, but Rome excluded too many. Last year a priest preached a sermon saying that gay people were in the image of God and deserved respect. While there were no easy answers to hard questions, we needed to look at things in a new way. This was all he said, and in a Catholic church it was quite revolutionary.

I laughed into my hand and rolled my eyes. How he spoke! As if gay people were something outside of us, far removed from the church, a sort of them to our us. I looked around that church and thought to myself, “If we got rid of all the gay people who keep silent we’d lose half the choir, half the priests and most of the sacristan’s staff.

Not to mention at least a fourth of the congregation.

It’s not the only thing out church keeps secrets about. But it is a major one. It’s not the only inconsistency, but it is the one that is on my mind namely because of last night.