I recently finished “Gilead” by Marilyn Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Congregational minister in Gilead, Iowa.  It is a fictional memoir written in the first-person with poignant descriptions of small town life, growing old and work in the church, but also contains brilliant passages that reflect on the meaning and mystery of life.  The book is stunning – simply beautiful – and I can’t recommend it enough.  I was moved to tears at several points not because it was sad or tragic but because it touches something so fundamental to our human experience.

One passage has stuck with me, related to the minister’s understanding of baptism and the act of blessing others.

“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand.  Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing.  It stays in the mind.  For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them.  It still seems to me a real question.  There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily.  It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.  I have felt it pass through me, so to speak.  The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.”

Over the past few months I have been seeing someone and it has been a beautiful time of learning and discovery.  We are slowly getting more comfortable sharing the deeper parts of ourselves with each other and I have found many of our talks and intimate moments to be much like Robinson’s character describes the act of blessing.  There is a sense of mystery, beauty and joy as you hold a person who has opened their heart, mind, body and soul to you.  Something wells up within me at those times and “deep speaks to deep,” as Henri Nouwen writes.  It is holy experience.

I grew up with an understanding of same-sex relationships as somehow incomplete or incorrect, and was told that one could not find fulfillment in them.  These were conclusions drawn from very different readings of scripture than I have come to accept today and I’m not going to open that can of worms in this entry.   My sense is that an understanding of gay relationships as flawed comes from a narrow/exclusive focus on the physical/sexual aspects of gay relationships – the mechanics, if you will, or their reproductive potential.  They appeal to some notion of what is “natural” in a biological sense but tend to completely ignore the deeper human and spiritual qualities that, to me, both include and transcend our bodies.  And this binary reading of relationships and of sexuality in general makes for a very simplistic, two-dimensional understanding of what it means to be human.

I don’t claim to have profound insights but in my process of discernment it is becoming clearer that relationships are sacramental, and in that respect they are mysterious and deeply personal.  Each one is an occasion to experience God’s presence in a real, tangible way in our lives.  There are as many different types of relationships as there are people, and there are different levels or dimensions in which they are expressed.  But the labels and particulars are secondary.  At the heart of them all – the partner, the friend, even the passing acquaintance or stranger – is this idea of blessing others.  We are not here just for our own satisfaction or pleasure.  Relationships are not simply about being happy or fulfilled (though healthy relationships often bring a sense of wholeness and satisfaction); they are about experiencing and seeing the sacred in and through others. They are about calling forth or naming others’ beauty, worth and potential.  And then, maybe in the process, we find the beauty, worth and potential in ourselves.

I believe that same-sex relationships require great care and thoughtfulness, might I even say prayerfulness.  We have freedom, a scary but equally exhilarating opportunity to define our relationships in the ways that we need to and want to.  Gender roles are not assumed; we do not have to be bound by many of the societal norms and expectations as heterosexual couples.  But I also believe that in our attempts to forge new ways of being together, we should not forget that the heart of all relationships is in an invitation to the mystery and wonder of life, an opportunity to know another deeply and to be deeply known.

My hands are made to bless,
to offer on behalf of others,
a prayer, a touch,
inner healing and life.

It is part of my calling
part of my own healing, perhaps,
to hold another beautiful soul
and to claim its beauty and worth,
to pray from a deep place for
its safety, peace, stability,
to ask that this soul know the
ground-shifting, life-reorienting love and grace
that I have heard spoken of and
glimpsed in unexpected moments in my own life.

I feel myself a broken vessel
into which something of great
beauty and value has been poured,
and I am grateful, and humbled,
and curious how it could be.

But I know that I am also called to be courageous,
to live in this holy paradox and to
seek God’s will in it,
to ask more deeply whose I am
and who I am
and what this this precious gift of life and love
are to accomplish in this beautiful, broken world.