The Rt. Rev. Michael Curry considers how God is always leading us beyond what we think we know:
There will be a time when God’s GPS points you in a direction that makes people uncomfortable. It may make you uncomfortable. The evolution of long-held beliefs can be a spiritual earthquake; the ground beneath us shaking, the very fault lines of our identity shifting and seeking to resettle. But if we can make it through, we find the reward: not an easy journey but a share of what the Bible calls “peace that passes all understanding,” the peace of knowing we are living love’s way, without contradiction….
We humans are walking bundles of contradictions. I know that I am, and experience suggests that I’m not alone in that. As people often describe relationships … “It’s complicated.” It is and we are.
In 2000, Curry was elected bishop in the Episcopal Church as the church wrestled with questions about the full inclusion and equality of LGBTQ persons in the church:
Experience and friendships had long taught me that gays and lesbians were as Christian as anybody else. Still, when it came to the public blessing of unions (marriage wasn’t yet on the table), I was stuck in the unspoken disapproval of my upbringing. Homosexuality happened behind closed doors, not at the altar.
And yet, during that same upbringing, … “love your neighbor” was held up constantly, forcefully, as a core value and commitment. That conviction fueled the civil rights movement that had given me birth. I heard it all the time. But somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that that truth must be true for gay and lesbian friends in every respect.
As a bishop, I made a solemn vow to “guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church.” I had also vowed to “be merciful to all, show compassion to the poor and strangers, and defend those who have no helper.” I was beginning to see that obedience to the letter and the spirit of both of those vows was leading me to a real contradiction….
I was growing, and my own beliefs had evolved. But another way to say it is that I was becoming more and more open to letting the spirit of God breathe through me and make me new. Therein is the source of real personal change, evolution, and transformation, and it’s never ending….
The late [lay theologian] Verna Dozier … was a real mentor, teacher, and soul friend to me. In her book The Dream of God, she offered this wisdom: “We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong.”
Reference:
Michael B. Curry with Sarah Grace, Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times (Avery, 2020), 166, 171, 172–173, 178, 184.
Image credit and inspiration: Beth Macdonald, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An estuary reveals a world that is more than just land or water, but something beyond them both.
Story from Our Community:
I have long felt my orientation as a gift from God. It has allowed me in many ways to intimately experience “being in the world, not of the world.” Despite being raised an Episcopalian, I have found resistance to my sharing of my experiences as a gay man. I have many times had to hide my light—the Christ-light within me—under a bushel. Fortunately, though much darkness still exists towards me and those like me, the dawn of accepting queer people is breaking, and we are better able now to share our Christ light into the world. We are strengthened in our hope and encouraged in our expanded learning to become our true selves to the glory of God.
—William P.
