Marriage; heteronuptial and homonuptial?

This week the house of commons passed the next stage of a bill permitting marriage for same sex couples. This is a triumph of common sense in a secular state and a disaster for the word marriage.  A word that has been consistently used over thousands of years to describe the commitment to a biological partnership that has the diversity to create new life as a single unit, a word that has described the foundational unit for all societies in every time, that word has now been stretched out of shape.

Perhaps we need to invent new words like heteronuptial or homonuptial to describe these radically different realities. Using the same word to describe the two relationships is papering over the cracks of too many fundamental differences; the potential of a heterosexual relationships, the unity of heterosexual relationships, the complementarity of heterosexual relationships are all radically different from same sex relationships. They may be equal in value but they are radically different. Simply labelling them the same way does not remove the diverse nature of the two relationships so much so that other language will have to be created to make that distinction with much confusion as a result.

As a Christian I have little problem with gay relationships and recognise the hierarchy of values in the catholic church especially which places love right at the pinnacle of that hierarchy. St Augustine put it simply "love and do what you will." Many other Christians would disagree with this approach but I am not sure that Jesus would. His approach was one of compassion and encouragement to the woman at the well and the woman caught in adultery. The woman who was a sinner  and wept at the feet of Jesus was not forgiven because of her moral strength but because "she had loved much."

Same sex couples cannot simply throw a switch and disconnect from the genuine love that holds them together. That love is as much part of God's love as is heterosexual love. Otherwise why would a consistent 11% of the human race, made in God's own image, be born with this orientation?  Christians cannot pick and choose to recognise one love and not another, bless one kind of love and evict  the other from public life. As a catholic church we have a lot to learn about sexuality. We are male, celibate and caught up in a clerical culture for millennia. We need to be a church that listens in this area and say little, perhaps for a hundred years or more. Listening will make us humble, perhaps even wise in this area and the Gospel may emerge with a greater clarity than ever before when we recall the words "God is love"
But the word +marriage- that is in for a difficult time +dictionary writers will already be scratching their heads and creative types will be dreaming up new, and hopefully better, words for heterosexual contracts.

King Richard III and you

The discovery of the remains of King Richard III under a car park in my home city of Leicester has made the news today. The historians were apparently acting on a hunch!
The identification of the remains involved a lot of investigation and crucially included DNA matching with DNA from Richard's sister. The amazing thing about this story is the scientific identification that can be so accurate after so long. The blue print of our lives is unique and yet it overlaps with so many others. The freedom we have to be ourselves is built upon a communal foundation written into the DNA of our lives.
In a culture that glorifies independent and solo heroes it is easy to overlook the interdepenedence that is built into our genes and our stories. When the individual dimension is over-stressed the sense of community is diminished and governments need to work harder at social cohesion and try to invent a "big society" where one no longer exists.
The truth is that DNA means that we are all spiral bound not only individually but also as a community. Our lives spiral through community to the point that we cannot say clearly where we end and another person begins. That is why, in the book of Genesis, Cain asks the question "am I my brothers keeper" in an attempt to cover up his brother's murder. Cain's punishment was to wander as a marked man and never enjoy community or prosperity in God's presence.

The DNA that binds us together is an image of the way that God's life weaves through our own making sense of each person's story and giving meaning to the shared journey we are making together. To plough our own furrow at the expense of others, to refuse to get engaged in the common good or to reach out in compassion is to share the mark of Cain.  To realise that we are all interconnected in God's love is to recognise that we are not so different from the bones of Richard dug up today in Leicester. At least that is my hunch!