Surprised by Pride - A Pride Month reflection by OTN trustee Neil Rees
‘Proud to be gay… Now make me proud to be a Christian’ - Alison from Open Table Cambridge holds a placard during a vigil outside General Synod, the governing body of the Church of England, in London, February 2017. CREDIT: REUTERS / Hannah McKay
IN the sixth of a series of reflections for Pride Month, our trustee Neil Rees reflects on his journey from feeling threatened by the movement for LGBTQIA+ equality to standing in solidarity and celebrating diversity.
“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
There was a time when Pride was a threat to me, to which I preferred to close my eyes.
It was too much of a challenge to my narrow interpretation of Scripture, and I was yet to abandon my unfounded assumption that this ‘strange group of people’, surely, lay beyond the limits of God’s love.
I’m thankful that God did not leave me in my prejudice and hardness of heart.
C.S. Lewis, author of The Narnia Chronicles, records in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, his slow but relentless journey towards faith. He describes himself as ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England, because ‘That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.’
Like C. S. Lewis, it is strange that we should be so slow to embrace ‘that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape’!
The slow work that Lewis describes continues beyond conversion, as our lives are shaped by a growing awareness of God’s character: the compassionate and gracious God, whose ways, most certainly, are not our ways!
Having met with God in Christ and experienced the touch of his Spirit, though, it is equally strange how slow we can be to allow that same Love to change our hearts so that we begin to see others as God does. In the story of the prodigal son, while the father throws a party, embracing his son who ‘was dead, but is now alive’ [Luke 15:24], the elder son stands outside, fuming at the return of his younger brother. Although close to the father all his life, the elder son was painfully unable to share his father’s view of others, even his own brother, much less his father’s joy.
Are we so different? Am I?
Over the period of a decade or more, I have come to see Pride as a demonstration of how far ‘out in front’ of us God is. As I began to see God’s pain reflected in the trauma that some have experienced, I also encountered that explosion of joy in finding freedom to know ourselves accepted, just as we are. Through Pride, I stand in my own uniqueness alongside others in a celebration of the diversity that is evident right across the whole of God’s creation.
From this new vantage point, Pride points me to what Cory Asbury calls the ‘overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God’ that we see in Jesus. If, as Paul reminds us, God’s love is ‘too great to understand fully’ [Ephesians 3:18-19], why do I keep putting limits on it? Why did I ever think that I could put a box around his love and authoritatively say who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’?
