A table laden with grace - OTN Patron Rachel Mann's response to Prayers Of Love & Faith
Revd Dr Rachel Mann, trans Anglican priest, poet, writer and broadcaster, is a member of the Church of England’s General Synos and a patron of OTN.
WATCH: Rachel’s message to OTN [4 mins]
GENERAL SYNOD, the Church of England’s governing body, debated the College of Bishops’ proposals for the next steps in the Living In Love And Faith process on identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage on 8th and 9th February 2023.
OTN Patron Rachel Mann used elements of this text in her speech at Synod in response to a proposed amendment which requested ‘further legal, theological, and practical consideration’ before introducing prayers for the blessing of same-gender relationships and pastoral guidance.
“God does seemingly impossible things in the midst of the facts. I want to stay close to the God who abides with us in the dust of our real lives and offers love, reconciliation and, yes, blessing.”
‘The Kingdom of God is not a press conference, or a resolution, or a short course in how to be eloquently indignant. It is a table laden with grace, at which the social maps are all redrawn’.
In writing this speech those words of the Jewish biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine kept coming back to me. I want to use them as a guide to why I think we, as a synod, should warmly support the motion before us.
In recent months, our episcopal colleagues have undertaken an extraordinary work of leadership and discernment.
Do their proposals entirely satisfy my instincts for a new settlement in our understanding of same-sex relationships or LGBTQI+ lives? No.
Do I long for a deeper dive into the theological architecture of the proposals or for bolder, braver, more beautiful prayers? Yes.
Still, I greet this motion with gladness. Why? Because behind the clatter of our deeply felt disagreements and the temptation to speak out of wounds rather than scars, I hear in them a call to dwell in the kingdom of God. It is a call to stay at a table laden with grace. Jesus’s table. Where even people such as us, the General Synod, are fed.
Yes, I want us to find a deepening clarity and precision about what our episcopal friends are bringing forward. And we shall find it. Not on the bruising floor of a debating chamber but in that covenantal wrestling and conversation to which we as people of God are called in coming months and years. We don’t do that in the airlessness of abstractions, but amidst what George Eliot called ‘the dim lights and tangled circumstances of the world’. If LLF has taught us anything it is that our work of love and grace is about indwelling and relationship rather than logic-crunching.
I commend this motion to you not because it is easy, but because it is costly; not because it has the cleanliness of defined positions attractive to philosophers or lawyers proving a point, but because we are called to meet our God in the rich and beautiful messiness of human relationships; the motion before us is not about fudge, but about this truth: that God is in the facts.
God does seemingly impossible things in the midst of the facts. I want to stay close to the God who abides with us in the dust of our real lives and offers love, reconciliation and, yes, blessing.
I sense God in the bishops’ discernment. Our God is one who walks the costly path to good news at the pace of the one who bears the stripes of the church’s wounds and its woundings. He does not crunch logic at the speed of a supercomputer that can game all the outcomes in a split second.
Fr Herbert McCabe once said that sin is a distortion which leads us, when we encounter love, to crucify it. I ask that we stick with love today, in all its simplicity and indwelling; Let’s look for the table laden with grace.
Originally published at therachelmannblogspot.blogspot.com. Republished with permission.
