In The Affirmative: Penultimatum

Wendy and her wife Jo signing the register at their wedding in 2014.

OUR MOST READ BLOGGER since 2022 is back with the eleventh of a series sharing more of her story. This month she reflects on the most heart-breaking night of her life.

In the Affirmative is a monthly blog from Open Table member Wendy Young who shares her life, thoughts and experience as a queer Christian in Britain. You can read the rest of the series here.

“Why would God send me this unexpected, entirely unlikely love relationship if we weren’t allowed to be together? And why should we not be allowed to get married, if marriage meant a covenant before God?”

PENULTIMATUM - Yes, that’s a mashup of two words and I happen to find both quite anxiety-inducing: penultimate and ultimatum.

You are reading the penultimate [last-but-one] edition of this particular blog series. I have been posting here for nearly a year now and for me it has served as a kind of stocktake. I have always found it really helpful to put things down in order to travel lighter and I can recommend it wholeheartedly. If you’re at a stage in your life where there might be the opportunity to leave the old stories about yourself behind, do that and then live in the new story. There’s a verse in the Bible that says:

‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!’ - 2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV

So why would I find ‘penultimate’ a scary word? I suspect that the culprit here is my fear of loss. If I am looking at the second-to-last of something, it means something is nearly gone, used up, expired. I will have to manage without it and I’ll be wondering how that might feel.

Let’s also look at ‘ultimatum’. When we face one of these it usually means we have to make a choice, often between two equally unattractive options. The last time I was confronted with one of these follows on from my previous blog.

After months of Facebook Messenger and Skype for hours at a time, I was deeply in love with Jo, whom I had met online in a poetry group, and she with me. Our relationship was very solid and we loved each other very much. Late one night, she told me that for her the only honourable next step would be marriage and that she wasn’t willing to continue if we weren’t going to get married.

Ultimatum

I was facing two options and had to pick one: either we get married or we end our relationship and have nothing more to do with each other. The blood drained from my body. Before hearing the ultimatum, I had been getting sleepy but suddenly I sat upright in bed with my ears ringing. Decades of conditioning flooded over me: from a very young age, I had been taught that marriage was between a man and a woman and that it therefore wasn’t meant for me. I wasn’t allowed to have this thing I had just been offered; it was for other people. I had never wanted it before and so I had never cared much (maybe a little) but at that moment I didn’t fully believe that it was only for other people. As much as the vicars, the youth workers and authors recommended to me had tried to convince me, they had never quite managed it and now I was struck, for the first time ever, with the reality of what this particular exclusion of LGBTQIA+ people meant. My first-ever personal experience of the reality of such a limitation left me breathless. That night, I wrestled with God.

The book of Genesis in the Bible tells the story of Jacob, who wrestled with someone one whole night (Genesis 32:22-32). Jacob’s hip was wrenched out of its socket as they fought. At daybreak, the other person called for the deadlocked match to stop. Before he would let go, Jacob insisted on a blessing from the one he had been wrestling with. The person’s blessing was to give Jacob a new name - Israel (which means ‘he struggles with God’) – saying ‘you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.’

In my wrestling with God, I brought to God the conundrums that were threatening to tear my world apart. Why would God send me this unexpected, entirely unlikely love relationship if we weren’t allowed to be together? And why should we not be allowed to get married, if marriage meant a covenant before God? Why wasn’t I allowed to love and to be loved? Why didn’t God just let me go through the process of recovering from the traumatic ending of the previous relationship, instead of dumping me right into something new and life-altering?

It was possibly the most heartbreaking night of my life, and I’ve had a few. There was no option in my heart of going against God’s will: if God made it clear to me, through a night of intense prayer and absolute submission, that it was against God’s will for me to marry the woman I loved, I would obey and walk away from the relationship. Jo knew that too and gave me the time and space to find the answer. At times during that night my fists were up, at times I was sobbing, but at daybreak I came away with absolute certainty: God had given us to each other to love and to cherish. To marry. At daybreak I went back to Jo, on Facebook Messenger, and said ‘yes’.

Most people thought we were crazy. It WAS a huge thing to do! It cost us both enormously, in many more ways than just money. It was very, very difficult to jump through all the hoops of bureaucracy and that is not a process I would wish on anyone, but we kept pushing and working and praying and, after a few failed attempts at a visa and much desperation, we got married, in London, in December 2014. It was truly the most joy I have ever experienced and we look back on our memories and the photos and videos regularly. It was very nearly perfect, except for two things: my family couldn’t come to the UK from South Africa, and we couldn’t get married in church.

And here we are, nearly 11 years later, and we still can’t get married in our local Anglican church. People say, ‘Ah, but we’re making such fast progress, just look at how far we’ve come in the last 50 years’, and I want to scream! It’s not enough to be ‘allowed’ to have Prayers of Love and Faith spoken over us - we wanted to GET MARRIED! IN OUR CHURCH!

Penultimate

Next time we meet here, it will be the last blog in this series.

Nothing is going to change between now and the end of August, in terms of marriage equality in the Church of England. But I pray that one day it will. I can join campaigns and walks in support of marriage equality. And I can live my life, with my wife, openly and honestly and shimmering with the light that God shines on it and on us every day.

Shine on, wherever you are. Just do, because you are loved and you are loved and you are loved.

Wendy