Here is the second excerpt from Garret Keizer’s cover story in the latest Harpers Magazine called “Turning Away Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church.” which we are posting with permission from Harpers.
Garret Keizer writes:
I loved Martyn Minns, who offered to say a prayer for the success of my assignment (I didn’t refuse), just as I loved Colin Coward, who helped my wife and me buy our first tickets on the London Tube. And I wished Henry Orombi could have heard Coward describe his devotion the Office of Morning and Evening Prayer and that Coward could have heard Orombi’s deep voice—perhaps all the most resonant in the ears of a gay man—when I asked him what he saw of value in the Anglican tradition and he said without a moment’s pause, “It’s beautiful.”
Most of all, I wish that everyone I talked to could have met the anonymous (as I promised) village curate I met in England, who said she knew, as a woman and as a disabled person, as a child who was always the last picked for teams, what it means to be prejudged and excluded, and who said she would try to minister in a loving way to any gay or lesbian person or couple who came to her church, but that on the rightness of blessing same-sex unions, she was simply not sure, and that it was difficult for her—so palpably difficult that I knew I’d ruined the rest of day just by asking—“to sit her and say I don’t know.” And I’d like to gather all the most strident of those I met in a nice tight pack around her and invite the one who is without doubt to cast the first stone.
The Harpers cover story is available by subscription only here.
The first excerpt may be found here.