U.S. Supreme Court will start debate on Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8.
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The Rev. Susannah Crolius is the interim pastor at South Congregational Church in Springfield.
Well, another season of “The Bachelor” has wrapped and Sean has found love. There was, of course, the tearful finale with handsome Sean getting down on bended knee to starry-eyed Catherine and bringing out the gigantic diamond ring.
The words “fairy tale” were used far more than once. We are told they are planning a “dream” wedding — televised, of course (and corporately sponsored) — and that they can’t wait to begin their “perfect” life together.
Taking off the rose-colored glasses for a moment, those who have actually done it know that marriage is not for the faint of heart. This realization grows with each passing year, what it means to be married and stayed married, let alone maintain a healthy, vibrant marriage.
When there are children involved, it is even more challenging. It takes work, a lot of it. This does not deter over 2 million people a year from embarking on this daring adventure.
A marriage does not happen when two people have a ceremony.
A man and woman together do not make a marriage. You can say “I do” but that does not a marriage make. As a pastor who has officiated at dozens and dozens of weddings over the years, I encounter how much time and energy is spent on a single day, on a singular ceremony that, in my Protestant Christian tradition, takes about half an hour.
I can only pray that the couple will spend as much time and energy on all the other days that are to follow.
A marriage begins on the wedding day when promises are made to one another, but is created only over a long period of time as two people begin to build a life together through trial and error, in good times and in bad. The divorce rate in America, hovering near 50 percent, is evidence enough of how challenging it is to fully live out this commitment.
Marriage takes integrity, commitment, communication, persistence, compromise, and forgiveness. These are noble and mature qualities that often take a lifetime to cultivate, the kinds of qualities faith traditions seek to encourage in their faithful through guidance, nurture and practice.
The presence of these qualities increases the possibility of peace, joy, healing and love, not only between two people, but in our neighborhoods and our communities. Strong, healthy marriages help build strong, healthy communities.
This coming week, the U.S. Supreme Court will wrestle with what the definition and legality of marriage is. Marriage is, after all, a civil issue, not a religious one. It is a legal contract two people willingly enter into for a variety of reasons: love, children, shared vision, economic stability, companionship, lust, convenience, fear of being alone.
At the moment, with the exception of a few states, marriage is a contract only a man and a woman can enter into. At the moment, in the majority of states, only men and women can participate in the blessings, benefits — and challenges — of marriage.
As a Christian and as a pastor, I pray that this will change. I support marriage equality in our country. I pray that the Supreme Court will overturn the Defense of Marriage Act and broaden the definition of marriage to include all people.
I pray that they will overturn Proposition 8 in California, which bars gay and lesbian people from marrying. It feels critical to me to say the words “Christian” and “support of marriage equality” in the same sentence, because so often the two are expressed as unable to exist together, that to support one automatically means canceling out the other.
There is an assumption that if you are a person of faith of any kind, of any religious tradition, you do not — cannot — support marriage equality. When U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, announced his recent support of the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, it was said he was “straying from his (Christian) faith.”
One news report said that some of his constituents in Ohio felt “sad and betrayed” by his support of gay marriage.
I confess to struggling with this, precisely because I am a person of faith. We honor God most faithfully when we live together — two by two, in family, in community — striving towards manifesting peace, nurture, compassion, and respect.
Faith is not an abstraction, not a checklist of do’s and don’ts, but is the day-to-day practice of striving to live from our best selves so that we might increase the possibilities of these life-giving qualities in the world.
I struggle to understand why, as people of faith, we would say “no” to anything that might increase the opportunity for mature love, for commitment, for responsibility, for honor, for respect.
These are of God. Our world needs as many of these qualities as we can get, for they are surely in short supply. All faith traditions remind us that we are not passive players in this, but are active participants in making it so.
Marriage gives us, perhaps, the most intensive opportunity to practice these holy virtues.
The married same-sex couples in my congregation are deeply devoted partners and parents who have been together for a long time. Some have adopted children whom other couples might have hesitated to welcome into their families.
They are people who have important jobs and are engaged and informed citizens. They are caring people who work hard at making the world a better place. They bring their children to church, some from quite a distance, so that they might learn about what it means to be a faithful, virtuous person.
They have come to our church because they found they were not welcome in so many other churches.
At our church, they join with all the other people in my congregation — black, Hispanic, well-off, poor, able-bodied and disabled, young, old, single, married, divorced — who come each week to try to figure out how to be decent human beings and how to love God. It is not easy, and I love them for trying.
It is a congregation as diverse as God made the world, and I pray, as love-filled as God’s heart.
The Rev. Susannah Crolius is the interim pastor at South Congregational Church in Springfield. The congregaiton is a member of the United Church of Christ denomination. When Massachusetts was the first state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, the UCC was the only Christian denomination to publicly support this law.