Friday, March 30, 2012

The Claiming the Blessing Saga Continues!

This week -- buried in a Huffington Post interview -- Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said these words:


"I would guess that at [General] Convention, we would adopt a trial rite for blessing same-sex unions," she said, referring to the annual meeting of the church's governing body, which meets every three years. It will next meet in July in Indianapolis. Jefferts Schori said that no priest is required to bless any marriage, but that formal same-sex blessings could become optional.

Try to get past the part about the "annual meeting" that "meets every three years" ("my kingdom for an editor" ... Seriously!) and focus on the fact that the Episcopal Church is now -- finally -- so on the verge of "claiming the blessing" that the Presiding Bishop herself tells us so. The many months of work that the SCLM Blessing Project put into the resources that will be presented to General Convention 2012 follows the many years of work done by the Claiming the Blessing collaborative and our various organizations and institutions ... all of which stands on the shoulders of the Inclusion Pioneers who broke through the hard ground of homophobia to plant the Gospel seeds of love, justice and compassion now bearing fruit as the Episcopal Church moves ever-closer making the 1976 promise of "full and equal claim"to its LGBT members not just a resolution but a reality.

We may not be in Oz yet, but we're certainly not in Kansas anymore.

And here's a little look back at the journey-so-far down the yellow brick road that got us here:

1 comment:

Elizabeth Kaeton said...

My, my, my....these pictures do bring back memories of times of hard work and great fun in spite of the fact that there were times when we thought our hard work would be in vain but the cause was so worth it we simply couldn't not work so hard.

Thanks for this. Looking forward to more.