Our journey to holy union
Kate Childs Graham
About a month before Proposition 8 passed in California Nov. 4,
taking away an array of human rights, and the U.S. bishops decided to
team up with the Knights of Columbus to make the “preservation of
marriage” one of its key focuses for the next five years, my partner,
Ariana, and I made our commitment to one another.
Our marriage was not “legal” by terms of the state of California or
the official Catholic church. Yet, in our eyes and in the eyes of our
friends and family, our union is indeed holy.
As society has not yet defined the norms for our relationship the
way it has for those of heterosexual couples, we had the freedom to be
the architects of our own journey. And so, when Ariana and I initially
realized that we were building a lifelong partnership, we had the
opportunity to choose whether or not we needed or wanted a ceremony to
mark our commitment.
After many discussions, we decided that not only did we want to have
a wedding ceremony in order to express our love and commitment to each
other in the presence of the Creator, our friends and our family, but
we also wanted to take the year before the ritual to traverse through
our version of a Pre-Cana marriage preparation program.
Our Pre-Cana was quite different from the Pre-Cana courses that many
heterosexual couples go through kicking and screaming. Diann Neu,
codirector of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Religion,
walked with us through the journey.
She challenged us with questions we had not thought to ask or were
afraid to ask. We discussed everything: finances, children, fair
fighting, spirituality and so on. We tackled the last-name debacle and
settled on a combination of our mothers’ maiden names. We came to new
levels of understanding -- and, sometimes, new levels of
misunderstanding.
After we had journeyed through several months of our Pre-Cana,
realizing that the work of communication would never be finished, we
turned our focus to our ceremony. Diann helped us understand that we
were the priests of our wedding. With great care, we crafted every
moment of the ceremony to reflect a delicate balance of Ariana’s
Unitarian Universalist tradition and my Catholic faith tradition. We
each chose a reading -- my pick was from the Book of Ruth, while her
choice was Alice Walker’s “While Love Is Unfashionable.” The songs --
“Morning Has Broken,” “Water Is Wide” and “Swimming to the Other Side”
-- each signified an important aspect of our relationship. With Diann’s
expertise, we even managed to create a beautiful eucharistic prayer
that was inclusive of our faiths and the faiths of all who celebrated
with us. In the end, we had a ceremony that was truly us.
Kate and ArianaThe
year of preparation flew by and before we knew it our friends and
family were arriving from all over the world for the affair. The
ceremony, held at a local Swedenborgian church, was everything we had
imagined it would be from the moment our families lit the candles to
our tear-filled exchange of vows to the closing prayer when our family
and friends raised their hands to bless us.
And, of course, no wedding would be complete without a party to
follow. We led the parade of guests to a small restaurant around the
corner for dinner. At the reception, folks shared songs and poetry,
laughter and tears. From the deep holiness of the ceremony to the
lighthearted humor and love of the reception, Ariana and I both felt
blessed to have had the opportunity to marry one another surrounded by
those closest to us.
In the days following our holy union, fully sated by our love and
the love of our community, we did not necessarily feel any change in
our relationship. For us, our marriage was and is about the journey,
and the ceremony was one marker along the path. However, our story is
just one of many. And surely, other stories will vary greatly, as what
it means to be family comes in a multitude of shapes and sizes. Still,
common themes will certainly arise — love, commitment, passion,
devotion and so on.
Indeed, this past month has offered many challenges to the LGBTQ
community and society at large. The institutional Catholic church and
the state cannot take away our commitment to each other. However, as my
legal right to marriage and family has been called into question, I
have felt that attack on my life and the lives of my friends deeply. My
only hope is that these stumbling blocks on the road to justice will
help open the dialogue, compel more people to tell their stories of
love, and bring our church and our world closer to a discipleship of
equals.
(Kate Childs Graham writes for ReligionDispatches.org and YoungAdultCatholics-Blog.com .
She also serves on the Women’s Ordination Conference board of directors
and the Call to Action Next Generation Leadership Team. )
Some interesting thoughts, and data, here, from Ross Douthat.
One student remarked that so many students are responding to the blog today because ANYTHING is better than studying for finals. Here is another student's take on the human dignity question:
"The real problem is, indeed, a modern philosophical shift, but not necessarily the one people are talking about. Modern philosophy begins with the outlying case: can there be human dignity for the human person that doesn't act, look, or smell like a person? Classical philosophers began with the norm, and then accounted for outlying variations. They established principles that were generally true of a type, while dealing in individual cases with the failure of some to have certain traits that otherwise seem characteristic of the type.
As such, Aristotle was able to say that duties were owed to all other persons in so far as they were people, without tying the dignity that creates the duties to any particular trait. (I am being a bit anachronistic here, since Aristotle didn't really deal with "dignity" per se). He does acknolwedge that the thing that makes the genus human different is reason (like Kant) but says that we owe the duty to all others in the genus, regardless of whether they share the particular trait.
The difference is a belief that things have essences. Unfortunately, for this to make sense, we have to consider the age-old (really many ages old) debate over nominalism. That is, the debate is about whether the distinctions that separate categories of things are a recognition of real phenomena or merely nominal distinctions drawn by humans in recognition of certain common traits. If distinctions are recognitions of real differences in kind, then things of a kind share a common essence. And those things within the group ought to be treated alike. Thus, in the present case, human beings ought to be treated with dignity because they have the same essence, even if they lack certain characteristics that are definitive of human beings. But if distinctions are merely nominal, then when we say that we treat alikes alike, we have to look to certain characteristics that might grant (or not grant) the status of being alike.
An illustration that may or may not be helpful: a layman's definition of a dog is a creature with four-legs, a tail, and fur that barks. If a dog were to lose a leg, its tail, its fur, and its vocal chord in some terrible accident the classical philosopher would have no problem recognizing the creature as a (rather sad) dog that has lost certain characteristics, and would treat it as she would treat any other dog. But the nominalist would have to make a very real inquiry into whether the traits lost somehow made it so the dog no longer meets the definition of being a dog, and this could have a very real impact on how he treats the dog."
