Messy Blessing

One fine day at the end of May, a Rev. Mr. Cowell and a Rev. Mr. Lord registered a civil partnership in England. They then went to St. Bartholemew's in London and entered into something approximating fratrimony before friends and relatives (a good sampling of the liberal clerical establishment of the Church of England) with a Rev. Mr. Dudley as officiant. I say something approximating fratrimony, because the service was a cut and paste of the kind all too common in ILEOS, except you have to give someone credit for cutting and pasting the 1662 Marriage Service. Only this kind of high-handedness could make the first commenter on the liturgy at Peter Ould's site accuse them not just of deconstructing marriage but salvation. Yes, you read that right. This debate is not just about sex now, it's about God and the Church.

There's a lot to say about this. For instance, this isn't likely the first of these to take place. And there's endless speculation to be had about whether the celebrants intended the publicity just before GAFCON in a Lambeth summer. But I've decided to focus on the possible Chiquita aspect of the Holy Spirit of this. This theology states that the Holy Spirit occasionally likes to do things that are just plain silly in order to convince us of the foolishness of our ways. It's an idea at least as old as Erasmus and maybe as old as St. Paul. But the name derives from Chiquita banana for reasons I really can't explain.

For you see, I think the Rev. Mr. Dudley may have committed a liturgical and doctrinal abuse of such serious gravity that he probably could be prosecuted in the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved. The bishops on this high tribunal are so comically condign as to see the hand of God in their selection for such a case. We have Bishop Wright of Durham, Lord Harries of Pentegrath (who as Bishop of Oxford tried to appoint Jeffrey Johns as his suffragan), and Lord Hope of Thornes (former Archbishop of Canterbury and a lifelong celibate who has described his sexual orientation as a "grey area.") Their senior jurist colleagues would be a member of one of England's most prominent legal families (the Haverses), Elizabeth, Lady Butler-Sloss, and Lord Justice Mummery (Sir John Mummery). The presence of the latter on the panel mainly describes the kind of circus such a trial would be. Veni Creator Spiritus.