I have been asked to reflect on what it means to be an openly gay priest. To give my testimony, as it were—especially in this parish, which offers so much space for the discernment of what is appropriate, and even urgent, in the life of the church.
It is hard for me to spell this out, but I would bear false witness if I didn’t say that the background to my whole life in this area has been one of lies—and the shape of my adulthood a more or less desperate search to winnow out the truth from the lies. As a child I was taught by my parents the absolute importance of Jesus and of love; and by the politically conservative, Evangelical Protestant world in which I was brought up, that “homosexuality” was diametrically opposed to that.
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