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Tracing the Desolation
By Judith Marie Gentle, Ph.D.
Like so many, I have suffered great loss to my ministry and livelihood as a consequence of the woes in our Communion regarding issues of human sexuality. I have asked myself repeatedly how so many bishops and clergy can ignore the Truth revealed through both natural law and sacred scripture that sexual relations are intended by our Creator to occur only between a man and a woman within the covenant of marriage.
I weep continually over the seeming loss of so many souls who choose to abandon the Truth of God's good design for human sexuality and embrace the lies of the secular culture instead. There is an applicable directive for our dilemma in St.Ignatius of Loyola's Rules for the Discernment of spirits. Whenever we discover ourselves in a state of desolation, i.e., distant from God because we have fallen out of the will of God, St. Ignatius counsels us to trace the steps by which we were deceived and deprived of the graced state of union with God through our own sinful choice.
If we follow this counsel, we must ask ourselves when our Communion began exchanging the Gospel of repentance, salvation from sin and transformation in Jesus Christ for the false gospel of simply affirming people exactly where they are. In other words, when did we, as a Communion, first tell people that they could simply follow the dictates of their "conscience," without any regard for making sure one's conscience was properly formed by being aligned with the Divine Will as revealed through sacred scripture and the natural law on a particular moral issue?
It is my belief that the answer lies in the 1930 Lambeth decision to allow artificial contraception under certain circumstances. With this decision, our Communion was the first Christian body to try and separate what God has joined together namely, the unitive and procreative aspects of human sexuality. What we failed to realize is that we mere human beings cannot "break" the natural law or "change" the moral law. Rather, we end up breaking ourselves against them when we ignore or abandon them. God's laws that regulate the moral order are as real as God's laws that regulate the cosmos we inhabit.
While we understandably want God to resolve the dilemma our Communion now faces, scripture and tradition remind us that God never solves our dilemmas until we have traced the path of our own desolation, repented of our sin and asked God's forgiveness for both our sin and its consequences. In 1930, we began breaking ourselves against God's good moral order for human sexuality. The endless efforts to authorize "homosexual" sex are the logical outcome of our Communion's trying to separate the unitive and the procreative aspects of human sexuality. I, for one, believe that until we openly repent of this 1930 decision and the harm it has caused, God cannot bring healing to our ecclesial life.
---The Rev. Judith Marie Gentle, Ph.D., is a priest of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, adjunct professor of biblical and moral theology at Duquesne University, an Officer of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an International author and lecturer in Mariology and a Board member of People Concerned for the Unborn Child, the oldest and largest grassroots pro-life organization in Pennsylvania.This article first appeared in the May-June issue of Anglicans for Life, a global ministry affirming the sanctity of life.
