Back in the 1980’s, as a young boy, I was told that AIDs was God’s way of punishing Gay people for their gayness. Even though I didn’t believe this to be true even then, Gay people were ‘other’ to me. They belonged to a different world that was ‘dirty’ somehow – or at very least alien and impossible for me to understand.
This was the truth given to me by good religious people. Whilst homophobia is still very much a part of our religious institutions (and elsewhere) things have changed. How did this happen? Wht shifts apparently fixed narrow views? How are people set free?
This might offer us some clues.
I offer this today as our lent meditation as the Proost we are building seeks to engage with our context through spirituality and art, and there is much to learn here about embodyment, about community and about how change which seems impossible takes generational intent.
Let’s keep dancing.
