I cannot travel with Lord Carey, Bishops Michael Nasser Ali, and Wallace Benn who feel that gay people can change their sexual orientation through a form of therapy which the British professional body for counselling rejects.
Since these bishops’ action was announced more Christian have have expressed concern about the controversial ‘reparative therapy’ for gay persons. Jeremy Marks, Director of Courage UK which is an evangelical Christian ministry to gay persons, and himself a former practitioner of Christian ‘reparative therapy” writes that this practice is “downright damaging and dangerous”.
In the book “Moving Forward Together: Homosexuality and the Church of Ireland” which has just been published by Changing Attitude Ireland, Jeremy Marks provides this assessment of ‘reparative therapy’ in his chapter called ‘A journey from self-condemnation to acceptance’. He writes that from his past attempts at this type of ‘gay cure’ ministry and ‘reparative therapy’ “people lose their faith in God and in many cases end up in severe depression, even become suicidal”. He concluded “Tragically, over our first 12 years, this approach destroyed the faith of many and was completely ineffective in changing a person’s sexual orientation.”
My journey regarding expressions of sexuality started fifty years ago in my rural home parish. The most modern facility in Europe for what were then described as special care patients had been built there. The Chief Male Nurse kindly took me and a few other students on as temporary staff in what would now be described as ‘sumer internships’. In all I spent five four month periods there in addition to ongoing contact with the hospital’s scout group.
It was a hard-hitting, eye-opening, experience which shaped my views, values and ministry. It brought me into daily contact with people whose life and well-being was totally dependent on care. I think of one 14 year old with narrow twisted legs, arms that could not move, and who had to be spoon fed and cleaned being permanently incontinent, but whose eyes would light up when Jimmy the charge nurse of the ward appeared. Jimmy was to become my occasional mentor.
I think of a twelve year old in the same ward who whilst he was mobile, literally had to have food forced in to him otherwise he would have died. He had a repetitive action. He kept knocking his forehead with the knuckles of his fist. In fact, he literally had hammered a hole in his head, despite the frequently changed bandages and the totally professional care he was receiving. These two images have never left me. In fact to a point they still haunt me.
There were also people in the hospital at that time, who today would be living within society in some form of sheltered community. One in particular who interested me was Max (not his name). Max had an accent which would not be out of place in a Guards regiment’s officers’ mess. His family provided him with suits from Austin-Reade – no hospital hand outs for Max. He also was an accomplished pianist. He was prepared for confirmation by the rector and became a regular communicant. One day I met him coming out of the staff education centre. He told me he was just coming from helping Jimmy with his work – Jimmy having been rightly promoted to be the staff tutor for the hospital.
I happened to meet Jimmy that day and told him about my meeting with Max and said that I had difficulties in coming to terms with Max because one moment he would be chatting up a woman or wolf-whistling at one, and the same day be discovered as the subservient participant in a homosexual act.
Jimmy’s catch cry was, “Help us all”. And I still hear him saying “Help us all, Mr McKelvey”, before he took me in to the education centre and showed me a couple of transparencies of Max. They showed that he had a female distribution of hair on his body. He had a penis but no testicles. This was my deep-ending into the world of genetics, never mind the horrors of genetics gone wry which I was encountering daily in many of the other patients.
I returned to this area some time later when I had the privilege of completing a doctor of ministry programme in the USA. My tutor for this extremely intensive period of study was Rev Prof Timothy Sedgwick, who is now the academic dean of Virginia Theological Seminary, but then was at Seabury-Western in Evanston, near Chicago. Tim was also then advising both the Lutheran and Episcopal Churches at national level on the issue of sexuality. In the process I was involved in, I worked my way through the 10,000+ pages of set reading and wrote my integrative paper – and that was before being permitted to join the intensive course of seminars. Most of my classmates were clergy with masters in divinity with a specialism in counseling and were working in church owned clinics and hospitals. They were seeking further professional qualification in the only christian seminary accredited by the US national professional association in counseling and therapy. So kosher it was – academically!
I readily admit I had difficulties with getting my head round the chemistry which was referred to. But I know enough to know that the DNA – the genetic soup – of the overwhelming majority of people is fixed and to state the obvious, with that our sexuality.
In one’s workaday theology one has to encompass the fact that “God made” the youngster with twisted limbs, the youngster who wanted to hammer the hole in his head, and nice people like Max who are totally mixed-up genetically. Where is God in all this – God the creator? Is God in the cell – the basic unit of life?
The question for me is wider than simply DNA, genetics or sexuality. It is a question about the very basis of creation and procreation itself, and where God is in the process. Does God get things wrong? Do we simply write off those people whom I met in that hospital as some form of God-given genetic deficit?
Or do we accept that things are as God made them? That God is in the gene, the DNA and the sexuality?
I wish people would spend only one tenth of the time they spend getting het up about sexuality and look at the other closely related issues in genetics and the impact they too have on peoples’ lives.
I have never heard of clergy getting together to concentrate on the issue of Downes’ Syndrome, epilepsy, or other other such challenges which many families and individuals face daily. I have never heard clergy in Ireland discuss whether or not God is in the very cells of the otherwise unwanted cancerous tumour. After all is the cell not meant to be the most basic form of life? And is all life not given by God?
What is there about sex and religion? And what is there about sex and religion that seems to dominate the theological thinking and pre-occupy people like Carey, Ali and Benn? Is it a way of avoiding recognition of the tougher issues in the same area where casting out demons is about as close as it gets biblically to the people I met fifty years ago in that wonderful facility in my home parish?
However, the one redeeming feature I saw there was in certain members of the nursing staff there, many of whom were church people from all denominations. I saw in their dedication to their work God’s love being demonstrated on a daily basis.
A few months working there maybe just might challenge the “gender-benders’” theology. But maybe not. I have often thought if the Titanic had been built with bulkheads like those which some decent folk have in their brains separating theology and reality, it wouldn’t have sunk!
Houston McKelvey
* Bishop Ken Clarke of Kilmore and Dermot O’Callaghan are signatories according to an England base web site