Saturday 20 February 2021

The Peacock 77

 "What was your dad's position on same-sex marriage?"

"I'm not sure if he ever completely resolved it for himself.  For a while he seemed to side with the old guard at St. John's, and together they resisted the move the Anglican Church was taking towards validating same-sex marriage.  I was not happy about what he was doing, but I was afraid of raising the subject with him, Kenny had already been dead for six years, and on several occasions I thought of invoking his memory in order to persuade dad to carefully rethink what he was doing but I always felt  really nervous about coming out to my dad, especially by accident. We were both very careful to not talk about it.  In the meantime, things were getting acrimonious.  The bishop ordered all the parishes in the diocese to comply with offering and upholding same sex blessings.   St. John's was one of six rebel holdouts.  They had to lock them out of the church, and everyone was talking to their lawyers.  Yes, I know, such Christian love."

"We even heard about it in Switzerland", Carl says.  

"The upshot was that we were forced to leave St. John's.  With other rebel parishes we formed a new coalition called the Anglican Network, and since no bishop in Canada or the US wanted to touch us with a barge pole, we were taken under the wing of a bishop in Argentina."

"We also heard about that."

"It was only a couple of weeks later when he actually came to himself.  One morning at breakfast, I told him that I had just had a dream about Kenny.  It turns out, that so did Dad.  It was a very simple dream.  We both saw him, at the same time, looking very sad, very indignant, almost ready to scold us.  That same day, Dad resigned from the rebels, and returned, crestfallen and repentant, to St. John's, now fully under the complete control of Bishop Michael..."

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