December 17, 2005
Integers
It fell to my favor the other evening to celebrate Eucharist and visit some with the Integers — that’s what Integrity calls its members — down and over at Calvary Church in Memphis, the home of The Blues. We remembered St Margaret, Queen of Scotland, her eight progeny, her short span of life, and how she moved the Brits and the Scots into a more likely relationship, for a while, at least.
We got to dine and talk a bit afterwards. I recalled as we did that how moved I am that their purpose is to implement a “justice ministry” to the church maybe to do for us what Margaret did for those two unfriendly countries. We’re already one, holy, apostolic, and catholic, but mostly on paper filed off in a Nicene theological vault somewhere. At that meeting last evening, though, justice, the idea, poured out like Amos’s waters. And we can never have enough of that.
Integrity gets kicked around a lot by those of us who just can’t wrap our minds around the way God imagines us, that is, the many ways being human turns out to be. We get so religious that we end up trying to be more spiritual than God, and we seem to forget that our vocation is rather otherwise to be human, ourselves. We’re already as spiritual as God wants us to be or else God wouldn’t have settled that in our creation.
Integrity understands itself as a “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender justice ministry to the Episcopal Church.” Not for, not from, not by, but to. Heaven knows, we need justice now like we’ve never needed it before, let alone, the rarity of it in the rest of creation. Why does anybody have any trouble figuring that out and welcoming it with open arms?