"'T'aint Nobody's Business, But ... "

It's dark when we meet, on the other side of town. Away from the street lamps, we carefully take separate routes to our rendezvous.

It's in a downtown cafe, softly lit for "intimacy," near the corner of a well-worn street in the older part of town. Our eyes meet, we smile, and we think of the passion about to issue forth.

I bring my latest poems of love. She brings her baby and her husband.  A bunch of other people are there waiting for us.

Say, wha'?

It's Open-Mic Night at the Gran Cru Cafe+! We join all our friends to share our scars and our stories in the language of verse. Our bag is a blend of many varieties, many experiences, many styles. We poets have our love of life, and we express our passion in words that make their own rules.

What's odd about all this is, that's about the only place we ever meet, she and I and this group of language-lovers. Our backgrounds are frequently in opposition to each other in a town filled with paradox. The crosscurrents and ironies of life are met in sharing verse -- nothing else like it in the world. ("What is the color of a peace conference?" a crayon-wielding Linus asks his dumbstruck sister, Lucy.)

What's really odd is that we get along so well, she and I. On another day of the week, we attend church -- in the same town! The same denomination! We have a lot in common, right?

Wrong. I probably would not set foot in her church, unless I had a really good reason. Hell might well freeze over before she might set foot in mine.

Her church endorses (I think "endorse" is apropos -- I could be wrong) a form of sacrament mine adamantly opposes. A form of the sacrament of marriage. More precisely, just who can marry whom. Even more precisely, what gender of who can marry what gender of whom. With the public side of the private life of the person doing the marrying mixed in.

When I started this live journal, I made myself a promise I would not use it as an editorial soapbox. I could express my opinion, but I would not try to convince anyone else of it.

I'm going to stick to that tonight. You have the right to your stance on these matters, and I have mine. The reason I'm going on about this is that the titular head of our denomination (called a "communion") met this week with members of its American wing to discuss the issue one-on-one. I don't know what came out of it. I do know this: I do not want a split. Our denomination -- regardless of its many disagreements -- has a certain "take" on Christianity, one that I found friendly to me from the first minutes of attending my first service at one of its churches. I've since then found friends within the traditional form of that denomination, and it has made all the difference in my life since that first day.

It seems to this layman that the current disagreement falls over some fairly fine points of theology (based on variants in certain forms of Biblical exegesis) -- but our two sides hold firm in their viewpoints over that, because both sides feel the issue involved is very important. I agree that it is. I just hope something can be worked out that we can all live with.

I would hate for the argument to one day ruin my rendezvous.

+name changed to protect the atmosphere of my post


LJ orig.: Sept. 21, 2007