The Promise of Freedom
Address on IDAHOT Day
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
17th May 2015
I am blessed to be in your presence today – the Spirit of the God who is
Love moves within and through each of you and touches my heart on this
day, the day we gather in communion with others throughout Ireland and
the world to express our resistance to the fear of lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender people. I wish to thank Dean Dermot Dunne for his
gracious invitation and express my appreciation as well to Reverend
Stella Jones. And what a great personal pleasure it is to share this service
with my former Trinity College colleague, Reverend Ginnie Kennerley.
I am also blessed because you are a church, a people who create space for
a diversity of views on the question of marriage equality and this sends a
positive message not only to LGBT people but to other religious
denominations and traditions as they debate this issue, and struggle with
conflicting deeply held views and beliefs. I want to begin by saying I
respect the struggle, I respect those who hold opposing views from my
own, and I am affirmed by your invitation and welcome. A very special
acknowledgment to the work of Changing Attitude Ireland and Faith in
Marriage Equality.
I have titled my address ‘The Promise of Freedom’ because the God ‘who
heals those who are broken in heart’ as the psalmist says, is the same God
who offers the promise of freedom for those who are oppressed as Luke
tells us.
As one raised within the Catholic tradition of the Christian religion I still
believe that the powerful interplay between faith and reason is critical for
the human journey towards the promise of freedom – found, I still think,
in ‘the promised land’. Though my faith or set of beliefs have changed
radically over the course of my lifetime I carry always a deep sense that
I—and all humans—are created related. I first came across this
reasonable interpretation of the meaning of faith within the ‘I-Thou’
theology of the great Jewish thinker Martin Buber. We are created
related, Buber said, related to the divine Thou, and through this ‘Thou’
essentially related to one another.
Just imagine now, if this were really true: that it is the core of human
identity to be essentially related to every other human in this country and
throughout our planet. It would be reasonable then to care for and to be
concerned about not only our own individual desires, hopes, dreams and
struggles but also those of every other. Such a profound belief or way of
viewing humanity, I think, would enable significantly the dismantling of
institutionalized homophobia, transphobia and biphobia, and allow the
promise of freedom for all to surface.
It is this relational character of reality—now described and analysed at
length within the new sciences such as quantum physics as much as it is
within the contemporary interpretations of world religions such as
Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism—it is this relational character of
reality that also provides clues to the meaning of ‘promised land’ and a
life of freedom for everyone. The ‘Land’ that I and many other human
rights activists seek is a set of laws, systems, social and environmental
conditions that enable all people to be free to be the human they were
born to be.
We are motivated to seek this land, to seek this realm or ecology of
justice and peace, because we care about those who are like us and those
who are different from us, those who are family and those who reside
outside of familial circles, those who are friends and those whose paths
we would not necessarily cross unless we stepped outside of our given
social circles and familiar neighborhoods.
We care in these ways because we believe in something beyond ourselves,
because we believe that meaning and happiness in our lives ought not to
be at the expense of any other and indeed because meaning and happiness
is more easily found when we honour a sense of social connectedness that
necessarily drives us towards the work of unmaking laws and conditions
and systems that keep others down and unfree. The ‘Promised Land’ is
decidedly not a metaphor for the realization of dreams of a single
individual and her or his family – it is instead a beacon for a social order
where no one has to live on the margins because the resources of the
centre are shared and because those who make up minorities—whether
they are minorities of race, religion, disability or sexual identity—
experience the same essential dignity of those who make up the
majorities.
And the genuine experience of dignity is a quintessential
ingredient for the empowerment of every human to lead the life they wish
to choose. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, ‘Whenever men and
women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a
man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.’
As a young lesbian, I did not always carry this genuine experience of
dignity. Instead I often felt shame – shame for my feelings, shame for
my actions, shame for who I was discovering myself to be. I wonder now
is that a similar feeling of shame to those in this country who are out of
work, to those who have left school early, to those in prison, to those who
beg on our streets. What I do know is that shame does bend your back.
And what I do know is that shame is never generated from within; it
develops as others who are not like you or others who possess more
resources/abilities than you suspect that your difference is deviant or treat
you as inferior because you do not have what they have. It develops
when you run up against laws and systems – fashioned by religious
and/or state leaders—that keep you outside the mainstream of social,
cultural and economic opportunity or human worth/iness.
All of us take the journey of trying to figure out who we are. The firing
of our identity is no doubt one of the greatest projects of our lives. But it
is a weighty and significant undertaking I think, not simply for ourselves
and those closest to us. It is also an adventure that holds the power to
make the world a better place – for ourselves, for everyone. We become
who we are within the social, cultural and economic context of our lives.
That context fashions who we are up to a point, it defines what it means
to be normal in particular ways. But that context can be changed – by
our choices, our courage, our imagination. That context can be changed
for the better by our resilience and be how we make love in our world.
As change-makers we have the power to re-define the meaning of normal,
and to bring that re-defined meaning into our social and cultural
institutions, including the institution of civil marriage.
ENDS