God be praised

Well glory be to God for dappled things. The sacrament of holy matrimony is something we can all be proud of in the good old Real Church of England, since many of our wedding solemnities are carried out with a certain gravitas and a certain bearing, replete with those fine and noble sentiments say in the wedding rites of Charles and Camilla at Windsor Chapel. With my body I thee worship. Like our proud posh public schools to China in these last few years, it is something we can export to other churches and faiths, even the enormously gifted Auntie Overseas, the Catholics of the old christian empire in Roma Eterna. Yes they have much to learn from us; our experience, our delicacy, our fine words, our elegant phraseology, in sum our whole demeanour as ministers in God's holy sanctuary, of enormous and grave respect toward any couple that falls in love and comes to us for the blessing of a priest or priestess - benedictio sacerdotalis. And why should we not also accord this grave respect to young gay couples? After all, Jesus like the Buenos Aires Bergoglio was enormously kind to young call girls and rent boys in the Graeco-roman empire all around Israel. His early faith gripped the imagination of the whole empire by not judging those of the temples of ISIS, as long as they undertook no longer to practise as temple prostitutes of porneia - the true meaning of the term rather than the later christian narrow reformation concept of simple before-marriage fornication. Oh yes it is time for a little latitude for young gay couples - and why should they not experience the salvation that Jesus accorded and extended to those couples who set temple prostitution behind themselves and embraced love at first sight with a single chosen belle or ball? Time to be open as a church, time to die to old fashioned middle-class and upper class attitudes that belong more to Hardy's Tess than to real on-the-streets industrial urban christianity.