One more for the road.

Eve Tushnet posts a sort of summation of day two of the Gay in Christ colloquium...

I'm told there were about 75 people in attendance - which may explain the lack of coverage.  I seriously thought there would be a bigger crowd.  One friend told me he believed a key element in the conference might be summed up in this phrase,  "rehabilitating the Church's concept of 'eros'".  Eve Tushnet would probably disagree - she concluded her post on day 2 saying:

Overall: I initially walked away thinking we’d advanced the ball a lot on pastoral care, but very little on theology. Having mulled and discussed things a little, I’m less negative about our attempts to trace an orthodox Catholic theology which isn’t anti-gay. And anyway the more creatively, personally, and humbly we approach pastoral care, the more likely we are to understand the theology, since we understand the faith by living it. - Eve Tushnet

I think I had to be there in order to comment on the speakers.

It's a strange life they've chosen.

Gay-celibacy as a vocation?  I see it as a state in life.  Celibacy - not gay.  Gay is a condition.

That said, imagine getting up every day, and going to bed at night saying to yourself, "I'm gay", or "I'm lonely", or "I'm misunderstood"?  I think the focus is 'off'.

I found it interesting that the only religious speaker there brought up L'Arche - a community for disabled persons founded by Jean Vanier.  I love Jean Vanier very much - his spirituality is pure Gospel, deeply Catholic.  It is very much like today's Gospel, where the servants go out into the hedgerows and byways to collect the blind and the crippled to come into the Church.  It is also a very Franciscan concept - as in Pope Francis.  I get that.  That's what the Christian life is.  It's like Madeleine Delbrel, who would be a very good prototype for any effort in evangelization of gay people, BTW.

I still don't get the Spiritual Friendship - Gay in Christ stuff.  Unless it really is about disability... Nah!  They definitely don't think so.

Good patrons for these folks would be Madeleine Delbrel, Dorothy Day, and Jean Vanier - as well as Therese of Lisieux.  I like this thought from the life of Therese:

"To help me accept a humiliation, she once confided to me: 'If I had not been accepted in Carmel, I would have entered a Refuge (for fallen women) and lived out my days there, unknown and despised among the poor penitents. I would have been happy to be taken as one of them, and would have become an apostle among them, telling them what I thought of God's mercy.'" - Therese By Those Who Knew Her

That I get.