The homosexuality debate – a proxy (cultural) war?

You know the idea of a proxy war: America and Russia don’t fight directly, but support opposing sides in a local conflict, say Vietnam or Afghanistan.

I can’t help feeling that the ‘battle’ around homosexuality is basically a similar phenomenon. It is rather convenient field for a proxy battle between two opposing cultural forces. And just as proxy warriors show scant concern for those whose territory they borrow as a battlefield, so the fighters show pretty scant pastoral concern for those caught up in the gay world. Indeed if the gay phenomenon stopped tomorrow, they would have to go and look for another area into which to confront themselves. Certainly the amount of firepower – as it was at a conference I have just returned from ­– seems out of all proportion to the size of the phenomenon. It is overkill several times over.

Finesse

I am reading ‘Counsels from the Holy Mountain’, by Elder Ephraim, former Abbot of the Monastery of Philotheou on Mount Athos – they give it me as a gift when I visited Philotheou seven years ago with my son Ben.

Solid stuff. But there is one thing which irks me here, and in other Orthodox spiritual writing also: no sense of beauty comes across, no finesse.

I compare this with the 13th (??) century Welsh poem, ‘The Loves of Taliesin’, which an English Anglican friend sent me this week:

   “The beauty of virtue in doing penance for excess
    Beautiful too that God shall save me…..
    The beauty of a faithful priest in his church, ...
    The beauty of a strong parish led by God…”

This sense of beauty, of finesse, of κаλоς, which is part in particular of the Celtic tradition, remains important to me, and, yes I fear losing it in certain parts of the Orthodox world.

I remember the words of the late Dom Paul Grammont, my abbot when I was a Roman Catholic novice 30 years ago, who once said to me of very strict women’s monasteries that where the life is too harsh and regimented, people can lose something, a certain finesse, a certain humanity”.  I think he was right…..