Looking for a New Church Community (or not)

It has been a month and half since I wrote to the pastor of my church advising him that due to the unrepentant homophobia of the archdiocesan newspaper, a medium which represents the views of the archdiocese, I could no longer be an active member of the parish. I have never received a reply to that e-mail.

Since that time I have not attended any other church, but I have been feeling more and more that I need to find a new church community.

Prior to my departure from my own Catholic parish, I attended Mass a few times at the Old Catholic church located in my neighbourhood, and although I did not feel too comfortable with the liturgy there, I know I should go back and give it a chance. The Old Catholic Church is absolutely inclusive, and I was certainly warmly received by the clergy in the little church near my house.

I have also been looking at the Anglican Church—the Anglican Church of Canada, not the ANIC as described in an earlier post. There is St. James, which is located in the heart of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, a district notorious for its drug dealers and users, prostitutes and derelicts, and for its occasional violence. From what little can be seen on its web site, the church itself appears to be gorgeous. One of the big draws for me is that St. James is both High Anglican and inclusive. High Anglican means that liturgically it is close to Roman Catholicism. Inclusive means that until recently the assistant priest at St. James was an openly gay young man from Hong Kong. The priest was recently made rector of a parish in a seaside community near Vancouver, where he and his partner were warmly welcomed by the parishioners. St. James is twenty-minute bus ride from my home.


There are other Anglican churches I could attend, including Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver, which, like St. James, has Mass every day, and gay-friendly St. Paul’s in Vancouver’s West End. Attending Mass or Holy Communion at these churches would entail a longer bus trip.


So why haven’t I got myself dressed up and onto the bus and made my way to St. James? For sure, it is partly just laziness. The Catholic church I formerly attended was a ten-minute walk from home or a two-minute drive with easy parking around the church. The larger reason is more complicated. I miss my church—my Catholic church. Despite my beefs with the hierarchy and my cafeteria-style faith, the peace and comfort that I felt in church when I returned four years ago never left me. I could not recapture those feelings in the Old Catholic Church and I guess that I am afraid they won’t be there for me in the Anglican Church either.

There are many in the Catholic blogosphere who are unhappy with the Roman Catholic Church because of the outrageous and un-Christ-like actions of members of the ecclesial hierarchy and the intransigent stance of the Church on issues that affect so many of its members. Yet these thoughtful people seem to be unable to leave the Church and join another denomination, regardless of how inclusive the alternative community might be.

I think again of the character of Father David Telemond in The Shoes of the Fisherman, whose words of frustration about the Church I have quoted before: “I hate her! And still I can’t leave her. I love her, and still I cannot live in her in peace.”

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"Monument" by iBjorn

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Generous Orthodoxy

From Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian:

A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, controlling, or critical orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble; it doesn't claim too much; it admits it walks with a limp. It doesn't consider orthodoxy the exclusive domain of prose scholars (theologians) alone but, like Chesterton, welcomes the poets, the mystics, and even those who choose to say very little or to remain silent, including the disillusioned and the doubters. Their silence speaks eloquently of the majesty of God that goes beyond all human articulation. And it welcomes the activists, the humanitarians, the brave and courageous and compassionate, because their actions speak volumes about God that could never be captured in a text, a sermon, an outline, or even a poem.

From Chapter 9, "Why I am a Mystical/Poetic"

The Bible tells me so. Oh, really?

In his most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren states that “for a new kind of Christianity to emerge, we need a new approach to the Bible.” He claims that most Christians treat the Bible as a kind of constitution; in other words, it is a set of immutable laws that Christians are expected to live by. At the core of this constitutional metaphor is the idea of authority—not so much the authority of the Bible itself but “the authority of the people interpreting the Bible.” McLaren cites a pre-Civil War novel as an extreme example of where this exploitation of the Bible-as-constitution metaphor can border on the extreme.

Nellie Norton was a novel to celebrate the greatness of slavery, and the subtitle was basically something like this: “How the Bible is a pro-slavery Bible and God is a pro-slavery God." Now, that turns your stomach to hear that now but we haven’t had any scrutiny about the way we read the Bible. We’re still using it the same way.

We are indeed still using the Bible the same way. In fact, many claim today that the Bible is an anti-gay Bible and God is an anti-gay God.

For the Bible Tells Me So is a wonderful documentary that came out a few years ago and made the rounds of the film festivals; I’m not sure whether it ever found its way into general release. The film is about Christian parents with gay children.

The documentary looks at five families, including Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop elected in the Episcopal Church, and his parents, and former U.S. presidential candidate Richard Gephardt and his wife and their lesbian daughter Chrissy. In the film we learn of the struggle of the parents to come to terms, in the context of their own religious upbringing and beliefs, with the sexual orientation of their children and with their own prejudices and their fears for their children’s safety and well-being. The film also examines the fears and misgivings faced by gay and lesbian children in religious families as they hear the condemnations of homosexuality in their churches and as they consider coming out to their parents.

The Bible is a major character in this documentary as it is quoted by pastors and laypeople alike in order to condemn homosexuality and homosexuals. There are numerous clips of preachers railing against homosexuality; the most common word that is used against it is “abomination.” One preacher, Jimmy Swaggart, says to his congregation: “I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. If one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.” He goes on to say—with no awareness of the irony of his statement—that “God calls homosexuality an abomination. It’s an abomination! It’s an abomination!”

A parent of a lesbian daughter and husband of a Christian minister says, “I’ve learned enough about the Bible now to understand God. I understand how God works, how Jesus works.” A little later, when talking about his two children, he has this to say: “When my kids were growing up, I said, ‘God, please don’t let my son grow up to be a faggot and my daughter a slut’. And he did not…he did not do that. He reversed it (laughs).”

Gene Robinson, who was a model Christian boy in his childhood church, says, “From ten to eleven on Sunday morning everyone was in Sunday school class, [which] was always and only focused on the Bible. So we were absolutely steeped in scripture.” From the seventh grade, Robinson knew that he was different from the other boys his age and he immediately realized that he must keep this difference to himself. “I was always familiar with what the Bible said: Anyone who is thought to be ‘that way’ was an abomination before God.”

All of the stories in For the Bible Tells Me So are compelling. The senior Robinsons, southerners and members their whole lives (they are in their late seventies when the film is shot) of the Church of the Disciples of Christ, deeply and unconditionally love their son. The Gephardts are willing to forego Richard’s quest for the presidency if their daughter feels the campaign—and Gephardt believes her being a lesbian will be an issue—is in any way going to be painful for her.

For me, the most powerful story in the film is that of Mary Lou Wallner and her daughter Anna. Mary Lou was raised in a family of fundamentalist believers and attended “a conservative, Bible-believing church” every Sunday of her childhood and her adult life. In her Christian community, “everything in the Bible was taken literally and there were rules about everything.”

The church that Mary Lou was attending taught that homosexuality was a sin—and not just a sin but the sin of all sins. “I didn’t really study the Bible at all about [homosexuality], but I did pull out those passages and read them and certainly used them against Anna, later.”

When she was away at college, Anna wrote to her mother and told her that she was gay. Mary Lou reacted to this news by first going to the bathroom and throwing up and “then just going completely underground, not telling anybody and being ashamed and embarrassed.” She wrote her daughter back and told her “some things…that were not very loving.”

Undoubtedly the most difficult part of your letter is the gay thing. I will never accept that in you. I feel it’s a terrible waste, besides being spiritually and morally wrong. For a reason I don’t quite fathom I have a harder time dealing with that issue than almost anything in the world. I do and will continue to love you, but I will always hate that.

She thought her daughter’s sexuality was a choice and that “she needed to just get her act together and stop this.”

The letter caused an irreparable break between daughter and mother. Ten months later, before there could be any reconciliation, Mary Lou’s daughter took her own life by hanging herself from the bar in her bedroom closet.

The death of her daughter led Mary Lou to question what she had been taught by her church—that being gay was a choice, for example—and to begin to research the subject of homosexuality for herself. What she learned was this: “…instead of taking the Bible literally, I have to take it in the context and culture of the day in which it was written.” She has since become an activist for the advancement of gay rights and for the understanding of gay and lesbian people by the church.

Jorge Valencia of the Trevor Project Suicide Hotline says:

It’s estimated that every five hours an LGBT teen takes his life, and for every teen that takes his or her own life, there are twenty more who try. One of the top five reasons why teenagers call us is for religious reasons. They’re feeling there isn’t a place for them and God.

Reverend Jimmy Creech of Faith in America says:

The church, because of its teachings that homosexuality is sinful, is wrong, is a perversion, has created the climate in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered children growing up feel very much in conflict with the world in which they live. It really shapes their thinking so that they hate themselves, so that they internalize this judgment and condemnation.

In The Bible Tells Me So, a number of clergy members, including biblical scholars like Reverend Peter J. Gomes of Harvard Divinity School, stress the wisdom and importance of reading the Bible in the context of the period and culture in which it was written. They point out, for example, that the famous prohibition against homosexuality in Leviticus—“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood is upon them”—does not exist in isolation from other abominations: eating shrimp, planting two different seeds in the same hole, comingling crops, eating a rabbit, and so on.

Moreover, biblical scholarship has determined that in the Hebrew Bible the word abomination “is always used to address a ritual wrong. It never is used to refer to something innately immoral. Eating pork was not innately immoral for a Jew, but it was an abomination because it was a violation of a ritual requirement.”

It is not a stretch to say that selective reading of the Bible, as a constitution, led to the tragic death of Mary Lou Wallner’s daughter and has led to the deaths of many other young people. It has also resulted in closeted lives of fear, self-loathing, and confusion for countless numbers of LGBT teenagers who do not take their own lives. In this age of information, where the truth of both scripture and homosexuality are readily available, the choice of pastors and laypersons to not only remain ignorant but to preach in ignorance is, in the sense of the word as they so like to use it, an abomination.

In A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren suggests an alternative metaphor for the Bible; his suggestion is that we think of the Bible as a library, which is “a collection of documents.” His rationale for the use of this metaphor is that “in a good library you want to present all sides of an issue. A good library preserves key arguments; a good constitution eliminates all arguments.”

A library is a sacred place of ideas. For every argument you find there, you will find a counter-argument, made with the same intelligence, with the same love for truth as the first. This interplay of ideas promotes growth—spiritual, intellectual, and emotional. If we can see the Bible as a library rather than as a constitution, Christian churches and Christian families might begin to have respectful and loving conversations that include the LGBT members of those churches and those families and that allow them to be who they are.


If you have not seen The Bible Tells Me So, I highly recommend it. You can watch it on YouTube in nine parts. Here is the first:

The central paradox of the religious life: Karen Armstrong

I have just started reading Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History. I love the way in which, in the Preface to the book, she describes "the central paradox of the religious life":

The external history of a religious tradition often seems divorced from the raison d'etre of faith. The spiritual quest is an interior journey; it is a psychic rather than a political drama. It is preoccupied with liturgy, doctrine, contemplative disciplines and an exploration of the heart, not with the clash of current events. Religions certainly have a life outside the soul. Their leaders have to contend with the state and affairs of the world, and often relish doing so. They fight with members of other faiths who seem to challenge their claim to a monopoly of absolute truth; they persecute their coreligionists for interpreting a tradition differently or for holding heterodox beliefs. Very often priests, rabbis, imams and shamans are just as consumed by worldly ambition as regular politicians. But all this is generally seen as an abuse of a sacred ideal. These power struggles are not what religion is really about, but an unworthy distraction from the life of the spirit, which is conducted far from the madding crowd, unseen, silent and unobtrusive. Indeed, in many faiths, monks and mystics lock themselves away from the world, since the clamour and strife of history is regarded as incompatible with a truly religious life.

In the Hindu tradition, history is dismissed as evanescent, unimportant and insubstantial. The philosophers of ancient Greece were concerned with the eternal laws underlying the flux of external events, which could be of no real interest to a serious thinker. In the gospels, Jesus often went out of his way to explain to his followers that his Kingdom was not of this world, but could only be found within the believer. The Kingdom would not arrive with a great political fanfare, but would develop as quietly and imperceptibly as a germinating mustard-seed. In the modern West, we have made a point of separating religion from politics; this secularization was originally seen by the philosophes of the Enlightenment as a means of liberating religion from the corruption of state affairs, and allowing it to become more truly itself.

But however spiritual their aspirations, religious people have to seek God or the sacred in this world. They often feel that they have a duty to bring their ideals to bear upon society. Even if they lock themselves away, they are inescapably men and women of their time and are affected by what goes on outside the monastery, although they do not fully realize this. Wars, plagues, famines, economic recession and the internal politics of their nation will intrude upon their cloistered existence and qualify their religious vision. Indeed, the tragedies of history often goad people into the spiritual quest, in order to find some ultimate meaning in what often seems to be a succession of random, arbitrary and dispiriting incidents. There is a symbiotic relationship between history and religion, therefore. It is, as the Buddha remarked, our perception that existence is awry that forces us to find an alternative which will prevent us from falling into despair.

Perhaps the central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendence, a dimension of existence that goes beyond our mundane lives, but that human beings can only experience this transcendent reality in earthly, physical phenomena. People have sensed the divine in rocks, mountains, temple buildings, law codes, written texts, or in other men or women. We never experience transcendence directly: our ecstasy is always "earthed," enshrined in something or someone here below. Religious people are trained to look beneath the unpromising surface to find the sacred within it. They have to use their creative imaginations. Jean-Paul Sartre defined the imagination as the ability to think of what is not present. Human beings are religious creatures because they are imaginative; they are so constituted that they are compelled to search for hidden meaning and to achieve an ecstasy that makes them feel fully alive. Each tradition encourages the faithful to focus their attention on an earthly symbol that is peculiarly its own, and to teach themselves to see the divine in it.

Of course the book is about Islam and the main purpose of the Preface is to introduce the uniquely political nature of Islam:

Muslims developed their own rituals, mysticism, philosophy, doctrines, sacred texts, laws and shrines like everybody else. But all these religious pursuits sprang directly from the Muslims' frequently anguished contemplation of the political current affairs of Islamic society.

Nevertheless, Christians and other people of religious faith who read this brief Preface can appreciate how perceptively Armstrong captures and how clearly she presents the dilemma of the spiritual quest.

The Jesus of the Oppressed

In his book A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren, one of the founding fathers of the emerging church movement, writes that in his life as a Christian he has encountered and gotten to know several different Jesuses:

For conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics, then, Jesus saves individuals through the cross and resurrection; for Eastern Orthodox followers, Jesus saves the world through the incarnation ; for liberal Protestants and Anabaptists, Jesus saves through his teaching and example. But in addition, Anabaptists uniquely emphasize Jesus' role in connecting and leading a community of disciples. For them the church is not at heart an institution...with hierarchies and policies, headquarters, and bureaucracy. Above all, the church is a continuation and extension of the original band of disciples, a group of people learning the ways of Jesus as a voluntary community.

There is one more Jesus that McLaren has met, a man that is in many ways closer to the Jesus of the Bible and that informs the beliefs and practices of many Christians of the emergent church: "the Jesus of liberation theology."

In my readings and travels (especially in Latin America), I have been exposed to many committed Christians who believe that Marxism and Communism were filling the gap that should have been filled by Christians--Christians who understood the revolutionary social and political implications of the teaching and examples of Jesus, whose gospel was good news to the poor along with a challenge toward generosity for the rich.

Because Christians failed to preach and practice this dimension of the gospel, secular movements arose to fill the gap. Sadly, because these secular movements had ideology without truly spiritual good news, the poor received from these secular movements yet another disappointment and yet another delay in experiencing true liberation. Sadly, because these secular movements often preached that violence could overcome violence, even if they had succeeded in liberating the poor from poverty, they could never have liberated the poor from violence. Nonviolent liberation theology sought to rediscover the Jesus who is the hero to the poor and oppressed, and the prophet who bravely confronts the establishments of power and privilege.

....

The Jesus of liberation theology, firmly rooted in the struggles of the first century, inspires Christians to continue his work and mission in all centuries throughout history, believing that history is exactly the venue into which God's kingdom comes and in which God's will can increasingly be done.

The Princes of the Catholic Church would do well at this time to study and emulate the example of the thoughtful McLaren, along with others in the emerging church movement (oh, and not to mention Jesus), and turn their attention away from summary judgments and acts of excommunication that make them appear pathetically out of touch with the reality of Christian lives and direct it to the suffering poor and oppressed of their own countries and of countries where poverty and suffering of Christians and non-Christians alike is the main feature of life.

And if, for whatever supposedly valid theological reason, the term "liberation theology" is anathema to "true Catholic teaching," then let's, for Jesus' sake, call it something else.

How about "love"?

The Golfing Nun

A nun walks into Mother Superior's office and plunks down into a chair. She lets out a sigh heavy with frustration.

'What troubles you, Sister?' asked the Mother Superior. 'I thought this was the day you spent with your family.'

'It was,' sighed the Sister. 'And I went to play golf with my brother. We try to play golf as often as we can. You know I was quite a talented golfer before I devoted my life to Christ.'

'I seem to recall that,' the Mother Superior agreed. 'So I take it your day of recreation was not relaxing?'

'Far from it,' snorted the Sister. 'In fact, I even took the Lord's name in vain today!'

'Goodness, Sister!' gasped the Mother Superior, astonished. 'You must tell me all about it!'

'Well, we were on the fifth tee...and this hole is a monster, Mother -540 yard Par 5, with a nasty dogleg right and a hidden green...and I hit the drive of my life. I creamed it. The sweetest swing I ever made. And it's flying straight and true, right along the line I wanted...and it hits a bird in mid-flight !'

'Oh my!' commiserated the Mother. 'How unfortunate! But surely that didn't make you blaspheme, Sister!'

'No, that wasn't it,' admitted Sister. 'While I was still trying to fathom what had happened, this squirrel runs out of the woods, grabs my ball and runs off down the fairway!'

'Oh, that would have made me blaspheme!' sympathized the Mother.

'But I didn't, Mother!' sobbed the Sister. 'And I was so proud of myself! And while I was pondering whether this was a sign from God, this hawk swoops out of the sky and grabs the squirrel and flies off, with my ball still clutched in his paws!'

'So that's when you cursed,' said the Mother with a knowing smile.

'Nope, that wasn't it either,' cried the Sister, anguished, 'because as the hawk started to fly out of sight, the squirrel started struggling, and the hawk dropped him right there on the green, and the ball popped out of his paws and rolled to about 18 inches from the cup!'

Mother Superior sat back in her chair, folded her arms across her chest, fixed the Sister with a baleful stare and said...

'You missed the fucking putt, didn't you?'

Where is the Good News?

We are often told that we need to hear the “good news” of the gospel. After looking at The New York Times online this morning, I believe we need this good news more than ever.

Here are some of the headlines and by-lines we are starting our day with:

“Tea Party Pick Causes Uproar on Civil Rights”
Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Kentucky, suggested that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was too broad.

“Padded Pensions Add to New York Fiscal Woes”
Errors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking are piling hidden costs onto New York’s pension system.

“Asian Stocks Drop Sharply after Big Fall in U.S. Markets”
Uncertainty over sovereign debt, financial regulation and a halting economic recovery drove markets down across Asia on Friday.

“Fed Governor Says U.S. Could Feel Europe’s Pain”
Daniel K. Tarullo, a Federal Reserve governor, laid out for a House panel how Europe’s debt problems could cross the Atlantic.

There’s often bad news in Sports:

“Rays 8, Yankees 6: Rays Again Dig a Hole Too Deep for the Yankees”
The Rays victory at Yankee Stadium completed a two-game sweep and doubled as a clinic of slugging (four home runs), opportunistic baserunning and robust pitching.

Entertainment and the Arts of course reflect the tone and mood of the day:

“FILM: World Events Rumble at Cannes”
At the Cannes Film Festival, directors are addressing real and often calamitous issues, like the financial crisis and religious fundamentalism.

“MOVIE REVIEW-‘SOLITARY MAN’: Yes, He’s a Jerk, but There’s Something About Ben”
In “Solitary Man,” Michael Douglas plays a liar, cynic, compulsive womanizer and all-around jerk.

But the Editorial and Op-Ed sections are where the negativity knows no bounds. Here’s a sample from today’s Op-Eds:

“Lost Decade Looming?”
America definitely isn’t Greece, but it is looking more and more like Japan. Inadequate recovery, not deficits, is the big problem.

“The Story of an Angry Voter”
The appeal of the Washington outsider will yield to familiar divisions without a viable centrist alternative.

“The Academies’ March Toward Mediocrity”
A football scandal at Annapolis illustrates how our service academies have lost their way.

These headlines tell us a great deal about our society. Now I am definitely not one of those people who believe that the world is going to hell and that we are much worse off than we were 30 years ago, 75 years ago, 150 years ago. What the newspaper is telling us—in this edition and in every edition—is that the same old sins of greed, bigotry, pride, selfishness, and disregard for those less fortunate that Jesus spoke about are still very much with us. Our sins are not new, but the seismic impact of our obsession with telling them and hearing about them has left the Richter scale.

We like disaster, we love scandal, we are addicted to conflict. While we may indignantly claim otherwise, we are all judges, critics, and gleeful spectators at the crucifixion or at the spectacle of gladiatorial combat. And it usually matters not whether the combat is personal, local, or global. What we do not recognize is our own responsibility for much of what we read in the paper or see on TV; we fail to acknowledge our own greed, our own bigotry, our own selfishness. If we were not so hungry for oil, perhaps the disaster in the Gulf might not have occurred. If we weren’t so very greedy for material goods, our economies might be more stable. If we weren’t so lustful or cynical or untruthful, maybe we wouldn’t need to make movies like “A Solitary Man” and then have critics marvel at how well Michael Douglas has learned to play a jerk.

What is wrong with good news? It takes consciousness. Living consciously means being aware—aware of the love that God has showered on us and on this earth, aware that we have been given the flowers, the trees, the blue sky, the snow on the mountaintops, dogs, cats, birds of all kinds and colours, and the beautiful beings we touch every day: our husbands, wives, coworkers, the bus driver, the Starbucks barista, the elderly man crossing the street because we have stopped to let him do so. Aware that our getting angry at the guy that cuts us off in traffic might just become tomorrow’s bad news, aware that it doesn’t really matter whether the Yankees beat the Rays because the game is beautiful no matter who wins, aware that whatever conflict is taking place in the world is a reflection of the conflicts in our own lives because all conflicts begin for the same reason: unconsciousness.

I don’t have to read The New York Times online every day (and next year they may start charging for it, so I likely won’t), or the Huffington Post or cnn.com. But at some point during the day, I am going to encounter the same negativity. And I cannot directly help the two courageous men in Malawi who were sentenced to fourteen years of hard labour in prison because they declared and physically expressed their love for each other. I can only acknowledge and try to fulfill my own purpose in life: to be conscious, to be aware.

How do I create good news in my life? By recognizing that, as Henri Nouwen says, I am the beloved child of God. By recognizing that I am not what I do, I am not what I possess, I am not what others think of me. If I am conscious of God’s love for me as expressed in every aspect of my life, whether it is the flowers in my garden, the pleasure that the food I prepare gives to others, or the ever-changing morning scenes as I walk the dog at 5 AM, that consciousness will inform my life every day and the love that I feel as a child of God will radiate outward to the people in my home, to the people behind the fish counter at Safeway, to the readers of this blog.

If I—and every one of us who calls himself or herself Christian—were to sit quietly every morning and read prayerfully the famous passage from 1 Corinthians, we would be filled with good news and protected from bad news:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”