Staying with the Wound: A Contemplative Reflection on Love, Division, and Being Gay and Staying in the Wider Anglican Church

A Personal and Prayerful Practical Contemplative Reflection from the Heart

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35 NRSVUE

There are moments in prayer when I sit in silence, heart heavy, soul raw, and I say only one word: “Why?”

Why does the Church—a place meant to embody Christ’s love—so often become the site of rejection, distortion, and division? Why so much fear and lack of love when this really mattered to Jesus. Why is it that, as a partnered gay man who loves Jesus, who seeks to follow God faithfully in the path of prayer and community and mission, with a responsible vocation in the Church, why do I still find myself regarded by many in some Anglican Churches and right now particularly in the Church of England as suspect, unorthodox, or even dangerous?

It is hard to express how exhausting it can be to live in that tension. To belong to a tradition that as a young adult new to Christianity has shaped me, formed me, and called me - and yet one that cannot fully receive me. To feel sacramentally connected to this wider Anglican body, and simultaneously vulnerable within it. And to know, heartbreakingly, that even those who love me deeply may not fully see me as rightly-ordered in the eyes of God.

One of my closest friends—someone I’ve prayed with, laughed with, shared long conversations with over cups of tea and pints of Guinness - loves me with sincerity. I do not doubt that. But he cannot reconcile my being gay, and my desire at some point be married to a man (rather than a second rate civil partnership that is not recognised in so many countries in the world), with what he reads in the Scriptures. For him, the issue is not personal hatred; it is a biblical conviction. He believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. He believes that I, however kindly and devoutly I live, am ultimately choosing to revise doctrine (not orthodox but revisionist) in a way that is unfaithful to Christian orthodoxy and undermining the doctrines of millenia.

I want to be fair to him. His position is not built on malice, but on a sincere faith. And yet, however well-intentioned, the effect is the same: I am seen and made to feel as ‘other’. I am regarded as a theological problem, and effectively as someone standing outside of the boundary of orthodoxy, even by someone who calls me a longstanding friend. This is often deeply a painful and complex place to be.

And it is not just personal. The wider Anglican Communion is, frankly, in a state of fracture. The division on sexuality and marriage has become more than theological disagreement—it has bred distrust, broken communion, and in some cases, outright hatred. Some corners of the Church have weaponized Scripture against LGBTQ+ people with cruelty and violence, and some of the extreme progressives have demonised and raged at those who have traditional understandings of marriage. Others have abandoned patient theological reflection in the rush to accommodate the culture with deep unanswered theological questions. None of this is easy. And many of us, caught in the middle, are left asking: where is Christ in all this?

For me, the only path forward is the contemplative one that takes me ever deeper into the love of God.

Contemplation doesn’t give me easy answers. It doesn’t fix the institutional mess. But it gives me a way to stay present—deeply, attentively, lovingly—in a place of pain. It teaches me how to sit with the unresolved, to remain open to grace even when trust is fragile, and to recognise the presence of God in the very place that feels most forsaken.

This is where the contemplative path also leads me into the mystery of non-dualistic thinking. So much of the Church’s conflict lives in a binary world: orthodox or heretic, biblical or revisionist, right or wrong. But the truth, if we dare to sit with it, it is far more nuanced and tender. Human hearts and sexual identity and orientation are not neatly divided between good and bad. Doctrine is not always crystal clear. Real life rarely fits into tidy theological categories. There is truth and error, beauty and distortion, on every side of this argument and issue. And most painfully, there is love from those stuck in the middle and occasionally and increasingly very occasionally on both sides - love that doesn’t always know how to speak or act rightly, but is real nonetheless.

As Richard Rohr puts it, “The dualistic mind is useful for practical matters, but it cannot process things of depth, mystery, grace, suffering, or God. It is not the mind that can deal with paradox. The contemplative mind is content with mystery and patiently learns to hold tension.” For me it remains a mystery why I am a gay man - yes some want to say it was because my Father was absent at a key stage of my development, and whilst this impacted me I do not think trauma determines sexual orientation. It is a mystery. In other words, contemplation softens the impulse to judge and sharpens the capacity to see. It doesn’t dissolve conviction, but it humbles it. It lets me say to my friend: I think you are deeply wrong, but I also know you are deeply sincere. And it lets me say to myself: I may be right in my personal convictions and also may be wrong, and I am not above the need for grace.

In contemplative prayer, I experience something I do not always find in Church: acceptance. Not tolerance. Not polite avoidance. But true, wordless acceptance. The sense that I am utterly known and utterly loved by God and by those I know that are committed contemplative Christians. That I do not need to defend or explain or argue for my place. That my being, as I am, is beloved. That my love is not a problem, but a participation in the great love that flows from God’s own being.

This encounter changes everything.

It doesn’t erase the pain. But it gives me the strength to stay. Currently I am working in the Anglican Church of Canada where the Bishops and various Dioceses have been able to disagree well, it has not broken this Anglican Church and I am so deeply grateful I have been able to come here and recover from the wounds inflicted by the CofE which right now is just not safe for gay partnered ordained ministers.

To remain in a Church that is fractured, to participate fully in the Eucharistic life even when some deny the fullness of my belonging, is a kind of contemplative protest. It is a refusal to give up on love. It is to believe that the Spirit is at work not just in clarity, but in chaos. Not just in agreement, but in the labor of holding together what would rather break apart.

It is, in many ways, to live in the wounds of Christ.

Contemplative Christianity has long taught that the path to resurrection passes through the cross - not only in history, but in our lives. Christ’s wounds do not disappear after the resurrection. They remain - glorified, but visible. Real. And I believe the wounds of the wider Anglican Churches - our divisions, our exclusions, our betrayals - can also become transfigured. But only if we refuse to turn away from them.

And so, I seek to stay—not naively, not passively, but rooted in contemplative love.

This means showing up to the liturgy, even when I wonder whether my presence is fully welcome. It means praying for those who cannot bless my love, not out of self-righteousness, but because love does not cease to be love when it is not returned. It means listening to those who disagree with me—not to validate harmful theologies, but to see their humanity, to understand their fears, to remain in communion even when agreement is impossible.

Contemplation teaches me that love is not sentimentality. It is cruciform. It hurts. But it is also resilient. It is the very energy of God, sustaining all things, binding us together even in our resistance.

In practical terms, I ground myself daily in silence. I sit, breathing in the love of God, breathing out resentment, anger, despair. I use the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Not because I believe my sexuality is sinful—but because I, like all people, need mercy. I need grace. I need God. And I choose to entrust my heart, my life, and my love to Christ.

Sometimes I pray with tears. Sometimes with deep peace. Sometimes in dry silence. But always with the sense that God is not distant. God is in the wound. God is here.

And I believe, stubbornly, hopefully, that love will have the final word.

To my friend who cannot bless my desire to get married one day, I say: I love you. I hear your heart. But I will not be silent to make you more comfortable on this issue. My presence is not a threat. My love is not a departure from Christ - it is a way for people like me who are LGBTIA+ to following him.

To the Church, I say: I will not give up on you. I will not walk away. But I will speak the truth. I will not diminish who I am, or the grace I have received, to fit a shrinking version of orthodoxy. I will not live in shame and guilt that I am mysteriously gay and choose to draw on covenant theology to understand my committed relationship with my partner.

To my LGBTQ+ siblings: You are beloved. Your love matters. Your presence in the Church is prophetic, healing, holy. But lets keep focused on love not rage, and avoid the pitfalls of dualistic thinking, and lets not be extreme through impatience. Do not be afraid to stay - or to leave, if safety demands it. God is with you, in and beyond the Church.

To all who long for healing: come to the silence. Come to the stillness. Come and sit with Christ in the place of division, and you will find, perhaps, not answers—but presence.

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A Prayer for the Divided Church and the Wounded Heart

Holy God,
You who are Love beyond our understanding,
You who bind up the broken and walk with the excluded,
Come now and meet us in this place of division and pain.

We bring to you our longing to be seen, our grief at being misunderstood,
our weariness from bearing the weight of rejection,
and our desire to remain in love when it would be easier to walk away.

Hold us in your mercy, O Christ—
you who were wounded by your own,
you who forgave as you bled,
you who remained present to those who denied and betrayed you.

Give us the strength to stay rooted in love,
to refuse the comfort of bitterness or contempt,
to listen with compassion,
to speak with grace,
to live with integrity.

Let our silence be prayer.
Let our presence be witness.
Let our love be a protest against hate,
and a sign of your Spirit still moving, still healing, still holding all things together.

God of the Contemplative Way,
teach us to remain.
Not to be passive, but faithful.
Not to be resigned, but resolute in hope.
And may your Church become, in time, what it is called to be—
a place of welcome, of communion, of resurrection love.

Amen.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash