LGBTQ+ and Orthodox Tradition: What Does it Actually Say?

Good afternoon, everybody. It is my privilege to welcome you, especially because I went to law school here at Fordham Law School. And uh, thank you. Um, but I'm a double Fordham; I also went to Fordham College at Lincoln Center. Um, and I sat right there, uh, back in the 90s, the previous century. So I associate MCN Theater with gathering and learning, and it's going to remain true to its tradition today with the dialogue that we're going to have.

Um, I've lived my whole life Christian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox. I was actually born in Greece; I was baptized Greek Orthodox in the 70s before my parents immigrated here to New York. And my entire life I had the love, support, fellowship, and community that my Christian Orthodox, my Greek Orthodox faith provided to me. I had access to that. And back in October 13, 1989, I met my husband in high school. Um, he is Indian-American; he was born in India; he was raised Hindu. And we've been together ever since. Um, so we have an interfaith marriage. Thank you. And despite the interfaith marriage, um, there were some hiccups along the way initially from the Christian Orthodox community—some gossip, some snide remarks—but in the end, they embraced him, and they loved him, and they love him, and they have become his brothers.

So I was blind to the issues and pain of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters until my daughter, who is gay, said to me, "I don't feel welcome in our church." And I was blind to these issues until somebody I loved said to me that this was pain for them; this was an issue for them. Because that's how love works: when you love somebody, their pain becomes your pain; their issue becomes your issue. And so when Jesus commanded us, instructed us, "Love thy neighbor as you love yourself," if you take that instruction to its logical conclusion, what Jesus is saying is there is no "my issue," "your issue," "their issues"—there is only "our issues"—because of this love that we have for each other. And so to my brethren, to my siblings who have not felt heard, loved, and supported, I want to say, "I love you. I support you. I hear you. I see you." And we're going to hear from excellent panelists today, um, who will be discussing what the faith that I have—and I believe the answer lies in the love that our faith commands of us. Thank you.

[Applause]

You so, um, we will get the panel rolling, and um, I am simply going to introduce the moderator, who is Susan Ashb Harvey, who's a friend, and she's the Willard Prescott and Annie McLennan Smith Professor of History of Religion at Brown University. But Susan is really so much more than that; uh, she is, is she is, uh, an exceptional scholar of Syriac writings, an active member of the Orthodox Church, um, just a real role model in many ways for Orthodox scholars, especially Orthodox women scholars. And she's done so much to, uh, advance Orthodox education, especially in the Syriac tradition, which isn't as well known. So I could go on and on and on about Susan, but you just need to Google her and see how much actually that she's done, because it would take me about, it would take me a good hour and a half actually to kind of relate to all that Susan has accomplished throughout her career and how she's been a great friend to the center as well. So Susan, I'll let you take it away. Do you want us from here, or do you want us from here? I think from there. Yeah, all three of you just kind of stay there. Yeah. Thank you, Telly.

And good afternoon to everybody. I, uh, I guess being busy in the way that Telly just referred to, it seemed safer if I wrote things down, so I would not confuse you with other kinds of speaking that occupies many of us in universities. Um, but good afternoon and welcome, and many thanks to Telly, to Telly, to George, and to, uh, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center for their willingness to host this important and timely event. And many thanks to you who have joined us for this, for your careful time and attention. My name is Susan Harvey, and I am a professor of religious studies at Brown University, where I teach the history of Christianity, especially in its Orthodox traditions, and I'm moderating our first panel. So I will briefly introduce our panelists, and then each of us are going to offer short remarks from, uh, our different perspectives responding to the question that titles the session: "What does the tradition actually say?" And then we will have some comments, perhaps in response to one another, and then we will open it up for your questions, comments, and discussion.

So with me here are two fellow scholars: Father Perry Hamal is Cecilia Schnell Müller Professor of Religious Studies at North Central College in Illinois. He's an expert in religious ethics, especially from the Orthodox perspective, and he brings considerable experience addressing ethical issues in the context of multicultural, multilingual, and religiously pluralistic times that we live in. Dr. Nina Gitch is Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She's a specialist in the history of liturgy, focusing on Byzantine and Slavic traditions. Her work includes special attention to issues of women and gender in liturgical practice. But let me start. So I thank you both for being with me in this panel and with us this afternoon. Let me start by saying a few words about the Oslo project that, uh, was behind the book that, um, we'll many of us will be referring to this afternoon. There's also a second book of essays. There was a project for three years. Telly, um, helped to organize where we worked on Orthodoxy and sexuality, and uh, two volumes have come out. This one is out on sexuality, and there's a companion volume on gender—rethinking gender and Orthodoxy—that will come out imminently. Um, they just finished indexing it, so it'll be out in another. So it's a companion that came out of our, our work together at Oslo.

Um, for myself, it was an extraordinary experience and a profoundly powerful one to participate in such an effort. Most of the people there were systematic theologians or ethicists or, uh, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, political science people. I was the token historian, and it was really a great honor to be there, but I was there as I am here today as an historian of Christianity, especially of the Byzantine and Syriac traditions. And I firmly believe that there are resources within the history of Orthodoxy that can serve towards a more accurate and a more just historical memory and which can yield a fully inclusive vision of Church community. For my contribution to the Oslo project and to this book and to the one that's coming out on gender, I drew on different kinds of historical data, material and archaeological evidence, and especially the stories of saints and liturgical poetry, or the hymns that we sing, um, in our services. And I think it's important to notice what aspects of history are generally included in the official history or memory of the church and what is often concealed or passed over, not named or omitted altogether. We have a selective history, often in our, our history books. History shows us much more variety, diversity, and difference than people sometimes recognize. The church has not existed as a single monolithic, unchanging institution, either in its experiences or in its theologies. The church is a human community, and it has a human history. While official denunciation of homosexuality has been a constant over the centuries, the level of concern has often differed quite dramatically. The historical record makes it clear that ways of life other than heteronormative couples and biological families have been lived and lived well within Orthodox terms. We have various kinds of secular evidence for this, or what I call secular evidence—rare, but consistent across the centuries and geographies of the Mediterranean world. We have love charms between two persons of the same sex. We have wills and other legal documents that attest to longstanding same-sex relationships that were lived, sometimes for decades, in concrete and practical terms. In fact, a continuing need for the official Church to reaffirm disapproval of homosexuality indicates a continuing history in which people were able to live alternative lifestyles. It's time for us to acknowledge that reality and to respond with resources that are within the tradition as well as to seek new ways of affirming the wholeness of human personhood.

As a historian, I'm keenly aware how much variation there has been in Christian thinking over the course of its history. A major case in point might be marriage. And actually, Nina could probably say this better than I will, but I do have a little paragraph here somewhere. Between the 10th and the 12th century, a full millennium into the history of Christianity, Orthodox bishops and leaders decided to make marriage a sacrament of the church. It took 1,000 years to decide to bring marriage fully into the holiest of Orthodox rituals. In its earliest centuries, church leaders at best sought to bless marriages and their offspring. Marriage was a pre-Christian practice, so it already existed, and people already did it. John Chrysostom talks about the challenges of blessing such marriages, but invariably our great church fathers taught that the best way for Christians, as the Apostle Paul had expressed in 1 Corinthians 7, was life without marriage or children. And when marriage did become a sacrament of the church, it was not with some kind of timeless view of theos and devotion to God. On the contrary, when we look at the stories of women saints, the hagiographies that were written about women's saints and related sources, they tell us that women, once marriage became a sacrament of the church, women were instructed, for example, to bear with domestic violence from their Christian husbands as their holy act of martyrdom—an ecclesial teaching one can still see in some ways reinvigorated, at least in Russia, in our own time. And one of the essays in the, the second volume on gender that's due out shortly, uh, deals with this, this history and its current state. But this example of marriage, heterosexual marriage, shows us that Orthodox have not always had a single traditional way of teaching about marriage and sexuality. Things change.

The examples I looked at in my research came from two main areas: stories of saints and the hymns of the church. Among the saints, there are extensive records of monastic couples—two persons, sometimes cross-sex, sometimes same-sex—who lived together in shared devotional practice. Sometimes they lived by themselves; sometimes they were part of a monastic community. Often they lived in very small, harsh quarters—a cave, a hut, a monastic cell. Sometimes they did this for decades. These were conditions of intimacy, certainly emotional and spiritual intimacy, and also physical intimacy, whether or not that was sexually expressed. And we simply have no way of knowing this. We know about these couples, but we don't know what they said to each other in their small cell or their corner of the monastery, or what they did. They prayed. We know that. We have on record that other people might perceive these relationships to be holy, exemplary, and inspiring. Bishops, monastic leaders, and lay people—male and female—came, sometimes in large numbers, for spiritual counseling, for holy teaching, and for healing. In these instances, the relationship between two persons, whatever their sexuality, was the vehicle for living a life of holy devotion and for enabling others to be instructed by it. The relationship was the key. These were people who chose not to be alone in their pursuit of devotion to God, but rather to share that with another person.

From the hymns of the church, I looked at how poets expressed loving devotion to Christ. In the case of St. Romanos the Melodist, whose feast day we just had, uh, October 1st, for example, St. Romanos describes in his hymns vivid physical intimacy between Christ and faithful devotees—the sinful woman handling him as she anoints his feet, the doubting Thomas handling the body of Christ as his hand, uh, touches the wound—and even the primordial Adam, whom Romanos describes encountering and embracing Christ naked in the Jordan River. Famously, St. Simeon the New Theologian wrote a number of hymns meditating on his own monastic body and on the body of Christ, rendered in highly homoerotic terms. Erotic meditation on the love of Christ or God has been a part of Christian and Jewish mystical tradition, starting with the Bible itself. The book of The Song of Songs in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew scriptures, is cast in the heterosexual imagery of two lovers. Centuries of Jewish and Christian mystics have drawn on this text for inspiration. As St. Simeon the New Theologian demonstrated, the same imagery could be employed apart from a heterosexual orientation, and it could be employed in powerfully beautiful terms, as also St. Romanos depicted within Orthodox tradition. Embodiment is a sacred gift; it can be used for good or for ill; it can be used to know God or not. Christians have long explored God through holy desire, not simply in our minds, but also in our hearts, with our senses, with our bodies, with desire to know God. We live here in the incarnate present, not in some disembodied reality. Life is a sacred gift. We know God in and through our lives—alone and together—relationships, love, care. We live in relationship to God through how we live in relationship to others. The real question, to my mind, is how we love. If we love in a way that expresses devotion to God—that's, if we love in a way that serves to nurture a life of faithful devotion and witness—then such love serves God's truth. A loving relationship can be a fully holy vehicle for the nurturance of devotion and faith. Such a relationship is possible for couples—same-sex or differently gendered—as for heterosexual ones. We've all seen admirable same-sex marriages, just as we have seen heterosexual marriages, including Orthodox ones, that utterly fail to be faithful to human wholeness or a theology of theosis or Christ-centered love. It is not who one loves that makes that happen; it's how one loves, with God's presence in the midst. Heterosexuality is not the necessary ingredient for a relationship that serves God. Christ echoed earlier prophets when he said, "Behold, I make all things new." It is not new to admit that the human person is a complex being, or that there may be other forms of relationality than heterosexual marriage through which God's fullness might be known. It is not new to understand that desire, including sexual desire, can be a vehicle for expressing our love of God. Rather, renewal is something promised with the work of incarnation; it is not confined to one kind of person or one kind of place or one time. Every time I hear a sermon that diminishes the lives of LGBTQ persons who seek to live faithfully, I cringe. There are families and loved ones, friends, neighbors, colleagues, students who hurt every time such preaching is done. We have to do better, and we can. Christ showed us love; we can do that. Thank you.

Father Perry: Well, I want to echo, uh, Susan's gratitude to, is this a little closer? I want to echo, uh, echo Susan's gratitude to, to George Demopoulos and Telly, yeah, uh, Pepa Nicolao and the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University here, uh, for hosting this event—this really historic, as you said, and essential event—and inviting me to participate. I'm also grateful to my fellow panelists and to all of you who are participating and sharing your experiences during this conversation. I approach today's topic as an Orthodox Christian, as a deacon, and as a professor of ethics. I also speak with an awareness that that this topic is deeply personal for many of us and for our loved ones. It has been a source, SCE, of, of much confusion, conflict, anguish, and even despair and violence. Furthermore, I'm aware that my experience as a married, cisgender, heterosexual, white male carries with it real limitations on my ability to know the experiences of my LGBTQ+ students and siblings in Christ. So I'm here to listen and to learn just as much as I am here to speak.

Our panel's question, "What does the tradition say?" cannot be answered in a comprehensive way, even with the excellent new resources like the recently published book here, which you should all get if you don't have it yet, um, uh, *Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality*, and uh, the companion volume that is coming, uh. And the reason that it can't be answered comprehensively is, is partially because of time limits, partially because the definition of tradition itself is contested, and partially because the Orthodox tradition, if we frame it simply as, in broad terms, as that which includes scripture, the writings of the Holy Fathers and Mothers of the Church, also the sacramental and liturgical sources, canon law, iconography, architecture, practices—all of these are arguably part of our tradition. It is complex, and it is at times contradictory. However, I think we can highlight some of the familiar and less familiar teachings of our Orthodox tradition that seem especially relevant as we strive to deepen our understanding of sexuality and gender, to respond faithfully as Orthodox Christians to the broader cultural realities, and most importantly, to express and extend Christ's love to all people.

To be an Orthodox Christian is to be traditional on some level. It is to be a recipient of and participant in that which has been handed on from Christ to the apostles throughout history to the present as the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. We embrace our continuity with early Christianity; indeed, our continuity with the witness of what St. Simeon the New Theologian calls the golden chain of saints across time and space. And most of us are understandably skeptical of proposed changes to what we believe are the church's teachings and practices. Our Orthodox faith thus has a kind of conservative bias, if you will. At its best, this conservative bias serves to protect the church's divinely inspired doctrines, practices, and ethos, which have been proven to sanctify faithful Orthodox Christians across history and cultures. For this, I believe sanctification, theosis, resurrection is our telos as human persons—our goal. Holiness is our God-given and God-enabled ultimate goal, and we ought to be careful not to compromise the established teachings and spiritual practices that have proven to be authentic guides and fuel for a person's growth in Christ. Yet our conservative bias can also prevent us from seeing things that need to adjust, correct, apply, or expand our teachings and spiritual practices, uh, in light of the increased understanding of the world that we have and in response to social and cultural developments. Our human telos—sanctification, theosis, resurrection—does not change, but the context, circumstances, and particularities of each person and community may require us to seek the same telos through a modified path or a new way. The prominent Orthodox ethicist George Mantzaris writes the following quote: "Innovation is not something foreign or unrelated to Orthodox theology; on the contrary, in fact, it is her main characteristic. Orthodox theology is founded on innovation and is formulated in the world as innovation, and this is natural inasmuch as the innovation par excellence came about in the world with the Incarnation of God the Logos. This innovation, as an incision or an opening of a new way—the way of the Logos—belongs to the very nature of theology." End quote. In another passage, Mantzaris writes: "The neglect, or even more the avoidance, of the dialogue of Orthodox theology with the contemporary world and its problems is, is incompatible with the nature of Orthodoxy. The neglect or avoidance is incompatible and reveals a social indifference and a theological immaturity on the part of her representatives." End quote. So we need both tradition and innovation; we need innovative or living tradition and traditional innovation if we are to respond faithfully as Orthodox to the questions and challenges of our contemporary reality. Yet this, I believe, is the very meaning and purpose of holy tradition for us as Orthodox. Father John McGuckin writes: "Orthodoxy understands the holy tradition to be the essence of the life-saving gospel of Christ brought to the world through the church by the power of the Holy Spirit of God." What then is the essence of the life-saving gospel of Christ for LGBTQ persons and for our church communities in relation to our faithful who are LGBTQ+? I'm not going to be able to answer that in a comprehensive way, but I'm trusting we can get into more detail in the discussion. Let me make a couple of broad ethical claims. All religious worldviews provide some account of what it means to be human—a kind of basic three-part framework of: first, the human condition, or our starting point, or the way things are—one end of the spectrum, if you will—the other end of the spectrum; second, the human goal or ultimate good—the way things ought to be; and third, the way of the way, or ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that either help us toward our goal or construct our progress. This is one way of thinking about a religion's ethics or ethical vision—that which moves us from where we are to where we ought to be. Within Orthodox Christian ethics, we begin with an account of the human being as created by God in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), and our tradition has interpreted this basic claim to include several additional beliefs about what it means to be human, all of which have some relevance for today's topic, and I won't develop the relevance, but I'll just highlight some of the teachings. For example, there is broad agreement that our whole self—both material and immaterial—body and spirit—is created in God's image—that's from Irenaeus, for example—we are all personal beings, unique and unrepeatable, with inherent dignity and deserving of respect and knowable through self-revelation. We reveal ourselves as a personal God reveals Godself to us, if we want to be known. We are all created for relationship—for communion with God, each other, and all creation—and we need intimacy in order to flourish. As a result of humanity's rebellion against God, misusing our freedom in a way that separated us from the Creator, all of humanity, every single one of us, and all of creation is fallen or broken or impacted. We are mortal and prone to sin and suffering; our desires are often distorted, leading us farther from the communion with God that sanctifies, fulfills, and enlivens us. It was impossible for humanity to save ourselves from this condition of separation from God, death, and sin. We were subject to the laws of nature and corruption, which necessarily conclude in death. Yet as Christians, our understanding of the human condition, the goal of our lives, and the path toward that common human goal does not end there; it changes radically through the radical, surprising, liberating, saving, and yes, we can even say queer actions of God in Christ. For Christ does not fit into any preconceived categories or concepts; he inverts and transgresses the world's and nature's expectations. And as a result of Christ's incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit, all human beings are invited to a new life in Christ, to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit through baptism and chrismation, to use our freedom in cooperative synergy with God's grace, to overcome the old Adam and the limits of fallen nature, enjoin ourselves to Christ the new Adam, and participate fully in the sacramental life and deepen our love of God, neighbor, and creation, ultimately becoming, by divine grace, holy ourselves, living the resurrection here and now. So where does this leave us with respect to LGBTQ+ persons within our faith? And there's much, much more to say, but I'll simply make two further claims, and then we can elaborate in the discussion. First, I'll probably upset everybody with my claims, so there we go. First, to my knowledge—maybe invite everyone to conversation—to my knowledge, no part of our historical Orthodox tradition clearly endorses or celebrates homoerotic sexual intimacy as promoting holiness or progress in theosis. Doing so would indeed be something new under the sun, to quote the title of Bryce Rich's essay in the volume. But second, given our ethical tradition's methodology and attention to the particular reality of each person and given the many ways that Christ himself disrupts the natural order, the religious establishment, and the social status quo, I am not convinced that there is no form of LGBTQ sexual intimacy that does not promote holiness or progress in theosis. I would go so far as to say that our tradition is not so much heteronormative as it is hagio-normative: the holy is normative. And for enriching my understanding and stance, I am most grateful to all of the volume's contributors. Thank you.

[Applause]

Nina: Okay, can you hear me? Closer. All right. Um, our hosts have brought us together to reflect on LGBTQ+ questions in the life of the Orthodox Church, and in doing this we are very much participating in a broader conversation. Catholic and Protestant thinkers are today also seeking out ways to bring their theological traditions into greater conversations with the contemporary social realities and cultural views around issues of gender and sexuality. Indeed, as we gather here today in New York, one of the rounds in the, in the synod at the senate on synodality currently taking place in Rome has been explicitly discussing pastoral questions around LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Catholic Church, according to remarks by a Vatican spokesperson two days ago. A significant number of senate participants have asked, quote, "for greater discernment on the teaching of the church on the subject of sexuality." So this is all to say that the questions raised by the collection of essays in the book, *The Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality*, and our discussion this afternoon are part of a broader global conversation taking place in several Christian contexts and beyond today. But in our specific panel we've been asked to reflect on what the tradition itself says.

In my own work on the history of medieval Orthodox liturgy, I do not frequently traverse topics directly related to LGBTQ+ questions. However, I do work a lot on issues of gender, especially in the liturgical life of the church. So I thought that I would approach the question by reflecting on cultural variability concerning gender issues in the history of the church. While this might not directly engage with some of the contemporary pastoral questions, I believe it sheds light on how we think about tradition related to questions of gender identity and human sexuality. So at the University of Notre Dame, where I'm a faculty member in the department of theology, I offer a graduate-level class entitled "Liturgy and the Female Body." This class explores the liturgical role of women in the ritual practices of Orthodox and Catholic churches. On the first day of class, I tell the students that we will not be straying outside the boundaries of tradition; that is to say that we will be studying the various accepted liturgical roles that women have assumed in the liturgy through the centuries. My announcement immediately disappoints the more progressively inclined students. On the other hand, the traditionalists in the room take this to mean that the class will confirm and uphold their worldviews. Quickly, however, all the students in the room are struck by the sheer variety and richness of the tradition when it comes to the liturgical participation of women, and by the way the tradition can at times be contradictory, as our earlier two speakers mentioned, um, or even escape clear-cut positions. One of the main points that I make while teaching this course is that tradition is always embedded in history and in culture, again echoing my previous speakers. Orthodox and Catholic history spans 2,000 years, and this number does not take into account the prehistory of Christianity situated in the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds. Some traditions came before the church—baptism is one example—some traditions took centuries to emerge, such as the Orthodox ecclesiastical marriage rights that Susan mentioned, and some traditions came and went as the tides of time brought about new circumstances. So let me give one clear example. In the long history of confession, there is ample evidence in East and West that, um, female abbots heard confessions of the sisters in their communities. In some contexts, female abbots even heard confessions of non-monastic laity, including men who were visiting their monasteries. These women were seen as possessing what in the theology is sometimes referred to as apostolic authority—the authority to bind and loose; that is to say, they could permit or block access to the Eucharist. Remnants of this authority are found in some Orthodox female monasteries to this day, when those approaching the chalice during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy first ask for a blessing from the abbess to receive communion. Now, over time and for a range of reasons that are mostly not theological, the practice of female abbots hearing confessions declined, and confession has come to be strictly connected to ordained male clergy within contemporary sacramental theology. And of course, here we can distinguish between sacramental rights of confession and spiritual instruction. Hence, in most Orthodox female monasteries today, nuns typically confess not to their abbess but to an external or ordained spiritual father assigned to their community, who may or may not know them well. Now, in this example, am I saying that female abbots should be the normal confessors in monasteries today? Not necessarily. My line of work is primarily that of a historian, and history is informative and not normative.

There could be a host of reasons why this practice might or might not be favored today, including by nuns and abbes themselves. The role of the church historians is primarily to expand our vision beyond the present, so that we can see better how the tradition has intersected with a range of historical phenomena and, in so doing, better contextualize where we are today and help the broader Church reflect on where we might be going and how to get there.

Another classic example of how gendered liturgical issues have varied considerably with the history of female chanters, a topic that my co-panelist Susan Harvey has brought to both scholarly and broader attention. Now we have learned from her that the Syriac tradition had and has a rich history of female liturgical singles, singers precisely at historical periods in which the Roman and Byzantine liturgical rights attempted to theologically justify the exclusion of women, at least from Metropolitan Cathedral worship, and thus in sharp contrast to our sensibilities today. At times, liturgical leaders in the Roman and Byzantine Traditions referred, preferred the singing of the so-called castrati, or the male eunuchs, to that of women, and within those cultural contexts, this was considered theologically justifiable. But what do these examples really have to do with the topic of our panel? First, they show that tradition is not rigid, but dynamic, or to quote the book that gathered us today, tradition is a living reality, an ongoing process of discernment. Each generation is confronted with their own set of circumstances and invited to find the best way to express the Gospel in this new context. That is how tradition lives and grows and becomes imbued with wisdom.

Second, just like tradition, gender too is embedded in culture and historical context. In my course, we look at how early Christian authors intentionally use the motif of gender in order to describe spiritual progression. In one example, we look at the historical iconography of the 4th-century hermit and Saint Mary of Egypt. Mary is traditionally depicted with a flat chest that is visible and with loose and unveiled hair. When looking at her icons, it is not immediately obvious to the viewer that she is a woman; in fact, she looks very much like John the Baptist, who was also a hermit who practiced aestheticism in the same Judean desert as Mary. At this time, the social expectation of most women was to bind up and cover their hair, which was theologically interpreted as signaling their self-control and respectability. Their breasts were also always covered in iconography unless they served as a symbol of their role as mothers, and of course, we have images of Theosis, especially depicting this. Mary of Egypt's body, on the other hand, is intentionally stripped of these feminine qualities to signal her successful spiritual transformation into an ascetic, a category that in her culture was gendered male. There, there are multiple other examples in iconography and Christian literature from Antiquity where women transform their bodies in similar ways as part of their progression toward God. As one scholar of early Christianity put it, women's movement toward God required her to become, quote, "a female made uh, a female man of God," anthropos, to the. In this cultural context, spiritual perfection was associated with maleness, as evidenced across many Byzantine texts. An author seeking to depict a deeply spiritual woman often described her with explicitly gendered male attributes. Within a cultural context like, like Byzantium, where gender was not a binary, a strict binary, but more of a spectrum, as scholar Lorne Nille argued recently, gender and the human body thus become vehicles for communicating a spiritual ideal. At the same time, these models of communication no longer hold, hold the same meaning today. When we think of spiritual perfection, we do not automatically think of the male gender, or at least I certainly don't. And indeed, we have a significantly more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender and culture than thinkers in the past who were not concerned with these questions to the same extent and in the same way as our society invites us to be today.

In other words, contemporary reality invites us to vet and deepen our tradition in this regard by providing an adequate and Gospel-centered response to the new cultural circumstances that we find ourselves in. But what does this practically look like? I will conclude by responding to this question with an example from my personal experience from many years ago. So many years, years ago, while I was still living in Europe, um, and contemplating my move to the US for an academic position, I sought out the advice of my spiritual father. By then, I had lived in Belgrade, Rome, and Jerusalem, places where it seemed to me liturgy was present everywhere, where beautiful chant, with beautiful chant, to inspire and move the soul, and where worldviews manifested within the public sphere, often, though certainly not always, corresponded to Orthodox culture as I then conceived of it. How would I survive in the spiritual desert of the United States? Would I be able to transmit the richness of our tradition to my kids that would be growing up in a cultural context so different from my own, in a place where Orthodox liturgy and spirituality and all that it entails often seem to be the furthest thing from the public sphere? And my spiritual father answered, "All you have to do is see and hear and love each person standing in front of you; everything else will fall into place." Now, at the time, I resisted. You know, I said, "Have you been to liturgy in [Laughter] Indiana?" That was many years ago, indeed. That is how the deepest and richest and transfiguring elements of tradition are built. Tradition is not the past, the quote, the historian of the Byzantine liturgy Robert Taft, tradition is the Church's self-consciousness now of that which has been handed on to it, not as an inert treasure, but as a dynamic principle of Life. Indeed, only through a dynamic encounter with, with the Christ in front of us can we authentically live out our tradition, and that is part of what we're being invited to do in this historical moment: see, truly see members of the LGBTQ+ Community, listen to their stories, and deepen our faith through their, through this encounter. Let the encounter challenge our complacency and deepen our current understanding of tradition. All other debates regarding this question are secondary, and attempts to provide answers without such an encounter would resound as inefficient for the time at hand. Thank you [Applause]. We're just having a little conversation here about conversation, and actually we would be happy to just open things out for your comments or questions to us, responses or thoughts or ideas, um, but I want to thank my fellow panelists for their insightful and eloquent offerings this afternoon. It's really an honor to be at this table with you. Thank you so much for all yes, um, thank you so much for all of your comments, and I want to hear more about the blessings of marriages pre-sanctification, asoke, how churches, s to bless those relationships, and I wonder what that looks like relative to other, you know, sorts of blessings and prayers that might have been offered for other events.

Sure, sure, um, so we can, there's so many things, and there's so many different ways to answer that, right? Um, first and, um, very importantly, marriage predates Christianity, right? Um, so it's a social institution that was already in place uh when Christianity emerges, and what we know in the early Church is that marriage itself was mostly what we would today sort of think of as uh part of secular law, although this term is so problematic when speaking about the ancient world because there's really no such thing as secular law, right? All these things sort of come together, um, and so what we know is that early Christians followed the local Roman laws when they were married. Now that said, it doesn't mean that there were, there were not a whole range of religious practices associated with marriage already inherited by Christians. So, for example, in the Greco-Roman world, when people were getting married, they would bring small offerings, like perhaps bread, um, or wine to a specific local temple, right? Or there would be prayers and small offerings done at home, right? So there was a lot of kind of ritual activity; there were also prayers said, um, prayers of blessing said both by ancient Jewish authorities and Greco-Roman religious authorities over a couple, right? But marriage itself was really not at first something that was essentially connected to a liturgical act in the church building once the church building emerges, okay? Um, so what we see through the centuries is various local traditions, often in Christian traditions, often in continuity with what they encountered there on the ground before, gradually developing liturgical rights for marriage. So when you're looking at texts, for example, in the from, let's say, the 10th to the 13th century and even up until the printing of the Greek Euchologion, uh, so we're here at the beginning of the 16th century, you actually see great diversity in the marriage rights, and that's because marriage is actually a really rich tradition embedded very much into local customs, and it's very hard, kind of like, to rip it out of the local cultural context and strip it of all of these popular devotional layers to, to and restrict it to just the actual church service. So, for example, to give a fun example, I don't want, I mean we can talk about this all day, but um, to give a really interesting example, um, in Palestine, in Palestinian liturgical manuscripts, the key moment in marriage was the blessing of the bridal chamber. So earlier sources do not even have a visit to a church building; what they have is the community, including a local priest or Bishop, coming to the, to the marriage, typically taking place in both the bride's and the groom's home. There's, there's, there's usually a transfer of the bride to the home of the groom; it's still happening in a lot of cultures, for example, in the Balkans, a, and the, the clergy would bless this beautifully decorated room. I know people do this all over Greece to this day, right? You decorate the room for the newlyweds, because that room was the setting where the marriage is consummated, like where the marriage is actualized. And even in canon law, we have sort of echoes of this, where until marriage is, is, is consummated, it's not really a real marriage, right? So the Liturgy sort of centered on the bridal chamber, but gradually, with centuries, partly through the influence of the Imperial rite in Constantinople, the church building became increasingly mandatory. Eventually, the domestic rites were sort of pushed out, although traces of them remain in AIA, often as other, apply to other prayers. For example, we have prayers of Middle Eastern origin for the blessing of, um, for originally used for the blessing of the bridal chamber, today said for a woman on the seventh day of her marriage, after her marriage, when she puts on a veil, right? So signaling her new marital status. So, in other words, they're still there, right? Um, but sort of hidden traces of this are kind of hidden as the ecclesiastical right became normative and then canonically required. There's a wonderful moment in St. John Chrysostom when he's preaching on marriage, and he talks about the celebration of marriage, and he comes to the house to bless the couple after the marriage has taken place, and he asks, please, if the family would wait until the priest has left before the naked dancers arrive. So, you know, there were celebrations galore, but not all did he want to be there for. So it, it is an interesting thing to think about how these things grow and change. So they want at the bachelor party, they were at the post-wedding; it's an interesting thought, isn't it? Yeah, George, thank you. Yeah, so thank, thank all of you, thank all of you; it was, it was really fabulous. We were, we were so thrilled that you could come. I, I mean, to me, one of the things that whenever we have these conversations, one of the things we seem to just jump right past is the fact that St. Paul really seems to hate marriage. Yeah, he's really not interested, right? And we talk about him and read him as though he doesn't, but any straight reading of Paul is that he really, really, really doesn't want anybody getting married, right? And so I wonder how, from historical, liturgical, or ethical perspective, right, we deal with that, right? Good start.

Um, so a number of responses here. Of course, one, you know, as a historian, one historian to another here, um, so I often think poor St. Paul must turn in his grave 9,000 times every minute because, you know, he was writing letters for, to people in particular circumstances; he did not think that his letters were going to be read again 200 years later, let alone 2,000 years later. So poor Paul gets frozen, when of course he was writing in a dynamic situation, and the situation he was writing in was one in which, as he says in his number of his letters, is one in which they're expecting the world to end next week or maybe next month. And in his last letter, he, he admits we don't really know when this is going to happen, but when you're expecting, you know, his his letters are constant, you don't have time, you don't have time to get married, you certainly don't have time to have children because they're not, you're, you're not going to be here, so they're not going to be here. So we have to do something else. There is a great moment in St. Jerome in the fourth century when he says, uh, you know, "God did command us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth, and we did it; we're done," you know, so you, if we everybody would just stop, we could bring the end of the world and go where we're supposed to go, which is into the next life. So I, you know, those are very different circumstances than ours. So one thing is just recognizing that, um, but I often put this question to students, and it's not, I think, any of our religions that are long historically, so Judaism, Christianity, Islam, are now at this minute of History facing real challenges on how to think about things like sexuality and marriage and sexual activity of any kind because our religions are so long historically that they, they come from entirely different, unimaginably different social realities and contexts, millennia, millennia, and millennia. And so all of our very ancient traditions are really grappling with how do you take teachings that are 1,500 years old, 2,000 years old, 4,000 years old, and, and, and think they can just immediately be applied without some kind of thinking, and, you know, the way that I read um, so much of the record and, and that I work on with my students is everywhere I look I see people negotiating and grappling with what is gender, what is, what is it to be in a relationship, what is it to be human, negotiating and grappling and not, not thinking in flat binaries. Life, life isn't flat, black and white, male and female; life, life isn't like that. So, you know, what I, I, I see a constant effort to battle with these things and ask what, what is the intention? And so when we look at the writings of Paul, I think, you know, that's a place, a place to start is simply to say, what did Paul, what was he doing? But it's, it's tough because people are not necessarily taught to read scripture in that way, and so when you, you come to it and think about it as a, as a historical moment, then it seems like you're robbing it of its capacity to be scripture. Um, well, Father Per could speak to that better than I can.

Yeah, no, just to build on, on Susan's very helpful comments, I think, um, what I would say is I think it's a little bit more of a challenge than just this is historical context and, and, and the reason is because of Christ himself. So Jesus provides this normative example; there's, I don't remember it verbatim, but there's this line in St. Basil's um treatise on the Holy Spirit where he talks about how everything that, that Christ does is normative, right? So it sets a standard for human behavior, human ethics, and I mean, here is Christ, Christ is unmarried, right? He's also nonviolent; he's also not like any other king we've seen or any other Prophet we've seen or all of these other things, but he's also, to at least the, the traditional reading of the Life of Christ, is that he is not in any way sexually active, right? So this provides this thread within the entire Christian tradition that is very different from Judaism, very different from Islam, in so far as the central figure is unmarried as opposed to being married and having, you know, many offspring. So I think that, that, that's really significant because what it does is it sets up this eschatological norm of unmarried, and we have other passages, of course, in Scripture that talk about there not being marriage in the Kingdom, right? And we have examples of saints that I'm sure Susan can speak to more, better than I can, but of, of saints, and almost every story of married saints ends how, with the couple living like brother and sister, right? So there is this sense that on some level the, the norm, the goal is a kind of non-sexually intimate life, but it's intimate, it's communion, but it's not necessarily physically, it's not physically sexual, and that's, that's what I was trying to get at with my earlier point in the talk, too. I think that there are lots of ways we can think about intimacy and encourage and bless and, and, and fully endorse intimacy between people of the same gender or identity, and, but, but, but the question becomes one of, to what extent is physical sexual intimacy part of that, and can the Church—doesn't mean that it, it can't—it has to say, you know, it could be, this is where you are right now, we meet you where you are right now, and we're working toward a goal in the same way that heterosexuals also ought to be ultimately working toward that goal. Sometimes it happens just naturally through the spiritual process or just the libido, um, but other, in other times it is something that is striven for as a kind of ethical norm. So I think that the example of Christ really problematizes it; Paul is simply, you know, repeating what he knows of Christ on a certain level; we could read it that way, um, but that, that's just a few thoughts there. Yeah, that's really real.

Rachel, hi, this was fantastic; so many questions I have, but uh, one thing I feel like I noticed as a thread in your talks about sort of a methodological point of how to negotiate, um, to use your word Dr. Harley, to negotiate between kind of the lived reality of people and the broader tradition, um, that that was kind of a theme I heard throughout the talks, and so what I'm curious at, kind of a broad question, is how, um, kind of in historical texts, was the, we're local communities and the institution of the Church negotiating these differences and, um, changes and innovation, and then kind of the particular question is what would that look like for us to do with this issue today, now in our Church with our current institution?

Start, let me jump right in on that. Um, so if I was going to take one of my favorite examples that I like to think about, this is a sixth-century example, uh, or actually I'll start with a fifth-century one that uh Bishop Theodore of Cyrrhus wrote about, and he wrote about two women; I mean, he wrote about many people, among his writings were two women who lived together in a small hut, um, they lived a very severe life of ascetic practice in Syria, and when he wrote this, they had been living in their little hut together for 42 years, and in their time together, and, and they had not left their hut in that 42 years, their little hut. So in their 42 years together, a number of things had happened: one is a small community of nuns had grown up around the edge of the, um, small land, land where they were, that who served them, and the other thing that had happened in that time was that people began to come in a very steady stream, like Theodore himself, um, Bishops, clergy, lay people, other ascetics, to seek spiritual counsel, sometimes to speak healing. Now these women were not officially anything; they weren't nuns; they hadn't been consecrated to something, so they were just two women who had taken up a life of prayer together that lived in that space. When Theodore visited, there were many, many people coming. We actually have a lot of examples like this; there's one, another one I really love sharing from, um, 7th-century Iraq, and she lived in a, in a small hut in her village, and people came from all over the region, Bishops, Abbots, Abbes, lay people; the person who wrote about it, Sakona, who was a mystic of the East Syriac Church, he, his mother took him every month to visit her, and he said all the mothers took their children constantly to visit her for teaching. Again, she had no official, she wasn't consecrated to anything, she wasn't officially a nun, she wasn't officially a Deaconess, she wasn't official, she was just someone living a life of prayer. These don't, these were women practicing prayer, and in the case of the couple I started with, Mea, uh, Morana and Sarah, living together, they do not seem to have been a source of scandal or problem for anybody; in their people weren't scandalized by this; people measured, wasn't Martin Luther King Jr., you measure by the fruits of their labors, you will know them, and by the fruits of their labor they were known. So, and there's no hint of scandal, no hint that's a problem, um, and so there's an example, and I think of those kinds of examples often as I'm reading, um, ancient sources from the early Church or the Byzantine period. Local communities lived with people, and it wasn't a problem if those people lived in a way that to us, us might look surprising. I mean, who are these, these women? No, who was supervising these women? Nobody was supervising these women. What were they doing in their hut? We have no, you know, um, and who authorized them? Nobody authorized them. The people who lived in those, you know, who lived nearby, the local community authorized and validated them as religious teachers, as spiritual healers, as people who mattered. So I think one of the things I see always in my sources that I'm always looking for is not just what is the official Church saying, but what are, what are local towns and villages doing? How are people treating each other? How are they living together? And someone like this couple, s and Roman, uh, you know, they, they don't have a way to get into the official records of the Church because they don't have an official office, didn't have an official office, and we know about them because a bishop wrote it in a memoir, but not because they left something or, you know, writings or, or some, some ongoing institution. A lot of our history is like that: our local parishes, our local communities, the, the, the people we know, the people who are meaningful to us, but that's not necessarily a part of what is the official record of the Church. So I, that, that's what I mean by constant negotiating. Were they a problem? No. Are they a problem for us? Should they be? No. But I don't, uh, there may be a better way of responding to your question.

I'll just give a quick word. I mean, I think that, um, I think that part of this is simply a matter of meeting everyone where they are; this is the mission of the Church; I mean, this is, you know, Salvation is for everyone, and our prayer is that all may be saved, um, so at least according to St. Silouan the Athonite. So that, that should be our motivation. Now that's not going to happen if we close our doors, if we deliver fiery sermons that make people feel like they are terrible and unwelcomed and, you know, going to hell in a handbasket or something like that, right? Right. So the question becomes one of, in our context, how can we, the faithful, not just clergy and others with official roles, but how can the whole Church community be a place where everyone feels invited, affirmed, and welcomed to live the Christian life, and that's not, and, and I think Telly does a great job in his essay in this book, um, uh, talking about, about how, you know, that is going to require a kind of transformation, a kind of struggle, a kind of aestheticism for uh an LGBTQ couple in the same way that it would, that it's required for a heterosexual couple to struggle to purify our desires, to grow closer to Christ, and this is where the double standard is just so evident, right? Because we don't, we don't think about this in any, we just assume, oh, well, you're, you know, you're hetero, so therefore anything and everything that you do is blessed, and that's just absolutely wrong according to the tradition of the Church, um, we, I help out at a couple different camps, and we had a camper this past summer at one of the Chicago uh Metropolis camps who, who said, uh, you know, we asked them before we talk about intimacy and sexuality, you know, what they think the Church's teaching is, and, and he said, "Before marriage, you can't do anything; after marriage, anything goes." Yes, and I'm like, that's completely wrong. So, so anyway, so I mean, but that's, that's kind of the mindset, right? But, but, and this is someone who grew up in the Church, you know, this is, so I mean, I, I think that, I, I'm sure the, the next panel will talk maybe more about some of these issues, but I, I think that's a big step is just making it clear that our primary mission as the Church, as the body of Christ, is to offer salvation and healing and transformation and transfiguration to anyone and everyone who is seeking it, full stop.

I would just, um, like to add two things: one is, um, tradition is always embodied in culture, um, and so even this question really depends on the cultural context, right? And so there's certain conversations that we're having here that may also be taking place in my own home country in Serbia, or they may be impossible in my own home country in Serbia, right? Um, and so it really is a kind of culture-specific moment, um, like, like any moment in history where the local churches are all invited, like that is the call of Christ towards transfiguring the world, right? Um, so there, the sort of the core of our identity, whatever the world may be in that particular moment, there's a lot of prudence that's required in that, a lot of sort of slow reflection, but also a kind of brave heart, right? Um, so that's, that's one thing, and then the second thing is, um, this issue, um, so speaking about LGBTQ+, um, so, so, um, traditionally, or sort of a few decades ago, we talked about as an issue of homosexuality, but of course, it's much broader than that, um, is very present in the life of the Church, um, and it's often very kind of covert and hidden, um, and so there's, there's, it's always through rumor, or everybody knows, but nobody says anything, right? So it's, it's a reality that exists in our lives, you know, it's, so that, that's, that's why we need to address it, because there it is, you know, there's nothing else to say, but it's, it's already there, so the invitation is then to address it, right? Um, so, so the two main points: one is culture-specific; each culture will have to find its own sort of way uh to deal with what they're actually encountering on the ground, um, and then that it's here to stay; it's always been here, actually. Yeah, it's not new. Yeah.

My name is Greg Webb; I'm visiting from Chicago. It's a pleasure to be here and to, with you all. Um, lifelong CR Orthodox, I'm a, I guess Orthodox jurisdictional mutt; has been in most of them at some point in my life, um, but I am also gay. I've been publicly out for 12-plus years now in the Orthodox Church, trying to think about this, and a lot of my connections and communities and this conversation are largely outside of the Orthodox Church. I'm very connected and kind of the broader Evangelical space and the Catholic conversations, like Side B movement, QCF, GCN, REO, all these other organizations, and I guess in my own struggle as, have navigating this in my own life and in my still personal conviction, adherence to Orthodox teaching and theology as I understand it, what I, what I struggle with is often times conversations like this and especially anytime we're talking about like looking at all these examples of like same-sex intimacy back in the fathers, and, and there are many of them, and I think my personal favorite is, is CHR

And basil, and particularly the introduction on the where they're, when in together, but their mothers get involved, and so suddenly they can't. It's this great tragedy and trauma, and I was like, "These are some dramatic people." Um, so like we, we have these examples, but I think what I, my struggle often times is when we bring this into the current conversation on issues, the LGBT inclusion, the Church. We're bringing these people and these lives into a situation where we're talking about today, often like we're talking about same-sex relationships and marriage, which sexual intimacy is often going to be a part of that, and that's often the conversation. But often we're referencing these, these fathers, these teachings of these people who, if, if they thought their life or their story or their teaching in any way was endorsing what they would have seen as sodomy, they would jump out of their grave and probably smack the art in St. Nicholas. And so I don't know how to reconcile that. I don't know how to, while looking at these lives and these examples and seeing these as beautiful blessings of same-sex intimacy and potential for same-sex relationship, but of navigating within that context of the fact that like virginity was seen as this High Calling. If they were sleeping together, if there was sexual intimacy, that would have been likely seen as a great devastating sin or an error in that relationship. So I just don't know how to always resolve those two things. Thank you for that, and I think that's extremely important.

Our categories are not the same categories with which people thought in the past, especially in the premodern past. But, and, and I without question, uh, agree about the fact that for certainly, uh, most of the so-called Church fathers, um, celibacy was seen as the greatest and the highest ideal. But I do not think, I do not think that, uh, physically expressed intimacy, including sexual intimacy, would necessarily have been named the way you're naming it, even in the 4th Century, even in the 6th, even in the 1. I wouldn't go that, yes, our categories are different, would it? I don't see evidence that categorically it would have been, um, looked upon in that way. I, I really don't. I mean, it seems to me one of the very important thing, speaking as, speaking as a historian, you, we have an ethesis liturgist, but in my role as a historian, one of the really important things we have been able to do as historians in the last 30 years, um, is to find evidence of people who cherished and loved their Partners, regardless of whether or not they were heteronormative. And I, I call this, you know, we, we look for things, secular evidence. It's not as, it says secular is not quite the right word, but it's a different kind of evidence than Church cannons or or hagiography or hymnography. When we have, um, Wills, or when we have testimonies about possessions, or when we have love spells, or when we have grave inscriptions, um, I, the fact that we use a language that denigrates intimacy doesn't mean that was the language of the past. I really, I really strongly reject that.

Well, maybe that's as much as I, as there's so much we don't know, but I really, I would like to be able to honor history as including testimony that shows us more than we think we know, and this would be one example. But yeah, it's a really good question. I think it's in many ways the heart of the issue, um, because I think almost all of us would probably agree that we have these many examples of, of different kinds of intimacy that are, that are queer in the sense that they're, they're crossing boundaries and blending, and we have transgressive, we, yeah, transgressing. We have transvesti saints, we have all, you know, all these different kinds of ways. The Virtue, the language of, you know, manly and womanly virtue and all these kinds of things, all of that is part of our tradition. It's, it's not particularly controversial to say that, although still many people don't even know that, right? But, but to claim, right, to say that on some level the church is going, is going to endorse or encourage, uh, a couple who are, uh, homoerotic to practice, uh, their sexual intimacy, um, without, uh, uh, it being seen as in any way detrimental to their spiritual life is, is the question. It's the newness piece here, and, and I think that at least how, at least how I'm thinking about it right now is a couple in that situation is much better spiritually being in the church, living the life of the church, and living in a way that they, that they are going to be able to, uh, draw close to Christ. Um, what exactly the details of that look like is really not my biggest concern, but I would hope that in the same way that I would expect any couple of any orientation to pay attention to whether or not their intimate life is somehow putting up barriers between them and their family or them in Christ, that they should pay attention to that, and if it does seem to be doing so, that that's the kind of thing you definitely would want to be communicating with a spiritual guide or adviser. I don't know if that helps at all, but it's, it's, it's not really adding much to what you said, but I, I think you're absolutely asking the right questions, and I thank you for sharing some of your own story. Nina, did you want to just make one final comment?

No, just a lot of the historical work is about distancing the past, especially when you're somebody who are, who's also living within that particular tradition. So a lot of it is about distancing the past, making it foreign, making it strange, so you can see it with fresh eyes, um, as a way to really encounter the present, um, but it's true that you can't, it's not, it's not an issue of sort of picking and choosing examples and describing them in our categories, our modern words, and then using them as proof, as much as it's an issue of just showing, I think that this issue has always been there, right, and the church's dealt with it, the church's response has been very complex, and so we're not limited in ways that we seem to think we are when confronted with this particular issue. I know we're at our time. I'm here to announce coffee. I, I have a question for Nina really fast, um, the John Boswell, Claudia Rap books. I mean, I think we, we should mention them, right? I mean, John Boswell wrote a book, what 30 years ago, maybe more, uh, where he felt, so he felt like he uncovered, uh, an actual liturgy for same-sex unions, right, and created a huge, huge discussion and controversy. And now the famous Claudia Rap, uh, who is in Austria, I think, right, um, University of Vienna, right? So she sort of, she's now written sort of the part two, I guess, in a way that has become somewhat definitive. Can you like maybe just very quickly speak to that?

Sure, um, so, uh, yes, um, so manuscript sources are full of prayers for all kinds of occasions, many of which we haven't studied, um, so it's a really kind of vibrant, uh, SP right now in Byzantine liturgical studies to look at all of these prayers. They're not sort of the traditional sacraments, um, so thinking very in narrow categories, um, and how they function socially, and a lot of non-theologians, non-liturgical historians are really curious, ious to look at cultural history through the liturgical, right, um, especially these non, sort of commonly studied and known prayers. One such prayer is the prayer for brother-making, um, that shows up in a whole range of ways, um, in ancient Mediterranean culture, the practice, um, and so with Boswell, he actually depended on sources without having, um, very good philological Training, if you will, um, so training was studying with the manuscripts. And so what he found in a manuscript Source was part of this, right, of brother-making that was immediately textually, I think some people didn't catch the term, so brother-making, right? Brother-making, yeah, it's, it's a rite of brother-making, um, adelphos, um, and but some folios were missing in the manuscript, and it sort of immediately continued into the right of marriage, and so it seemed to him that it was actually one liturgical right, um, that he interpreted as a kind of premodern right for homosexual Union, right? Um, so since then there's been a lot of controversy and debate, and even people who sort of realized that this whole practice, um, of solitaries or, or, or couples living together in isolation is a very complex phenomenon, right, um, that may or may not have, have, um, in some cases included homosexual relationships, um, are challenging Boswell's description still, because it just methodologically there just wasn't, uh, what he was claiming that was there, right? But what's wonderful about that work and through Claudia Rap's continued study is that we're becoming aware of just the complexity of our own past, and some of our kind of very, uh, rigid way of thinking or sort of very kind of categorical way of thinking was actually not the case historically. And just, just to add one quick thing, if I speaking about liturgical history, um, very often what becomes codified as the Orthodox tradition, like for example, we could talk about marriage again, how do we get to contemporary marriage rights as we have them? Basically, it's what, what Venetian printers of Orthodox liturgical books chose to print, like it's what they had on the ground. And in fact, when we look at manuscripts around that time from Constantinople, from northern Balkans, and then looking on Venetian islands that were a lot heavily under Latin influence, and then looking at Palestinian sources and South Italian sources, what we see actually is that the right that becomes normative for marriage was actually in the minority. So in some ways, a lot of things that we consider normative, absolute, this is like, this is like the Orthodox tradition, is actually a consequence of series of historical circumstances that may not have had any sort of theological, uh, reflection, right? More like accidents.

Can I just add a really quick comment because many of you are familiar with the document that, uh, was published in 2020 for the life of the world, the social ethos text, um, and there was, uh, you know, some backlash to that document because it suggested that there, uh, can be or ought to be a third way in addition to married heterosexual married life and monastic life. This is the way we, many of us here, you either pursue the path of monasticism or you pursue the path of marriage, and if you don't fit into one of those two categories, we don't know what to do with you, right? And the suggestion of the document was that there, that there should be a third way for us to think about. We have so many people who are not called to monastic life and are also not married for a variety of reasons, and, um, I think that these kinds of blessings and prayers may be a very helpful way to help us respond to that criticism and also to think more creatively about, you know, how as a church we might open up, uh, opportunities for intimacy that are not simply heterosexual marriage or monasticism. Again, the historian steps in, um, so, uh, John Boswell found something like 61 manuscripts. We're not talking something that was, you know, a stray piece of evidence, but Claudia Rap has added that number so that there's now 66 or so medieval manuscripts. And one of the things that, uh, has been stressed about this particular ritual is it's a, a ritual that blesses the friendship between two men, and the, the prayers are quite beautiful, the wording of the prayers. So when John Boswell's book came out, which was 1992, 1994 somewhere in there, um, my colleague and dear friend Robin Darling Young, who's a professor at CUA at, uh, Catholic University of America, um, wrote a review, because, uh, in which she was quite critical of the way he handled the sources for the reasons you say, but she began her review, which was published in First Things, by telling the story about when she and I together traveled in the Middle East in 1985. We spent a month in Syriac monasteries, and part of that time we spent in Jerusalem staying at the Syriac Orthodox patriarchy, and the Syriac Orthodox patriarch of the time, uh, Patriarch Dionysius Behnam Jawyeh was so impressed by our friendship, he said to us, "You have a bond between you which is closer than that of blood sisters," because he said, "Your friendship is based in your Devotion to Jesus Christ." And so he took us with a retinue of Deacons, we were like, "Make Way for Ducklings" through the streets of Jerusalem in The Old City to the Church of St. Did he no, he took us to the tomb of Christ in the Church of the Anastasis, and on the Tomb, in the, as he said, "In the place where our Lord and Savior was buried," he blessed our friendship in a formal blessing, which we continue to refer to to this day, she says to me, "Habibi," um, and I mean, thinking about the possibilities for relationships, relationships don't have to be reduced to some kind of sexual activity. Relationships are, are meaningful and rich and generative, full and fertile in very many directions, and I, I cherish that experience. Robin and I refer often over these many years to that blessing of our friendship, um, and you know, I think of this when I look at these, these medieval prayers. Relationships can be truly magnificent vehicles of devotion, and we need to cultivate more of how we think about that, not less, and not reductionist in how we think of that. Thank you for bringing, no, this was really great. I [Applause] think.