Deputies concur with Bishops on marriage equality: "Things which were cast down are being raised up..."

It is customary for the President of the House of Deputies to ask for two things whenever a momentous vote is about to occur in the House: prayer and restraint. President Gay Jennings was not the first to ask for these two things today as we took the final steps on the road to marriage equality in the Episcopal Church. I have watched each of President Jenning’s predecessors – Bonnie Anderson, George Werner, Pam Chinnis, David Collins and Charles Lawrence do it, too. They call on the chaplain for prayer, and they urge the deputies to show restraint in expressing delight or dismay at the outcome when the vote is announced.

Today we had a pretty good sense of where the vote was headed on approving actual rites for marriage (regardless of the gender of the couple) and changing the canons of the church to make it possible for two persons of either gender to marry. There had been some telltale signs in the votes on proposed amendments to the resolutions that we were considering, and the wide margin of victory in the House of Bishops was an indication, too. But still, the process needed to play itself out. Any successful attempt to amend the resolutions would sink them, as the House of Bishops had already approved the resolutions – at this stage all that was required was a simple “concur.”

In the hour it took us to get to “concur” I thought about the many victories and defeats that preceded this one. I thought about the many people who had gotten us to this day, when marriage would no longer be defined as available only for a man and a woman. I thought about the many times we had waited for votes to be tallied (prior to the near-instant results of our electronic age) and the late nights of strategizing about what should come next. I thought about the many tears shed and the many wounds some of us carry from the years of struggle for acceptance.

In the end, our Newark celebration was discreet. I doubt anyone around us even knew what was going on. The four clerical deputies from Newark posed with the “Vote by Orders” record before it was handed in and the electronic vote was cast. But deep down – somewhere deep, deep, down – I felt the joy and satisfaction and jubilation in the moment the tally was flashed on the giant monitors. Seeing the results felt like the culmination of 30 years of work. Even with the restraint, I could feel the words of the collect echoing in my bones: “…let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new….”

(I am deeply grateful to the Rev. John Mennell, who graciously traded places with me today, so that I, an Alternate Deputy, could be on the floor of the House of Deputies at the time this historic vote was cast. Thank you, John.)