A subject near and dear to all our hearts. This was a good meeting. We stayed focused and managed to shed some light on a rather serious subject, especially for some of our members who have felt the pain of this rift in rejection from their branch churches. But, there are a lot of meanings to the "rift"in our topic, as I'm sure you all know. The cable station, the Bliss Knapp book and certainly, most certainly, the rift which seems to exist between gay people and the church. All issues crying out for healing.

We began, as always, with readings. We've changed our format just a smidge so that everyone brings in readings they want to share on a subject, rather than one elected reader for the meeting. The funny thing was that "the enemy"and how to handle "the enemy"kept coming up. It became clear that there was a definite adversarial feeling of "us"and "them". Not good, as the quote above points out.

From there we began working on the issue and saw that what was needed was for each individual to live the reality, live the Truth and work themselves to see the "structure of Truth and Love"as the real and only church. That church is not a material structure with a board of directors of mislead and confused people that we need to bring around through arguments and protestations. There always seems to be the argument amongst ourselves "why can't they just see..."fill in the issue. Question is, what are we seeing?

One member then shared that he saw the activities of TMC as the result of the world belief of homophobia, and that we really don't want to change the church as much as change society - handle the belief itself rather than it's particular local manifestation. The cause, rather than the symptom. Further, he pointed out that our happiness doesn't depend on TMC accepting us. Our individual happiness is never dependent on material situations. Such a relationship is co-deponent and rather unhealthy.

We agreed that this is a topic that warrants more work and decided to continue it into the next meeting.

*The acronym TMC stands for The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts.