And a child will lead them

I will never forget the moment, some 10 years ago now, when our Muslim social worker asked my partner and me the casual question - "And what religion will you bring the child up in". We were in the process of adopting our eldest child. We had not even met him yet. We were going through what seemed like a rather long process of being prepared for parenthood.

Being amongst the first Gay male couples to adopt a child in this country - the territory was rather new - for the social worker as well. They wanted us to "practise" for a while - and so for several miserable weekends, we were asked to go to the adoption home and feed the children. Dear Lord! It was a nightmare. I think they thought if we could survive that, we could survive anything - (I know that thought crossed my mind several times). But having passed the test, we were now looking at the nitty gritty of adoption. Who was likely to be the primary parent? Who was likely to provide the discipline? Etcetera, etcetera.

The innocent question about religion caused a three week break in the process, while we discussed the matter. Backwards and forwards it went. My partner, Leon, loathed the Church. The Church had almost proved his mental undoing, in its lack of care for him; in its homophobia; in its dreadful hypocrisy and alienation of Gay and Lesbian people. He was very uncertain indeed. On the other hand, he was pretty much at sea from a religious perspective. A kind of wannabe "spiritual" type, with not a great deal of focus, or specific practise to offer.

I, on the other hand, had been a priest - had studied and taught Theology for gazillions of years and had left the Church the moment the struggle was over. What was the answer to the Muslim social worker’s question? The truth is, it was an inoffensive question. She wasn’t expecting any particular answer. We could have said “None!” and we would just have moved on in the conversation. But we decided to interrogate the matter with what was, for both of us, surprising intensity.

We discussed the nature of faith. We discussed the practise of belief. We discussed our own journeys – the positives and the negatives. And we came to a decision – strange in the eyes of many and peculiar, sometimes, even in our own judgement. We decided that we should raise the children in the context of the Christian faith –despite our own serious misgivings.
And so that is what brought me back to the Church. A baby. The absolute epitome of human frailty and human need. A baby, with a newly minted laugh and eyes so clear, you could see eternity in them. A baby that came into our lives, to change them forever.

We called him Gabriel – and it is his job to put the angel on the top of the Christmas tree every year. We called him Gabriel, the harbinger of good news. We called him Gabriel, because that was the first name we agreed upon while flipping listlessly through a bible one Sunday in Church, during a boring sermon.

And tomorrow, Gabriel will be serving at the High Mass on Christmas Day, dressed in a cassock and surplice and looking utterly angelic, smothered in incense and feeling the surge of the Haydn “Jugendmesse” and the swirl of hieratic language. Of course he may, one day reject it all. That will be his choice and that will be his unquestionable right. But when and if he does so, it will be from the position of an insider. He will know the stories that form such a massive part of our philosophy and our culture, for good or for ill. He will understand why some people pray to a God and have hope for the future and show love to their neighbour. And, hopefully, if he does reject it all, he will be a better person for having taken what is good in religion and making it his own.

Of course, there are dangers. It is also possible that he will imbibe the bewildering levels of prejudice; the terrible bigotry and the hatred, which is also part of religion. It is possible that he will start to see himself as superior to other people. It is possible that his brain will start to ossify and become closed to science, and change, and possibility. That is also a feature of religion. But it is bad religion – and I hope that he will be enabled to see that and to reject it.

In the meantime, I will thrill at the sight of the child I have been entrusted with, dressed like an angel, doing his service with a diligence and dedication that really inspires me, when together we pause at the crib of another baby. A child who, it is said, can lead the lion and the lamb to find peace with each other. That is an ideal I want for Gabriel. That is a vision I want for myself.

Midnight Mass at St Michael and All Angels Observatory, 2009

There is something extremely peculiar about attending Mass on Christmas Eve. It has, of course, the strongest overtones of pagan ritual - which is historically what Christianity simply usurped. Dead of night. Phallic Christmas Trees. Should be the winter solstice, but we live in the south down here. Celebration of new birth etc

So, to see the priest bearing a tiny (what was it? porcelain? alabaster? plastic?) figurine of baby Jesus on a pillow, (looking from the distance I was at, for all the world like a foetus), it cannot fail to make one think about things like that.

As usual at St Michael's, the music was thrilling. I was glad to say the familiar and do the comforting. I breathed in the smoke and I knelt for the incarnation, as is my habit, Sunday by Sunday. And I faced, afresh, the strangeness - the real peculiarity of a human God. A God who might be, as one songwriter put it, "a stranger on a bus, trying to make his way home". The absurdity of the eternal constrained by the temporal.

And, from that temporal point of view, is it not sobering to see that, if you look around the country, that most babies were born on Christmas Day, in the poorest Provinces? In the Western Cape - there was one child born. We are outnumbered some 60 to 1 in some parts of the country - so great is the disparity. So great is the difference between us.

And then there is the great moment after the Mass, where the priest and sub-deacons kneel before the crib and adore the new-born child. All the lights of the church are turned off and we find ourselves in complete darkness, save for the glinting lights of the two Christmas trees which frame the high altar and the candles. And, of course, the light which shines from the Nativity scene. It is a brief moment, and then the carol "Silent Night" is sung, by all, and from memory.

For me, this is the song my father would sing to me as a child, by way of a lullaby, to get me to go to sleep. He would produce, from a drawer in his bedroom, an old and used Christmas card, on which the words of the carol were printed. And he would sing to me, in a voice sonorous and clear and comforting. My father singing me to sleep.

And of course, the Christ-child is the lullaby of the Eternal to this battered world of ours. When we hear it, we can, even if momentarily, let go of our fears and our struggles. We can find peace, if only for a moment. For the briefest of moments.

We can pause in wonder at the place where divinity empties itself into human form. And we can ponder what the point of it all might be. Because it is far from obvious. It is, in reality, anything but clear. The message of Christmas down the ages has been, that here, in this absurity, is where we find the best and the most comforting truth there is. Into our darkness, shines the light.

Christmas in Fairyland

Joshua - Xmas 2004

I have said often, that the world isn’t divided North and South; or Gay or Straight; or Black of White. The world is divided between those people who have children and those who do not. It is as simple and as straightforward as that. If you don’t have children, you simply cannot imagine what life is like with them around.

Let me start at the beginning. My partner of 12 years, Leon, was broody from the day I met him. And when your partner says they want children - achingly, desperately, completely – you either shake their hand firmly and wish them a nice life, or you get used to the idea. I had never considered children. (Well, I suppose I might have, briefly, when I was married to a woman – but the thought soon perished, along with the marriage.) And then suddenly, at the age of 45, I was faced with some extremely uncomfortable prospects: Nappies! Projectile vomit! Teething! It is, you will agree, rather strange, when most other Gay boys in Cape Town are driving around in cabriolet splendour and planning their next holiday on a little known Greek Isle with beautiful local waiters.

Indeed, when I see primped gay boys sitting at coffee shops around Cape Town, with the time to look delicious and lovely, I sometimes ask myself what is different between them and us as we are now? I was never the natty dresser. I was never the theatre diva or the intellectual guru. I have, mostly, just trundled on with my life, and been Gay as well.

But with children, all that calm and relaxed way of life changes in a flash. Because a baby doesn’t care whether you are Gay or not. They are not interested in whether or not you look your best or whether there is anyone out there to impress. Babies want nappies changed and food put in their mouths and sleep. So, Gay or Straight, Lesbian, Transgendered, Bi, whatever ... it really doesn’t matter at all to the child. All they need is love and care. And for that, they pass no judgement on you, just so long as it is there.

Take other things, like Christmas for instance. Pre-children, Christmas was a bit of a sentimental chore. You bought the statutory soap-on-a-rope and you wrapped it, gave it, chewed your way through the turkey and felt stuffed on the pudding. And that was that for another year.

Post-children, it is something else entirely. It starts with lies and threats about what Father Christmas will or won’t bring - round about June – and this rather fatuous attempt at bargaining continues, unrelenting, until the Christmas Eve. And it ends with very expensive plastic toys which seldom make it intact until the end of the day.

But in the middle there is a rediscovered world. A world of involvement and excitement and anticipation. A world before lies are exposed and half-truths suspected. A world where adults are trusted entirely for what they promise. It glitters. It gleams. It shines.

Every year, we have a ceremony, in our house. The Christmas Tree gets dressed. The lights are wound around it, the bells and the baubles and the glitter-encrusted stars are carefully hung on the tree by all of us. And the last thing we do, in this little ceremony of ours, is that the Angel is placed on the top of the tree, by our eldest child, Gabriel, his namesake. And then we all stand back, and we switch on the lights. They twinkle and pulsate. And the sheer magic of Christmas is there again.

Christmas had always seemed to me as a Gay man, to be a celebration of something I would forever be an onlooker to. It is, after all, about a woman giving birth to a child. And this was not something I was reasonably expecting in my life. So I was essentially a voyeur to the whole event. I experienced Christmas from the outside. It was nothing unhappy, but just strangely irrelevant to my life.

That is simply not the case any more. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I have been blessed with another glimpse into the purity of a child’s world. Oh, believe me, it isn’t always sweetness and joy - but for that moment, when we switch on the lights on the Christmas tree and they shine in the eyes of my children, I understand, fleetingly, momentarily, the joy of birth – the hope of the future. Could it be a glimpse of the divine?