When I first visited St. Thomas’, I was deeply closeted and told no one what I knew about my body chemistry or my heart. I vividly remember on one visit riding out to the National Cathedral on a bus on a very hot day in late spring. Many on the sidewalks had removed their shirts. The traffic was slow, and at one light the bus waited for several minutes. I stared uncontrollably at a man just standing by the bus no more than a foot from my window. I was glad that my friend Octavio was at my back and could not see my eyes. Then Octavio whispered to me, “Isn’t he gorgeous!?”

I turned in complete surprise. “You too?!” I asked. He smiled from ear to ear, his eyes sparkled, and he shook his head up and down.

Do you see the enormity of it! Octavio and I had been close friends for almost 10 years, yet so oppressive was the hetero dictatorship in our minds, that we dared not even share with each other the beautiful innocence of who we were.

That was 45 years ago, but almost any day now the legislature in Nigeria is expected to pass a law that not only will prohibit lesbian and gay marriage, but will also give harsh prison sentences to any gays who associate with each other in public (Look out a bus and whisper ’Isn’t he gorgeous!’ Hold hands? ) and will also punish any heterosexuals who advocate for such gay rights. Last week Time Magazine and The New York Times have joined many newspapers worldwide in condemning this proposal and in pointing a finger at Peter K. Akinola, Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, who is one of the loudest in promoting the new law and in condemning the Episcopal Church.

The old English word hāl gives us three words in modern English: whole, hale [healthy] and holy. They still are one entity. You cannot be whole if you are not healthy. You cannot be holy if you cannot integrate body and soul, mind and spirit.

We stand on holy ground. We stand in a place safe enough to be whole, to be hale, to be holy.

I hope that you are having a good Lent. It is a penitential season. Throughout Lent we look closely at our sins and strive to repent. Rethink! Rethink! The Kingdom of God is very near you. Rethink! gets closer to the opportunity Lent provides than does Repent! Repent! too easily is received as “Feel guilty!“ God does not want us to grovel: God wants us to use our minds and when necessary, to change them.

I learned an important lesson from the Baptists about the dangers of reviewing my sins: namely, don‘t take someone else‘s word for what your sins are. When I arrived as a freshman at Baylor in 1954, I already knew that it was sinful to cuss, smoke, drink, chew, and beat your wife, but imagine my surprise when Texas Baptists talked about “the sin of mixed bathing”! Do men and women here in Texas actually take a bath together? I wondered in Alabama horror!