To tend a garden is a precious thing,

But dearer still the one where all may roam,

The weeds of poison, poverty, and war,

Demand your care, who call the earth your home.

Creativity of all kinds, in art, in prayer, in justice-making, in human relationships, is born where people wrestle with angels, outside Eden, on the border between heaven and earth, where they struggle to create a new form, a new song, a new template, a new ethic with all the discipline and passion they can bring to bear.

Artists know that there is no creativity without a system of formal restraints.

Because they like their own church, and the relationships within it, or because they love Jesus, or because they have a nostalgic affection for it, many people will go on giving the church their loyalty and commitment, while simply disregarding parts of its teaching they don't agree with. Sexuality is one huge area of church doctrine in which this is clearly the case. The traditional position on sexual intercourse is that it is not permissible in any circumstance except that of heterosexual monogamous lifelong marriage. But most Christians are not virgins when they marry. Many Christians divorce. Some Christians are practising homosexuals. Some live together outside of marriage. And though there is still a consensus in secular as well as church circles that adultery is a bad thing, a betrayal of relationship, it is the deceit and faithlessness that is seen as the sin, not the actual sex. In the Catholic church, teaching on contraception is disregarded by the majority. In no other area of church life is the gap between theory and practice so wide.

We live in a time when the deepest and most painful need of the human person is for intrinsic worth, unconditional acceptance that does not depend on being good, right, controlled, conformist, or on being pretty, young, successful, rich, employed. Or on being straight, white and male. But if people do not hear the word that says, 'yes, you are accepted' through the meaningful framework of faith; if they do not hear it through their belonging within an accepting community; if they do not hear it through their closeness to the land; then people increasingly and only seek and hope to hear it in their personal, and especially sexual, relationships.