Expansive inclusion

A recent comment on a blog post I wrote a few years ago on my interfaith marriage inspired me to write more about my current circumstances. In the early years of keeping a blog, I wrote a number of posts about my marriage to Kevin, who is an atheist, as that was something I was grappling with at the time. Our conscious engagement with our interfaith marriage expanded our outlook on life and the world around us. It expanded it so much that I feel I'm now engaging new and different paradigms of inclusivity.

The issue for me, then, was the idea that Christian marriage and my life as a Christian would exclude people of others faiths and other ways of being. I was seeking greater inclusivity as the good news Jesus came to bring seems to me to be intrinsically inclusive - always broadening the scope of love to include more and more of those the religious leaders of the day sought to exclude. I wanted to explore what an inclusive way of being might look like.

I became increasingly aware of how marriage and the concept of the nuclear family are in themselves exclusive. I've become sceptical about the idea of the nuclear family. I'm drawn more and more to the idea of intentional family, which can include various people from various walks of life choosing to be a family to one another. In this model, there are no categories of 'single', 'married' and 'divorced' but rather just people living together, loving each other and forming meaningful life-long relationships with one another. The label 'married' falls away as the primary identifier and instead we are people engaging people.

Embracing ever expanding inclusivity - to open my heart more and more to include greater diversity, newness, otherness and difference - is the most beautiful journey I could ever have embarked on.