C S Lewis, in his Argument from Desire, wrote: ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’

In other words, humanity’s innate longing for something more than the material world can offer is itself perhaps evidence of there being something more than the material world can offer. It is a profound argument, and too often shut down by the classic if rather shallow counter-argument that if you can’t prove it, it ain’t there!

Let’s agree religion at its worst is an absolute nightmare. But let’s also agree that religion as we understand that word and at its best, meets a deep and abiding need in our search for meaning because it gives shape and form to these innate longings. It helps us to articulate them. Like language itself, religion gives us a chance to say what we feel most deeply. It is the language of faith in a transcendent reality that is too easily dismissed.

And because religion matters, so too does religious doctrine. We can’t just ditch it all as an inconvenience. Christian doctrine and its historical formularies (the framework for those doctrines) matter. Religion without doctrine is like a language without grammar and syntax. Without rules there is no game. Without language nothing much can be said.

So we should respect and honour the doctrines of the Church of England – but we should also guard against those occasions – and I suggest the debate about gay marriage is one such occasion – when doctrine takes priority over people; when tradition becomes the end we must protect and preserve at all costs, and people, people created to flourish, are reduced to the collateral damage of those well-guarded laws. When doctrines and dogmas are used to keep people in their place, we make religion the end, and people the means. This is wrong and this is the problem with the debate on blessing gay marriages.

Think of the woman caught in adultery – stoning was part of Mosaic law but does Jesus pick up the stone? No, he says, if you lot are better than her, you kill her. They can’t and she walks away, free to discover a new way of being. Healing on the sabbath? Picking corn on the Sabbath? It’s ok. Remember, says Jesus, the sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

In other words, the rules are given by God for the purpose of enabling the flourishing of life, not to suffocate and entrap it. I come to fulfil the Law, not to abolish it, Jesus said – and to fulfil it means to breathe the Holy Spirit back into it. To make it no longer a moribund thing.

We heard this week that the House of Bishops has once again kicked the issue of gay blessings a bit further further down the road. This blog, if only because of space, has to focus on the principle more than the detail. But, in summary, the Bishops have paused the intention to have a trial period for stand-alone blessings for gay couples, something many of us were looking forward to, and which was agreed some time ago. There must be more process, we’re told, more discussion, more voting, more delay. Meanwhile the tail – tradition and doctrine – continues to wag the dog – the Holy Spirit and the human flourishing it brings. Same-sex blessings can still be carried out as part of a regular church services where the PCC agree, and conservative members of the Church continue to argue that according to doctrine marriage is between a man and a woman.

It seems the difficulties are three-fold – the first and most understandable one is this tension between doctrine and real lives as they are lived – I think it’s wrong in this instance but I get it, and I write about it above. The second issue, I would suggest, is about placating conservative views both here at home and across the Anglican Communion. Churches across the Communion tend to have conservative leaderships (though not always) but we do need to remember there are gay people in their congregations and communities too and they need and deserve a voice. When did Jesus let the most powerful people have the last word? At home, conservative churches are threatening to (among other things) withhold finance, forgetting that Scripture also has lots to day about how we use our money. The third issue is unity – Jesus prayed that his people would be one, and it matters that we find a way forward together. But unity is not uniformity and surrendering to the loudest and most powerful voices hollows out the message of the Gospel. While the Church carries on taking its time, human beings live and die feeling rejected. They understandably begin to doubt the truth of the unconditional love that is preached. They look and see the uncomfortable irony – a church that cheerfully (and rightly) puts itself out to enable heterosexual atheists to have a Christian wedding, but cannot find its way to grant the same grace to faithful gay Christians.

The 20th century American Rabbi, Abraham Heschel put the misguided focus on tradition this way: ‘When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendour of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.’

That is the real danger here – Christian scripture is founded on Love. Its founder and chief protagonist is Divine Love. And this Love personified did not destroy the Law but challenged it time and time and time again – and he challenged it in the name of a people longing for justice and mercy. We may try to keep the Holy Spirit in boxes marked doctrine or tradition, and we may wrap the boxes up in insults like ‘woke’ and ‘revisionist’. But in the end the Spirit will not be contained by doctrine any more than Love was held back by the laws of the grave.