CV NEWS FEED // The founder of Eden Invitation, a community and ministry for Catholics with LGBT experiences, spoke at the National Eucharistic Congress about a sacramental worldview of sex and gender.
Anna Carter founded Eden Invitation in 2017 as a way to share her experience as a Catholic deeply in love with Our Lord who has experienced same-sex desires. The blog grew into a community for Christians and Catholics with LGBT experiences that now “creates space to receive the whole person, grow systems of mutual support, and empower for creative discipleship.”
At the Congress, Carter gave a talk entitled “Broken and Blessed: Sex, Gender, and a Sacramental Worldview,” which was focused on the Eucharist and how it informs a sacramental worldview. She used the four verbs of the Consecration: taken, blessed, broken, given.
“If you came here looking for ‘hot tips for your loved ones who are gays’… that’s not what this talk is gonna be,” she cautioned. She added that many people tell Catholics with LGBT experiences that those experiences are not their identity, which is true.
“But if it’s not our identity, then we need to see what it’s part of. And if it’s not our own experience, we need to see how those disparate experiences of sexuality in general are part of a larger whole, and we need to be able to talk like that.
“So we’re going to do that via a sacramental analogy, because it’s the Eucharistic Congress: taken, blessed, broken, given.”
Carter reflected on suffering in her talk. She noted that in the consecration of the Eucharist, the bread is blessed before it is broken, using it as an analogy to explain how God allows those He loves to be broken. She reflected on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced and broken out of love for us, and how that very brokenness gave birth to the Church. She then explained how and why God breaks our hearts.
She said she believes God wants to break our hearts from attachment to sin and our own expectations and to form our hearts to develop compassion for others.
Carter ended her talk by saying she hopes all Catholics with an LGBT experience can allow God “to break our hearts in all the right places. And that we can allow ourselves to be given away. And that our very lives, lived in the frail human flesh that God has given us, becomes a means to encounter grace.”
