He’s Not Just a Bishop. He’s Our Brother.

August 3, 2008

I want to thank my compadre John “Torch Boy” Shore over at Suddenly Christian for giving me the heads-up on this article. I’m not Anglican or Episcopalian nor do I play one on TV, but nevertheless I had the good fortune several years ago to meet Bishop Gene Robinson. He was delightfully personable, gentle in spirit, passionate in commitment and just a great down-to-earth type guy. Bishop Guy Sir, I mean. I was impressed with him then. All the more so now.

This article comes from the August 3, 2008 edition of The New York Times Week in Review.

Cast Out, but at the Center of the Storm

By: John Burns

CANTERBURY, England — For a man at the heart of a bitter dispute that threatens to sunder the Anglican communion, Bishop Gene Robinson seems more relaxed than almost any of the 650 bishops and archbishops gathered for the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade assembly that brings together the leaders of an estimated 80 million Anglicans worldwide.

The easy demeanor and constant smile of this openly gay 61-year-old Episcopalian bishop of New Hampshire, when we meet at the Falstaff Hotel just down the street from Canterbury Cathedral, are all the more remarkable for the fact that he is the only man among the many wearing the Anglican bishop’s purple on Canterbury’s streets these past two weeks who wasn’t invited to the conference. Indeed, since the conference first met in 1867, he was the only Anglican bishop anywhere, except those disgraced for disputed legitimacy, malfeasance or criminality, to be told — in his case, by the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury — that there was no seat for him at the Lambeth table.

Not that being the ghost at the banquet has inhibited Bishop Robinson. He may, in fact, have been the busiest prelate in town other than Archbishop Williams and in some ways the most popular, since he decided to carve out an off-stage role for himself here while on a tour that included delivering sermons in London and Glasgow.

On Canterbury’s gabled streets, he has been greeted on almost every block by well-wishers. “Good for you, bishop!” a man in his 20s with fashionably blond-streaked hair shouted as the American passed on his way to the 13th-century Franciscan friary where he is staying. “Thank you, thank you,” responded the bishop, beaming.

At a birthday gathering at the friary, among monks he has joined at prayer at 7 a.m. every day, everyone seemed keen to have themselves photographed with the genial man from Concord, N.H.

Bishop Robinson is used to being a standout; elected in 2003, he is the only acknowledged gay man, in an open partnership with another man, ever to serve as an Anglican bishop. That’s lit a slow-burning fuse within the Anglican fold that has crept ever closer to the dynamite that could blow the worldwide communion apart. Lambeth’s achievement this time, if there is one, will lie simply in the fact that Archbishop Williams — by reworking the conference rules and procedures and abandoning any resolutions or votes so as to avoid an open showdown over homosexuality, and by keeping Bishop Robinson from entering the tent — has managed to put off, though surely not to quash altogether, the threat of open schism.

Shortly before the bishops gathered here two weeks ago, a group of traditionalist and evangelical bishops, many from Africa but some from the United States, Australia and other developed countries, met in Jerusalem to establish the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. They resolved never to accept open homosexuality among clergy or bishops, and also rejected the notion of the archbishop of Canterbury as the communion’s supreme voice.

Though the Jerusalem group denied the characterization, their group, inevitably, was seen by other Anglicans as the nascent form of a separate Anglican Communion. Their stand was followed by a boycott of Lambeth, with at least 220 bishops and primates among the 880 invited choosing to stay away. That, in itself, seemed like a defeat for Archbishop Williams, whose strategy for the conference has rested on drawing as many of the disaffected conservatives as possible to Canterbury, and drawing them into a cloistered, no-press-admitted dialogue with liberals and reformers that would foster a mood of compromise on the issue of gays and lesbians in the clergy. In effect, shutting the door on Bishop Robinson, in a letter dispatched 14 months before Lambeth convened, did little to placate the conservatives, but much that made a platform for the American.

In negotiations between Archbishop Williams’s staff and three American bishops designated by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the consolation offered to the American for not being seated was an opportunity to be interviewed, at a conference session, by a BBC reporter. Bishop Robinson said he rejected that as falling short of the “substantive and meaningful” role he wanted, but said he had urged other Episcopalian bishops, at a meeting this spring in Navasota, Tex., not to boycott Lambeth on his behalf. In the end, 150 American bishops came, led by Bishop Jefferts Schori.

Bishop Robinson characterized the role he fashioned for himself here as nonconfrontational. “I think the leadership here expected me to show up, and protest, and try to wrestle the microphone from Archbishop Rowan, or try to get into meetings to which I wasn’t invited, and I’ve done none of these things,” he said. Instead, he said, what he had sought with his gadfly presence was “to bear witness to the love of God I know as a follower of Jesus Christ, and to be a constant reminder to the bishops gathered here that there are gay and lesbian Christians sitting in the pews in every one of their churches, and that they have taken vows to serve all in their flock.” [Emphasis mine]

Talking in the courtyard of the Falstaff, founded as a 15th-century pilgrims’ inn, it seemed natural to ask whether he saw himself in the mold of Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury who was martyred in the cathedral a slingshot away. “Heavens no!” he said, chuckling, “I have no aspirations of that kind at all, only to be a good bishop.” To make the point, he gestured to a burly British Army veteran seated close by, hired as his security companion for the tour, and cited the fact that he and his partner, Mark Andrew, wore bulletproof vests at his consecration five years ago.

By Bishop Robinson’s estimate, at least some countries represented at the Lambeth meeting have the death penalty for homosexuality, while about 25 others make same-sex relationships punishable by imprisonment. But he said that at least some conservative bishops seemed open to dialogue. American bishops have held two evening sessions to introduce Bishop Robinson to non-Americans at the conference; these have drawn about 200 bishops and their spouses, including some from African provinces that have been strongly hostile to compromise on homosexuality.

“A goodly number of the bishops took a considerable risk by being there,” the bishop said. “There were those among them who spoke very movingly, and without rancor, of the problems my consecration has posed for them. Afterwards, they told me they would pray for me, and asked me to pray for them.”

If there was any edge to the bishop’s feelings, and it was only fleeting, it came in his references to Archbishop Williams. As an Oxford-and-Cambridge educated theologian, the 58-year-old archbishop gained a reputation as a deep-thinking liberal, strongly sympathetic to gay rights, and underscored that as archbishop of Wales by appointing openly gay men to the clergy. “We were dancing in the streets when Archbishop Rowan was appointed,” Bishop Robinson said of the prelate’s elevation to the Canterbury seat in 2003. But then came the archbishop’s efforts to placate the conservatives, and his denial of a Lambeth invitation to Bishop Robinson.

The two men have met only once, in 2005, and that meeting, Bishop Robinson said, was held at the deanery of St. Paul’s Cathedral, not at Lambeth Palace, to avoid any chance of it being noticed by the British press. He said he sympathized with the archbishop, who had been placed in “an impossible position” by the uncompromising attitude that hard-line conservatives in the communion had taken on homosexuality. But by excluding him, the American said, the archbishop had made a strategic miscalculation. “In the end, the conservatives didn’t come to the conference anyway, only proving that bullies never get enough,” he said. “They always come back for more.”

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