HARTFORD, CT: Episcopal Church's First Openly Gay Bishop Sees A Higher Purpose To The Debate

By JOEL LANG
The Hartford Courant
January 23 2007

Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop at the center of the rift over homosexuality that has led some Virginia parishes to align themselves with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, stopped in Hartford Monday to deliver a message of reconciliation for the church and some news about himself.

"I believe with my whole heart that the Archbishop of Nigeria [Peter Akinola] and I are going to be in heaven together. And we're going to get along together, because God won't have it any other way. So we better start practicing now," Robinson said at a luncheon attended by a dozen local church leaders at Real Art Ways.

He was responding to a plea from The Very Rev. Mark Pendleton, dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford, who told Robinson, "You've been demonized by so many. ... How do you help me to not demonize others?"

Looking at ease in gray slacks and a blue fleece vest worn unzipped over a burgundy shirt, Robinson, 59, said he received 500 to 600 e-mails a day, both angry and supportive, after he was elected Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, the event that ignited revolts by some conservative parishes, including a group known as the Connecticut Six.

"I think everybody is doing the best we can. We're all trying to figure life out," Robinson said.

"The thing that has sustained me through all this is God has seemed so very close that prayer has seemed almost redundant. ... Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes God lets the storm rage, and calms the child."

Personally, "I couldn't be happier. I think that's the best revenge," he said.

He said his 15,000-member diocese was healthy, but the news he seemed most eager to relay was that immediately after the luncheon he was leaving for the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary film, featuring his story and those of four other gay families, has been nominated for a grand jury prize.

Titled "For the Bible Tells Me So," it is about families split by their beliefs about homosexuality and Scripture. He said his own parents talked more openly to the filmmaker than they had to him after his own announcement at age 39 that he was gay and getting divorced.

At the end of the luncheon, Robinson hugged the host, Bishop John Selders of the Amistad United Church of Christ, and said, "If I miss my plane to Sundance, I'm going to hold you all responsible."

In an interview before the luncheon, sitting on the edge of the stage in the Real Art Ways cinema, Robinson said the media has exaggerated the strength and importance of the small minority of parishes at odds with the national church's liberal stance on homosexuality.

The parishes are "seeking to get themselves recognized as the true expression of Anglicanism in this country and not inconsequentially get the Episcopal Church - I don't know what the word is - unrecognized as that legitimate expression. And I think they are using more conservative churches around the globe to support that claim," he said.

"In a world facing 40 million people dying of AIDS and an increasing gap between rich and poor, this seems like a waste of our time and energy, debating the rightness and wrongness of gay and lesbian people and their relationships," he said.

"I think it breaks God's heart that we would be focusing on such an internal issue, instead of focusing upon the world which, as I understand it, Jesus called us to."

Robinson said the division over homosexuality is not much different from an earlier split over ordaining women priests.

"Let's face it, I believe God is doing a new thing in the world. I don't just see civil forces at work in terms of increasing acceptance of gay and lesbian people. I see God's hand at work there, and I believe we are joining God in that work in terms of this debate within the church," he said.

Contact Joel Lang at jlang@courant.com.

Copyright 2007, Hartford Courant

FOOTNOTE: The Sundance Festival is also showing a movie called ZOO about bestiality.