wfn.org | Episcopalians: Bishop-elect Robinson shares his spiritual journey and vision

[dmack@episcopalchurch.org]

June 12, 2003

2003-131

Episcopalians: Bishop-elect Robinson shares his spiritual 
journey and vision

ENS EXCLUSIVE by Jan Nunley

(ENS) With 110 dioceses in the Episcopal Church, it seems 
someone is always electing a new bishop. But the attention of 
the Anglican world is now focused on one--the Rev. V. Gene 
Robinson, the first openly gay bishop-elect in the Episcopal 
Church, whose election will have to be ratified by General 
Convention this summer. 

Robinson, elected June 7, has been canon to the ordinary in New 
Hampshire since 1988 and serves as secretary for Province I, 
comprised of the dioceses of New England. Divorced and the 
father of two, he has been in a committed relationship for 13 
years with Mark Andrew, a health care professional. 

As controversy swirls around him, ENS decided it would be good 
to talk directly to Robinson about his election, his hopes for 
his episcopate--if his election is ratified--and his views of 
the church, the Bible, and the Gospel.

ENS: What was the election process like in the Diocese of New 
Hampshire?

ROBINSON: I have never heard of a diocese taking an election so 
seriously.  We had three evenings of the walkabout  "meet and 
greet" sessions, and over 700 people came out for that--in a 
little diocese like ours: 49 congregations; delegates, maybe 250 
people. I think that points to the health of the diocese. The 
questions were outstanding, substantive. They were about faith 
and vision and direction. 

It was different in Newark and Rochester, in that I was not 
present at either of those conventions.  So this was a very much 
more exciting moment for me, and also dangerous, in that it was 
a very odd feeling sitting among your colleagues, laity and 
clergy, and knowing that they're voting on you. And wondering 
what that's going to be like if the answer is no. I would often 
go into St. Paul's Church where the election was going to occur 
and try to imagine what that would be like.

I woke up that morning and said my prayers, and from that moment 
until the results of the election were announced I felt 
incredibly calm and at peace with what was going to happen.  I 
felt in God's care, and the love of people around me, and even 
had they chosen someone else to be their bishop, it was going to 
be okay. That was a surprise. And then of course to be greeted 
so thunderously I think that eruption of enthusiasm was a 
celebration of having come to a common mind about who they 
wanted to be their next bishop after such a long and thoughtful 
and careful process.

ENS: What was the next day like?

ROBINSON: In all three elections that I've been in, I've 
promised the rector of St. Paul's Church in Concord [New 
Hampshire] to preach the next day. I said to him, "I always hate 
you for this on Saturday night when I'm exhausted, and then I'm 
always grateful after I do it." 

And of course it was Pentecost. After having just had this 
experience of the Spirit, it was a little redundant! But the 
best thing about the day was the comments of people as they were 
leaving, saying "I'm so proud to be an Episcopalian." It was 
just an astounding experience for people to be so proud of their 
church. 

ENS: How is your family reacting to the news--and the attention?

ROBINSON: They have been so supportive. They have been on this 
journey with me for the last 10 years and they were just 
speechless and in tears and overjoyed. It's a special joy that 
we, and now our new son-in-law, share.

Just to put all this in perspective, so people don't think this 
is the only important thing going on in my life: We're about to 
be grandfathers! Right in the very middle of General Convention, 
our older daughter Jamee [25] is expecting our first grandchild, 
and we are thrilled.

My former wife called me two days before the election to wish me 
well and that she hoped that I was the next bishop of New 
Hampshire, and she was one of the very first to call and 
congratulate me on my election. Our relationship has been good 
since we were separated and divorced. It's one of the things I'm 
proudest of, the way we have treated each other.

You know, a priest came with us to the judge's chambers for our 
divorce, and we went back to church and released each other from 
our marriage vows and gave our wedding rings back as symbols of 
those vows. We have continued to jointly raise our children. A 
couple of weekends ago, we together graduated Ella [21] from 
UMass-Amherst.

ENS: You didn't grow up in the Episcopal Church. How did you 
come to be an Episcopalian?

ROBINSON: I had a really good theological upbringing in the 
Disciples of Christ (Christian Church). It is one of the few 
Eucharistically centered Protestant denominations--communion 
every Sunday. But it was the liturgy and the history of the 
Episcopal Church. It's important to me to have connections back 
to the earliest church. The apostolic succession is really 
important to me as a way of saying we are amongst a whole cloud 
of witnesses that go all the way back and it's important that we 
never forget our roots and as close as we can be to the early 
church, the better off we'll be.

I went to the University of the South [at Sewanee, Tennessee] as 
an undergraduate because my band leader in high school, who was 
an Episcopalian, said to apply there. So I won a full 
scholarship to Sewanee, and after four years of sitting in that 
chapel and singing in the choir, I became an Episcopalian, 
confirmed on Easter of my senior year. 

ENS: How long have you felt called to the episcopate?

ROBINSON: About 10 years.  God has been like a little yappy dog 
nipping at my heels about this, like the "hound of heaven." This 
is something I initially resisted because, as all of this 
publicity proves, it's not meant to be an easy journey for me if 
I were to be called to this ministry.

So I oftentimes felt like Jonah being asked to go to Nineveh and 
thinking, "Oh, my God, do I dare go?"--but not liking the 
thought of being swallowed by a whale either. I ultimately said 
"yes" to that, but it took a good long while before a diocese in 
the church could say "yes" back. We understand our calling not 
just to be from God but from the church, and so while I felt 
God's call, the church was not ready to call me. So I was in at 
least four processes and ultimately was not nominated in those 
places, before the Dioceses of Newark and Rochester did.

ENS: What kind of episcopate do you envision, if your election 
is confirmed by General Convention?

ROBINSON: A very hands-on, relational kind of episcopate.  I 
said to the delegates and in the walkabouts that if they didn't 
want a bishop who was going to be in their face, they really 
ought to elect someone else. 

We're going to re-imagine the Diocese of New Hampshire from the 
ground up. That will take about a year. We want to look at ways 
the bishop can be physically present and programmatically and 
personally  involved in the life of a congregation. It will 
probably involve regional confirmations so that the visitation 
can be more than just the confirmation class. I'm hoping to do 
visitations that last a couple of days so that there can be 
substantive conversations with the vestry, with young people in 
the parish, and to spend some time with the clergyperson so that 
I have some sense of the context in which that congregation is 
trying to do ministry.

The reason I was elected had nothing to do with my 
orientation--for many people it was probably in spite of it. It 
was more due to the relationships that I've built with them. At 
the end of each of those meet-and-greet sessions I said, "What 
would it be like to begin an episcopate with the kind of trust 
and depth of relationship that we already have?" Sometimes that 
takes years to build between a bishop and congregations and 
clergy. What would it be like to begin an episcopate with that 
groundwork already laid and then to go deeper? That's the most 
exciting opportunity I can imagine.

ENS: You've done much work on clergy wellness, how are you going 
to continue that in your episcopate?

ROBINSON: I'll try to model wellness myself. And I'm going to 
try to hold clergy accountable for that. We've got clergy who 
are not taking proper care of themselves and not only do they 
pay and their families pay, but their congregations pay. I'll be 
proactive about that, as their chief pastor.

ENS: When [Massachusetts bishop suffragan] Barbara Harris went 
to her first House of Bishops meeting, there was concern about 
whether the bishops would accept her as a sister bishop. Are you 
concerned about the same kind of thing? 

ROBINSON: I don't think so. It strikes me that I hadn't worried 
about that until you asked me the question--and I wonder if that 
has to do with male privilege. But I know so many of the 
bishops, having worked with them on any number of levels. Some 
of the most conservative bishops in the church have always been 
kind to me, knowing exactly who I am. So I don't envision that 
being a problem.

ENS: What about Lambeth 2008?

ROBINSON: Can't wait!

I want to say that I really do care about what they [bishops of 
the Anglican Communion] think and feel. It's been a big part of 
my prayer life about whether I should do this. There are those 
who would say that I'm doing this to the church or that New 
Hampshire is doing this to the church. It's not my goal to do 
anything to hurt this church, either locally or internationally.

I was in Uganda for three or four weeks helping set up a 
national peer education program for AIDS education. I never once 
mentioned being gay while I was there. It was irrelevant and I 
knew it would probably offend, and I was there to get a job done 
and to save lives from AIDS.

It's a very different context, and I have no doubt in my mind 
that people who disagree with me on this in other provinces of 
the Anglican Communion are following their call from God and 
their understanding of Scripture as best they know how. I just 
hope that they can acknowledge that I also am following God's 
call and my read of Scripture as best I know how. 

I said to the people of New Hampshire that as long as we can 
continue coming to the altar rail and receiving the body and 
blood of Christ together, we can figure this other stuff out. We 
don't have to agree about everything in order to continue 
finding our unity and our faith in Jesus Christ.

So I would assume that Lambeth would go very well because God 
would have it be that way and the Spirit will be at work to make 
sure it's that way.

ENS: Are you what would be called "orthodox" in your beliefs? 

ROBINSON: I would probably horrify many of my liberal colleagues 
with how traditional I am about many things. I'm very slow to 
throw out something that the church has believed for a long 
time. 

I'm sort of in my 'second naivete' stage. Like most clergy, we 
learned in seminary all about how the Scriptures were put 
together, and we all go through a doubting time, and now I'm 
just back to believing the whole thing. I have no trouble 
affirming what I see as the eternal truth in the Creeds and in 
Scripture.

And yet I do believe the Spirit calls us from time to time to 
grow and to learn and to change. We did that with the ordination 
of women. We decided that we were going to go against centuries 
of tradition, and a few years later it's hard to imagine the 
ordained ministry without the gifts that women bring to it.

On race, we turned a corner and stopped thinking we didn't want 
to offend those who didn't want us to take a strong stand on 
civil rights. We decided we were going to do the right thing and 
then deal as pastorally as we could with those who didn't 
understand why we were doing that. 

And I think we're about to turn that corner with the issue of 
gay and lesbian inclusion in the church. I hope that General 
Convention will do the right thing, and then be as absolutely 
pastoral as we possibly can with those who will be confused, 
angered, or disillusioned by that action.

But people in the church can still make statements about gay and 
lesbian folk that they wouldn't come close to making about women 
and people of color. For there to be a House of Bishops Theology 
Committee dealing with this issue and not have a third to half 
of the people being gay or lesbian doesn't seem abnormal to 
anyone at all. Yet you would not convene such a committee on 
race or the ordination of women. People would be outraged that 
people being talked about were not represented on the committee. 

ENS: To you, what is the Gospel?

ROBINSON: The Good News that the world needs to hear is that 
they are loved beyond their wildest imagining. We know that 
because of the love affair that God has had with humankind since 
the beginning of creation. And our story about that love affair 
is the Old and New Testaments, which testify to God's love and 
faithfulness and initiative in loving us, even when we are not 
willing to love God back.

That comes to its full climax, its unique expression, in the 
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In him, we meet 
this maker of ours who has loved us from the very beginning. We 
no longer have to wonder what God is like. All we have to do is 
to look at this man.

I believe that the Spirit that works in and among us is that 
Spirit of God which continues to teach us that we have far more 
in common with one another than we have which makes us 
different, and continues to bring us back to God. God is still 
initiating.

In the little rural church in the South I grew up in, we used to 
use those fans from the funeral home that had the picture of 
Jesus standing at the door shaped like a heart, knocking on the 
door. It is just simply the truth--that is how much God wants to 
have a relationship with us.

For me, I think one of the great pearls of the 1979 Book of 
Common Prayer is its refocusing on the baptismal covenant, which 
for me is the Gospel in our day and time. It's as much a purpose 
statement for why we do what we do as we have. 

ENS: What's your relationship with the Bible?

ROBINSON: I don't believe that we can easily disregard any part 
of Scripture. But I do believe that there are parts of Scripture 
which are culturally and time-bound, and are not eternal truths 
that all of us must follow. The difficult part, of course, is 
figuring out which is which. And we all do that, even the most 
fundamentalist of us do that. I don't believe it's possible for 
us not to pick and choose. 

The question is, is that a faithful picking and choosing, and do 
we do it in community? The way I make sure that I'm not reading 
Scripture through my own ego is to subject my reading of 
Scripture to the community of the church, for critique, for 
learning, for questions. Bible study always needs to be a 
communal activity.

ENS: In your understanding, what do you think is important to 
Jesus?

ROBINSON: Most Christians claim to want to be Christ-like. Yet 
when you look at what we do it's often not what Jesus would have 
been doing. Jesus spent virtually all his time with those most 
marginalized, at the edges of society. He spent time with 
lepers, the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery. 
Like them, I know what it feels like to hear the good news that 
I am loved by this extravagant God of ours, and I think the 
church needs to be about bringing people in from the margins 
into the center of the life of the church. That's why people on 
Sunday told me they were so proud to be Episcopalian, because it 
was a dramatic example of the church saying no one is outside 
God's love.'

ENS: For you, what is holiness?

ROBINSON: The journey--and it is a journey, not a 
destination--to holiness is different for everyone. But for 
everyone it involves living a life close to God. For some that 
will involve lots of prayer time; for others more action than 
reflection. We each do that in a different way.

I have been sustained by my relationship with Jesus through so 
many difficult times. I've often felt, like the ancient Hebrews, 
with just enough manna on the ground every morning to get me 
through that day--without any doubt as to where the manna came 
from, and to know that you owe your very life to this living God 
of ours.

To me, that's holiness. Which doesn't mean you get it all right 
all the time, it doesn't mean you don't make mistakes, it 
doesn't mean you aren't a sinner and sometimes your own worst 
enemy -- or God's! But that we have this loving, forgiving God 
who's willing to stay close and stay in relationship with us 
even when we least deserve it. That's holiness.

ENS: What will you do between now and General Convention?

ROBINSON: I'm going back to New Hampshire. I'm taking a group to 
Holderness School. We have an anti-racism event this summer, and 
we'd always hoped that the bishop-elect could attend, and now I 
can assure you that he will. I'll be leading a planning session 
for a big fall provincial convocation on the environment. And a 
week from now we'll have our pre-General Convention gathering of 
the province.

So I am up to my eyeballs in the Lord's work!

------

--The Rev. Jan Nunley is deputy director of Episcopal News 
Service.