Stuart Wolfendale

“PLEASE BISHOP ROBINSON……..”

If you are gay, alcoholic and a Christian, there is one pickle of a circumstance you could find yourself in. You can end up a bishop. This is where the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson found himself , rather like a drunk in a cassock waking up in an all male rave party. I can’t say I blame Bishop Robinson. Somewhere along the way he may have asked the Almighty with understandable irony. “Alright, You have made me a gay, an alcoholic and a priest. Is there anything else You’d like to lay on?”

This is a dangerous question to ask of God because there are all manner of disadvantages that can be made available. I suspect that Robinson posed it and got an answer that shocked his socks off. God replied that, yes, there was something else. He wanted Robinson to stand for election as Episcopalian Bishop of New Hampshire.

I have no idea whether Robinson was really right to do so. Only he knows the answer. He could have lifted his cassock to his knees and run from the nomination showing, to some people, prudence on two counts. He would have avoided moving into a bishop’s house with a boyfriend – and rolling around inside it with a bottle. The alternative was to do as he did, lay bare a sexual rift in Anglicanism which was not of his making, put his trust in the Lord and wing it where the booze was concerned. It may all have been a bit much for him. On top of all else, in February last year, Bishop Robinson went into a rehabilitation centre for alcoholism.

Even if Robinson had been straight, the prospect of his appointment as a bishop, lamed as he knew he was by licquor, should have been of tearing concern to him. Yet, more than that, he approached episcopal office as a declared homosexual with a live-in lover, knowing that would heap visceral objection upon him from whole communities of his fellow Anglicans and queer bashers world-wide. That sort of awareness keeps you awake at nights. So does a bottle of vodka.

It is not true to say that alcoholics cannot be trusted to take good decisions. There are too many drunks out there managing to function sufficiently well for some of the time for that to hold water. But as personal, private pastoral decisions go, they don’t come deeper or more difficult than the one Robinson had to take, striving as he must have done to make something out of his prayers. Six stiff ones round lunch time and half a bottle of Jack Daniels before dinner can skewer that outcome mightily.

It would also be untrue to say that alcoholics do not want to take decisions. Depending on what part of their drinking cycle they are in, they are capable of the most imaginative and courageous of commitments. The problem is that, as the cycle moves on and downwards, the commitment moves with it like a lead albatross and the man has neither the strength nor the courage to unburden himself. Thus it is possible to find yourself drunk in charge of a diocese.

Yet, what if this priest did succeed in asking God that opening question and, through the thick, slopping Burgundy and the hangovers hard enough to stop dead a Challenger, he heard the answer correctly? Yes, it ran, I do want you to be a bishop who lives with his male lover and goes to gay pride marches and talks about life as the son of a sharecropper who didn’t have a bathroom until he was ten. And when you finally stop pretending that you are a real man who can handle his drinking problem all by himself, I want you to be a bishop-in-rehab. I’m all into strength out of weakness. It’s amazing how many people don’t get that bit. Now, go and be My poster boy.

Again, no one but Robinson can tell if that is the way it went, but wouldn’t it be just splendid if that is what happened? Alcoholics, gays, lesbians, drug addicts, ex cons, chronic depressives, washroom attendants, kids who get bullied at school, truly desperate housewives and millions who don’t dare say boo to a goose could all become bishops.

As we doubt that little list, bear in mind that if Jesus loved ‘Mrs. Robinson’ and loves Bishop Robinson, he probably loves that lot too. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t love the stuffed shirted, the self righteous, the workaholics, the perfectionists or those who say they know His mind intimately, either. It’s just that, if Bishop Robinson heard right, they don’t have first dibs on bishoprics. The others can have a go as well.

Its all very liberating and a miracle for the media. There’s a black man at the archdiocese of York and now there is a woman in a mitre. In the meantime, the vulnerable and the foolish, already exalted, are coming clean on their thrones. By the way, if I just happened to be gay and an Anglican and drank like a whale, my needs would be modest. In fact, the bishopric of the Seychelles would do me nicely.

ENDS.

Posted in All, God