The Episcopalian Dilemma

As promised yesterday, Bush, this one is about fathers, church, gay marriage, tolerance… So let me begin by telling you a bit about my father. I may have mentioned before that he was an Anglican priest—that is, the British (parent) version of your Episcopal Church in America. (You’ll forgive me if I repeat myself from time to time, but I imagine you might have forgotten this detail by now anyway.) He was a devout Christian, but one who always struggled with his faith, and never stopped asking the hard questions; and who was always willing to change when he came up with different answers than the ones he had before.

I’ll tell you what I mean: when he started out, as a very young man, he was trained as a “high church” man. “High church” meant lots of ceremony. Robes, vestments, incense, altar cloths, candles, plainsong chanting, confession—the whole ball of wax. He loved that stuff with all his heart. They used to say the wider the dog collar, the more “low church” the wearer. My father always wore a very narrow one.

He wore that narrow collar until the day he died—at least whenever he dressed up in his robes of office. But in many other ways he heard a different message as the years went by, and he changed. Much of the high church ceremony went overboard when he heard a different message from parishioners who were “lower” than himself. He was the pastor of small parishes in the Midlands, where the congregations were more conservative, in the old sense of the word, more protestant in their suspicion of such wordly trappings, which they tended to associate with Roman Catholicism. Incense, for example, was completely out. The bereta—that little pointed clerical cap—was gone. And he sacrificed much of his love of ceremony in favor of the simplicity that they embraced.

More significantly, perhaps, he leaned more and more, in his later years, towards the ecumenical movement. He learned the wisdom of accomodation, joining others in the search for common ground between the diverse Christian practices. Throughout his life, too, he took the side of human justice, tolerance, and charity. As I remember it, charity was one of his favorite words, and one that recurred often in his sermons. Charity, that is, in its sense of caritas, a spiritual love, a caring for his fellow humans no matter what their standing in life.

I can’t resist adding that he had a sense of humor, too. He avoided that self-righteous kind of piety, the breast-beating variety. His humor could be directed not only at himself, but at the excesses of religion. I remember him telling me of his undergraduate days, in the 1920s, when the fundamentalist Oxford movement was in full swing: adherents at his own university were naïve enough to dub themselves the Cambridge University New Testament Society, and to send flyers all over town to announce their activities—to the derision of their fellow students—with their acronym in bold letters at the top. (Sorry, Bush, propriety requires that I leave you to work that one out for yourself. Hint: the acronym is the aggregate of initial letters in a nomenclature, such as, for example, U.S.A.)

All of which brings me back—finally!—to the question I started out to ask: what would my father say about the brouhaha in the world-wide Anglican Communion over the appointment of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire, and the increasing tolerance in the North American Episcopal church toward homosexuality? In Canada, for example, I hear that one diocese is proposing a liturgy dedicated to same-sex marriages. If you can imagine!

Now leaders of the Anglican Communion, I read in Saturday’s New York Times, have requested the Episcopal Church, USA, to withdraw its official representatives from their conference, in order to avoid a potentially divisive confrontation. The report suggested that everyone concerned was rather pleased with this solution, but I myself found it sadly evasive.

So what would my father say? He nursed no condemnation of homosexuals, to my knowledge. He had, in fact, many good friends in the gay community—though it was hardly a “gay community” in his day: gay men were outcasts, objects of loathing, ridicule or, at best, pity, and beyond the pale of the law; gay women, scarcely heard of. And yet my father did nothing to deter my friendship, as a teenager, with an openly gay couple who lived in the shadow of the church belltower in one of his villages.

He did warn me once, improperly, I assume, when the local police had tipped him off that the “vicar’s son”—myself, at about sixteen—had been seen entering and leaving the residence, in another or his parishes, of a man who was under observation and investigation for the then criminal activity of engaging in sex with other men. It was not, I think, with my father’s approval of the police activity, but more as a way of keeping me out of trouble with the constabulary. (In case you’re wondering, Bush, I was innocent: I’d experienced far more in the way of male-male sexual contact at my upright, heavily Anglican boarding school than at this genuinely nice man’s home. But that’s another story.)

Anyway, bottom line, were he alive today, I like to believe my father would be firmly on the side of tolerance. He would be questioning the tenets of his faith, and struggling with the teachings of his church. But he would be capable, in the end, of recognizing his shared humanity with the victims of discrimination. He would surely want to see them included in the embrace of "Mother Church", as he sometimes called her, not excluded. He would preach from his pulpit, one more time, about the need for caritas. He was that kind of a man.