Why God wouldn't object to gay bishops
CC: Vatican: General Delivery
Mary Wakefield
The sun was already high over Church Hill in Hertfordshire at 10.30 on Thursday morning as I followed Christina Rees through the garden, up to her front door. Tiny, red-gold chickens the size of tennis balls sped across the lawn and peacocks dragged their heavy tails through the flower beds.
"I had scrambled peacock eggs for breakfast," said Christina, over her shoulder, as she stepped inside. "I need all the primal peacock energy I can get, to do battle with the bishops!"
Peacock power must be pretty potent stuff. Christina is American by birth, but a member of our General Synod, and chairwoman of Women and the Church (Watch), which struggles to free the Church of England from patriarchal prejudice.
And within an hour, turbo-charged by egg power, she'd explained the Anglican Communion to me, unravelled all its competing theologies, and made it appear suddenly quite clear that despite his recent nod in the direction of the conservatives, the Archbishop of Canterbury will eventually have to go with the liberal flow, to follow in the wake of America and embrace not just women bishops, but actively gay clergy as well.
I sat opposite Christina in silence, listening and learning. Before our chat I had imagined the two warring factions of the worldwide Anglican Church to be evenly matched.
The liberals had been cheered up by the ordination of the squid-enthusiast and aviator, Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori in the USA; the conservatives had taken heart from Rowan Williams's recent suggestion that all Anglican Churches sign up to a Bible-based "covenant". They would be neck and neck, I imagined, during the debate about women bishops at this week's General Synod.
Christina knew better. She picked up a cat from between her sandals, and said: "You want to know what the headlines will be on July 10?" Yes please. "They'll all say the same thing: 'C of E votes for women bishops!' So hooray! It'll be a wonderful day and a step towards redressing the great mistakes that were made in the first few centuries of the Christian Church."
What mistakes? Christina looked surprised. "The suppression of women, of course. The early Christians were so keen to separate themselves from Goddess worship that they began to treat women as inferior. It was something Jesus himself never, ever intended." So Jesus would have wanted women bishops? "Absolutely." And actively gay bishops like Gene Robinson, would he have minded them? "No, not if they were in a faithful relationship, of course not."
For Christina Rees and Bishop Jefferts Schori, perhaps for Rowan Williams, the ordination of women into the episcopacy and the ordination of gay priests are connected in a very basic way. At the heart of the matter is the liberal Anglican idea of who God is and what He wants from us.
Our Creator doesn't intervene much, according to them, He is not a worrier or much of a judge. He doesn't mind which prayer book we use, or who officiates in church because all he cares about is love - and it is the same with His Son.
Jesus's defining feature, His divine feature, was and is His unconditional love, they say. His gender is irrelevant, as is His sexuality - both as arbitrary and unimportant as His hair colour or what clothes He wore. To be Christ-like then, to stand in for Him as a priest, it doesn't matter if you're boy, girl, gay or straight - all you need is love.
"Our duty as Christians is just to respond to the infinite love of God, and to stop endlessly dictating who's out and who's in," said Christina.
"Come on! God is Spirit! So how do we know how He wants to be worshipped? We don't." The sun, now dead ahead, shone in through the skylight, picking out pieces of coloured glass, pebbles, seashells arranged on shelves. So after women bishops in the C of E, you think openly gay clergy is next?
"Let's get real," said Christina. "Look how many of them there are already. It's just not official yet."
So is Rowan Williams thinking along these lines too? Christina just smiled. And maybe she's right.
It is true that in my part of London, a nice lady priest and her girlfriend run their parish side by side, and in the next-door church, a gay priest and his partner do the same. If their spiritual leader thought they were making the Creator cross, surely he'd have put his foot down by now. It is also true that for all the talk of a "covenant", there is no mention of its content yet, which would take painful years to negotiate.
Why then, if the Church of England is so intrinsically liberal, did the Archbishop bother with the idea of drawing up rules at all? "Perhaps he's just playing for time," said Christina. "He's got to avoid schism and stop calls for the Episcopal Church to be cut off. And after all, sooner or later, the Spirit will move even the hardest hearts."
BUT HOW LONG MUST WE WAIT?
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