American Prophets by Jack Jenkins

Author:Jack Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The Hard Work of Transformation

Bishop Gene Robinson could just make out the music as he shuffled through one of the shadowy back passageways of Washington National Cathedral, his clerical vestments billowing behind him. The tune was slightly atypical for an Episcopalian service, and the choir, too, was slightly atypical, at least by the standards of a cathedral that regularly hosts funerals for presidents and senators. The song was “Beautiful City” from the musical Godspell, performed by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC.

The rendition made perfect sense to the seventy-one-year-old Robinson, the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church. As he paused in a tiny, hidden room that October 2018 morning, he hoped it would have meant something to his companion as well. In his hands Robinson cupped a vessel containing the ashes of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay University of Wyoming student who had been brutally beaten, tortured, and left to die by assailants in 1998. The twenty-one-year-old succumbed to his injuries six days after the attack. Widely remembered as a symbol of the harm done by antigay violence, Shepard is sometimes described as a martyr to the cause of LGBTQ rights. What many people didn’t remember was that Shepard was also a devoted churchgoer. An Episcopalian, to be exact.

Robinson remembered. He thought about this fact as he listened to the practiced crooning of the altos echo through the cathedral. As the final notes began to fade, he took a breath and joined his fellow clergy at the back of the church. Still holding Shepard’s ashes, he processed down the wide, center aisle of the cavernous sanctuary. He stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed on the altar, as a lone flute played a soaring version of the hymn “Morning Has Broken.” Some two thousand pairs of eyes stared back at him as he passed, many already glistening with tears.

The bishop later explained to me that by interring the young man’s remains at the cathedral, he saw the day as an occasion to celebrate Shepard and an opportunity to unite, if only for a moment, two groups that have long clashed in US history: institutional Christianity and the LGBTQ community. For centuries, Christian theology has been used to hurt and oppress LGBTQ people in innumerable cruel ways, and Robinson knew all too well that for many people in the pews that day, even showing up at a church was, as he put it, an “act of courage.”

“For those two hours, I felt like those two communities of my life came together,” Bishop Robinson told me. “For that brief moment, they understood each other and loved each other in a way that is still not common.”1

As with many funerals, an unknowable number of stories wove their way into that moment. One begins decades earlier, when Robinson and others started working tirelessly to clear a space for LGBTQ people in faith communities that once rejected them, particularly among mainline Christians. It’s a complicated, multifaceted form of LGBTQ advocacy that often isn’t directed outward at the larger society.

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