The Long And Winding Road - Part 3

And then there's the "gay thing," the elephant in the living room.

In spite of the fact that the Canons of the Episcopal Church state

No person shall be denied access to the discernment process for any ministry, lay or ordained, in this Church because of race, color, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, disabilities or age, except as otherwise provided by these Canons. No right to licensing, ordination, or election is hereby
established. CANONS III.1.2

there seems to be an unofficial hierarchy in many dioceses, and queer folks are at the bottom. We are grilled more thoroughly about our personal lives than even the most promiscuous single heterosexual men.

For a long time in my diocese there was an unofficial don't ask don't tell policy in place. When I first applied for postulancy, Ledlie (my rector) and I wondered about the fact that I edited the newsletter of my Integrity Chapter, and Bishop Coleridge, as Bishop of Connecticut, was on the mailing list. Ledlie spoke to a member of the Committee on Ministry who told him that the newsletter could be on the bishop's desk, and when he received the application, he would intentionally not link the two.

So I sent in the application, which Ledlie and I whitewashed to some extent. There was a surprising, to me, amount of ministry work. But nothing about my involvement with Integrity, my activism with the Connecticut Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, being a founding board member of the Triangle Community Center, and of course, absolutely nothing about my relationship with Brian, which had ended about midway through my initial discernment process. In due course was scheduled for an interview with Bishop Coleridge, the Canon to the Ordinary, and newly elected suffragan Bishop Smith.

What they saw was a single man living his mother at the age of 37. I could tell him that my mother was uncomfortable living alone after my father died, but I couldn't talk about my recovery from and having nowhere to go after what was essentially a divorce. A great swath of my life experience hidden. It was quite clear by the "not yes, but not no" letter I received less than a month later that the Bishops and the Canon didn't think I was strong enough to survive the rigors of the process. Because of Bishop Coleridge's don't ask don't tell policy, they wouldn't know how much I had faced and survived before I walked into his office.

Brian and I separated 16 years ago this month. My being in discernment for ordination was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. He's now happily married to the man he's been with for several years. I'm still single. There are a variety of reasons for that, but the vast majority of those reasons have to do with being in the ordination process. Some men aren't willing to be involved with someone so deeply involved with the church. Some tried to talk me out of it. And I haven't been all that certain that I want to subject a significant other to the quagmire of the process.

In the last 18 years the Episcopal Church has come a long way, a slow long way, on the issues of its queer members. But it's still an issue to be queer in the ordination process.

It is still an issue.