GAY BISHOP RATIFIED!

It's true! It's true!

Finally, a bishop of our very own. We're finally part of the family. I dont' know how many cliches I've got in me, feeling like I'm just bursting at the seams with them.

Suddenly the past month, it's feeling like we can really achieve equality in our lifetime. (Maybe).

Headline News reported the latest milestone at exactly 8 p.m. Eastern time. (Right after the commercial.) Sixty-two of the 107 votes in the House of Bishops were in favor. Stories from Reuters, Voice of America, ABC, Newsday . . . (more coming)

Wow. We finally have a gay bishop of a mainline church--who is admitting he's gay and being raised up into the leadership regardless.

The Episcopal church is not so big in the U.S., but quite extensive outside it, in places that remain a bit behind us in attitudes toward homos. (It is part of the 77-million member Anglican Communion.) It could have a big effect there.

And larger U.S. denominations have been struggling with the same question for years, particularly the Methodists and Presbyterians. (And I actually know a Presbyterian, though not an actual presbyter.) They all keep chickening out, and it's always a lot easier once somebody else has taken the plunge. Of course it will be a lifetime or two for my Catholics to get it, but I'll be happy if they just let the women out of the doghouse before I die.)

Meanwhile, conservative Anglican elements have been threatening a schism if Robinson were ratified. (They were going to begin by walking out to pray at a Lutheran church across the street. Lutheran!--What next?)

We'll see how that plays out. Really interesting discussion of the very real moral dilemma the two sides were facing on NPR's Talk of the Nation today. Both the pro- and con-Robinson guests agreed that the schism would probably be minor, though. They said similar dissent wracked the church after ordination of women, institution of the new prayer book and a few other changes this century, but little became of them. (And TOTN has a timeline of the development of Christianity, Judaism and Islam here.)

Phyllis Tickle was particularly insightful on the show. (She is contributing editor in religion at Publisher's Weekly and author of a few books, including The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape.) She made a compelling case that the gay-bishop issue was to some degree a stand-in for the much broader and far more important battle between literal interpretations of every word of the bible vs what she called "progressive revelation." She described progressive revelation as the concept that the truth shall be revealed as humanity is ready to receive it.

Interesting. I'm sure the concept is well known in theological circles, but was news to me. It names an idea I think I've believed my whole life, though: That when God was speaking to people just emerging from caves, he was giving them a much simpler guidebook than when they were starting to experiment with planting crops and forging plows, which was still simpler than when they organized into cities, built nations, invented steam engines, laid railroads, left the planet . . . I know my bible-church friends would disagree passionately, because they believe God really did reveal the whole thing all at once, for every culture in every time to understand the same words. I've always thought of Him as a little smarter than that.

I understand why homosexuality was banned at the time of Leviticus. Hygiene was a life or death issue at that point, and sex with your anus, that was just asking for trouble. Same thing with spoiled seafood trichinosis in pork, and many of the other Levitican prohibitions. But homosexuality presented bigger problems than pork: The Australian Prime Minister's lingering fears for the survival of the species was not just very real back then, it was the paramount concern. Now, we're facing the opposite problem on procreation. Now, the whole fabric of society is different. The whole conceivable universe of ethical dilemmas is different. I think I'm only exaggerating a little when I say that I have less in common with one of Abraham's early Israelites than that Israelite had with a caveman.

Is it an exaggeration at all? It wouldn't be hard to make a case that the fairly simple choices available to both of them were more similar in kind than the dilemmas we face today. It was only in the last hundred years or two that many people had the choice of doing anything but toiling in a wheatfield. My people came over from Ireland just over a hundred years ago. I have little doubt that my line is peasantry more or less all the way back to Adam. I was born Catholic because my parents were, because a long line of peasants before them believed as they were told.

Today, I am free to pursue nearly any vocation I choose. I have infinitely more choices and a whole different set of challenges and ethical quandries. I don't think it makes any sense to operate out of the simple rulebook handed down to cavemen or their successors. The Creator I look up to thought things through a little farther than that.

On the Talk of the Nation show, Larry Cunningham, Professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, brought the esteemed Catholic hero known by the unwieldy title Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman into the debate. He quoted the venerable cardinal's famous last line from his landmark Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (December 27, 1874). Cunningham was taking a different tack with the quote, but I think he unwittingly played right into Tickle's wider point about progressive revelation:

"I shall drink, —to the Pope, if you please, —still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”

I don't think Newman was talking just about popes. I think God is still guiding us along with new insights every day, and we need to look inside to our own hearts to hear them. (To hear Him, if you prefer.) I look at that ancient book on the table and I see a lot of wisdom. But I think He expects a lot more out of me than just following a rulebook written as instruction manual for goat farmers. I shall drink, —to the Bible, if you please, —still, to conscience first, and to the Bible afterwards.