New York, New York
New York Diary: Dean Kowalski
Not everyone knows New York City houses the world’s largest gothic cathedral, nor that it may never be completed. ROSECRANS BALDWIN talks to St. John the Divine’s Dean James Kowalski while parrots flutter around their heads.
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I spoke with Dean James Kowalski recently in his office at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, on 112th Street in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood near Columbia University. The cathedral is the mother church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and the seat of its bishop; by nature of his position, Dean Kowalski is its public face.
Though I don’t go to the cathedral often, it’s a stunning piece of New York and, for me, has been a comforting place to visit over the years, during walks for a moment to sit and rest, or for Christmas services with my family, or more recently when my wife and I saw a children’s choir perform there, all the way from Raleigh, N.C., doing pieces by Mozart that were so boring we left after ten minutes.
This interview was originally intended to be a “People We Like” feature, but over the course of 90 minutes (I had expected the interview to run about ten, the following text is an edited version of our talk), Dean Kowalski proved too interesting a conversationalist for a short profile. One note: The talk was interrupted many times by flocks of parrots (or birds that look a lot like parrots with long tails and big nasty beaks) cawing loudly and flapping outside Kowalski’s windows, though he seemed not to notice.
* * *
RB: A lot of people in New York who walk by the cathedral have seen it under scaffolding for as long as they can remember. Where is the reconstruction project now, and where do you see it going in the next five to 10 years?
JK: I think the construction of the cathedral, as it eventually was conceptualized, ended up being a much bigger venture than anyone thought it would be. The diocese spent some decades debating whether or not a cathedral should even be built. They started talking about having a cathedral in the 1870s. Other cathedrals, including St. Patrick’s, were either already built or under construction. They didn’t acquire the land to build the cathedral until the 1880s, and then they laid the cornerstone in 1892.
Although they’d come through a period of ambivalence, they’d finally come to an idea that there oughta be a great American (but also international) interfaith cathedral in this great, international, interfaith city of New York. They began to think very big. They built something that’s enormous for a denomination that has only 63,000 members in the diocese of New York.
I’m not sure they thought through what that would cost, especially given that there was significant ambivalence; their own denomination might not come up with all the resources that were needed. But in 1862, you also have the opening of Ellis Island as the major gateway of immigration. Seventy-one percent of the people who came into this country during that wave of immigration came in through Ellis Island. So you’ve got all these forces that are thinking big, that are saying, if you’re going to do this, how would you do this, what it would look like?
They also had initially conceptualized it as kind of a British or European motif when they acquired 12 acres of land from Leake & Watts, an orphanage—this was still the undeveloped part of upper Manhattan. You had St. Luke’s hospital here, you had what was King’s College—this would be the acropolis of mind, body, and spirit, the theory went. And they fronted the cathedral finally not in the middle of the parcel, facing what was then the city, looking south, but they decided to build an urban cathedral, and they fronted it at 112th Street, leaving open a whole parcel on which they could build other things.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the then Bishop of New York, Manning, pitches to this diocese that we can finish the cathedral. The cathedral at that point was just the great choir and seven chapels around it, and going down to the steps it didn’t have the nave at all. Looking at the cathedral now you see this two football-field-long cathedral, but for years it was just that eastern-most part of the cathedral, the high altar and the chapels, seven of them representing the seven dominant immigrant groups that were in New York at the time the cornerstone was laid. Manning said, we can raise $15 million and finish the cathedral, and in one day he raised $15 million, which in those days was an enormous amount of money.
RB: Isn’t that when he got FDR involved?
JK: FDR, who was not yet the governor, I believe, was the chairman of the campaign. They raised 15 million dollars, and it turned out not to be enough money to finish the cathedral. Although in less than a decade, they built the nave. People say to me today, well, would you be able to finish the cathedral in our lifetime? See, the issue really is, should we finish it, how much would it cost, not could you do it. You could do it with new technologies, if you had the money.
RB: In fact, in 1967, Bishop Donegan’s plan was to not finish it, to reflect the neighborhood that surrounded the cathedral, as a measure of solidarity.
JK: Well, I think he positioned it saying, we won’t spend any more money on the cathedral until there aren’t any poor people in the city. But, I think part of it was also that the post-Manning period where the diocese had tried to garner and focus this support was a time where some people felt too much attention was put on all dollars going to finish the cathedral. So Donegan said, we’re not going to do that. No more money to the cathedral. Unfortunately that pit people against each other, those who said, what about the cathedral, and those who said, enough already with the cathedral.
It made it sound like the cathedral was a waste of money, or, poor people are more important and why doesn’t the cathedral understand that, when in fact the history of the cathedral as a great civic institution as well as a religious institution had already established a track record as an enormously important institution in the city of New York, nationally and internationally. But at that point it started to run out of money. Not just in terms of construction, it also started to spend its endowment. So it got into a lot of fiscal trouble.
The cathedral, in terms of its mission, will always be incomplete; you don’t have to leave it unfinished for it to be incomplete.
In the 1980s, the then-dean of the cathedral Jim Morton came up with the idea that they would work on the south tower. And they would create jobs for local kids, teaching them how to be stonecutters. The scaffolding went up, they did the stone yard and got enormous publicity and spent millions of dollars, and all they ended up doing in effect was adding 40 feet to the tower.
The problem was not only that they couldn’t figure out how to make it economically viable as a business, but it distracted people from some other issues that were going on in the life of the cathedral. You now have a cathedral that’s a hundred-years-plus old, so you have parts that have had deferred maintenance, roofs that leak. If you want to finish the cathedral, the first thing you have to do is attend to deferred maintenance.
So when Jim Morton left, the stonecutters’ project had been closed for about 13 years, but there were still people who, because the scaffolding was still there, kept thinking the stonecutters were at work. A new dean comes in before me, an interim dean, and he says, we’re not going to build anything new until we’ve taken care of what we’ve got. And the New York Times and others positioned that as, well, there was a dean who had a dream to complete the cathedral, but then a new dean came and all he wants to do is take care of what they’ve got; the dream to complete the cathedral has died. I get elected and the first question Dan Wakin of the New York Times asks me, which kind of dean are you? And I said, Dan, the whole notion of taking care of what we’ve got is to position us so we can complete the cathedral. No, he said, you’re not answering my question; are you just going to take care of what you’ve got, or are you going to complete the cathedral. Well, you can’t do one without doing the other first. You’re not answering my question! I am answering your question! Fortunately he didn’t write about that, except to say, well, he follows these two deans, one with the dream of completion, and one without.
St. John the Divine
I personally think that the symbolism of a completed cathedral that has more financial and spatial resources, to be what this place has already been but be even more, in a time of American and international history when we need an interfaith, international, even trans-national, trans-faith civic and religious institution—I think we need something like that given what’s going on in the world right now, more maybe than we even needed it in 1892. Some people say you don’t finish a cathedral because God’s never finished with us. Frankly, I don’t follow the logic of that. The cathedral, in terms of its mission, will always be incomplete; you don’t have to leave it unfinished for it to be incomplete.
RB: In terms of the church as a civic institution, obviously it has a large role in New York City. What have you seen, working here, since Sept. 11? Have you seen a marked change in New Yorkers’ spiritual lives? Have you seen people questioning their faith, or perhaps becoming more entrenched in their faith, in reaction to Sept. 11?
JK: I think the people I know who have really struggled spiritually since 9/11 look at the landscape politically and religiously in this country and in the world and have two reactions: one, why is there an increase in fundamentalism, in all areas of the world and in so many different religious traditions, on the left and the right so to speak? Why are there so many more people who, when faced with such complex problems, think you can solve complex problems with simplistic, fundamentalist, black and white answers? And then they put the spin on that, so to speak, that somebody’s got a point of view or policy that’s been explicitly blessed by God. I think a lot of people who are struggling with their own faith are saying, is there something about religion, or is there something about the human condition, or is there something about the mixture of those two things that causes people, when we face such enormous challenges, to become so reductionist? So rigid? So glib at saying that’s the enemy, or that’s evil. I think a lot of people are really struggling with that.
And the second thing they’re saying, the ones who I know that are really pushing themselves spiritually, is how can I make sure I don’t do that? That whatever your tradition, religious or otherwise, might be, it probably has something to do with staying open and staying humble. Saying, I can only approximate some of the truth if I’m lucky, I’m never going to know the whole truth, I don’t have the truth by the tail, I can’t be so sure that I’m right that I should stop listening to you or separate myself from the other. The great danger occurs when we’re sure that we’d be better off without them.
Remember, we come from a tradition of separation of church and state, though some people in this country seem to be a little confused about what that should mean…
As dean of the cathedral, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. I don’t know whether God has explicitly or directly put me in these different places in the last six months—other people set my itinerary. But you know, you wonder sometimes, is this divine providence? I don’t know. God doesn’t buy my airline tickets. But some foundation said, we want you to go to Tanzania. So I was in Dar es Salaam.
I listened to Muslim and Christian people in Dar es Salaam, all of them saying, we’re terrified by the extremes, whether they’re Christian or Muslim. Because most of them were not extremists. They were enormously proud of their secular constitutional government in Tanzania. They have religious leaders—they want their leaders to be religious, but they want their leaders to protect everybody. I was talking to a regional governor who was put under an enormous test because there was a very violent protest that got stirred up by a Muslim group, and he’s a Muslim. And the real question that got raised was, would he have them arrested and put in jail? Which he did. And that was enormously important to a lot of other people who weren’t sure that he would “do that to his own.” But he said to me, I am an elected official whose responsibility is to protect all people of all faiths. That’s what a secular government is about. Remember, we come from a tradition of separation of church and state, though some people in this country seem to be a little confused about what that should mean…
Then I go, some months later, to Israel. I see a government that has been one of the most important ventures idealistically and ideologically, almost in a utopian way, to create a Jewish state, that would be a place where all Jews could go and live and be safe, but would also protect the rights of all others. And now, that’s not what’s happening. Because they don’t feel safe, they are treating certain others, particularly Palestinians, in a very different way. Now I don’t know the answer to this. I know there’s been enormous violence on both sides. And I know that people have the right to be safe. But I also saw the construction of a wall by a Jewish government that will not create viability on both sides of that wall.
In fact I talked to a lot of Israeli Jews who were saying, many Jews have left Israel. The only reason there’s a net population stabilization is because of the influx of Russian Jews, and the birthrate of Israel, which is very high. But many people are saying on both sides of that wall, I don’t want to stay. Others are saying, no one’s going to ever get me out of here, whether it’s Israeli Jews or Palestinians. And it was very scary to me to be there, to see that, because of issues of security, the very definition of that government was now being called into question, philosophically and theologically. And frankly, what was most scary for me was it made me look at my own government in a different way, saying, in the name of the security, what in the world are we doing? What are we doing in Guantanomo, because we don’t feel safe? Here we have a government that is predicated on some very clear assumptions about the innocence of people not proven guilty, and we’re saying, that shouldn’t apply? Or for the Geneva conditions, we have the freedom to decide where they apply or not? This is just amazing to me.
Then I went to Johannesburg, just the other week. It’s now the 10th anniversary of the democracy of the new South Africa. And I saw enormous poverty, graves everywhere while we were driving around were being dug. With this pandemic of AIDS that is not only something that has already affected a huge portion of the population, but they aren’t able, with their president and others who are in denial or don’t want people to know they’re infected or talk openly about how it’s being transmitted, they’re not really involved in meaningful prevention strategy. But I still was mostly hearing incredible, wonderful optimism. People so proud of the litany of progress—they were much more interested to talk about the great things that have happened in the past 10 years. With the exception of AIDS in my experience, they were very willing and open to talk about the problems, but I left wondering, what is it about the people of South Africa that makes them so optimistic? And so thankful, so appreciative, that in droves they vote, and in this country fewer than half of the people eligible to vote will vote?
As I traveled, it was heartening to me to hear people talk knowingly about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and how for them it’s a symbol of hope that it inspires them. I rarely meet anyone in New York who doesn’t know something abut the cathedral—they may only know St. Francis Day, or only about the Memorial Day philharmonic concert, or may only come at Christmas or Easter, but it’s a great New York institution, and I see through it how enormously important to the world what happens in New York is. And I mostly think New Yorkers, since 9/11, are very careful to say, life must go on, and it has to be the kind of life we say we believe in. Otherwise the terrorists really win. And I’m mostly very proud of what I see in New York. I’m less proud of what I see going on in other parts of the country, or what are some of the policies of our national government.
RB: The history of the cathedral has a lot of deans and a lot of bishops making social declarations from the pulpit, being strident in political affairs—civil rights, the Vietnam war. What is your opinion about the recent election of Gene Robinson, a gay bishop in New Hampshire, and the threats of separation from other Anglican churches around the world?
JK: Well, I hope as I respond that I don’t fall in the trap of being blasphemous, which is to think that I’m right, which precludes any humility. Obviously I have some strong opinions, but I think the danger if you get too strident, you drive people away from the mission of the cathedral, which is to put under this large roof, that was built much bigger than a roof than we need for Episcopalians, the great conversations of our time.
But you know, if the Episcopal Church gets blamed for telling the truth about human sexuality, I can live with that. If there are people who get upset because we came to realize that it simply isn’t responsible to live out a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—when people who are born as gay or lesbian persons want to make responsible, faithful commitments, and we say to them, this society isn’t ready to accept that, other parts of the world culturally don’t believe that, well all of that’s true!
I was in Africa, I was in Dar es Salaam. And our African bishops are supposedly all against what the Episcopal Church has done here—meaning, the American expression of this Anglican worldwide community, which does not mean Church of England, it means a worldwide network that started with the Church of England but this is a post-colonial church, at least one hopes. Many of the African people I was talking to said their greatest fear was that we’re going to assume that a particular bishop spoke for them, like the Archbishop of Nigeria who’s been very vocal and very well-publicized and has said that if the Episcopal Church is not repentant then it should be disinvited from communion.
I believe God hates nothing that God has made
And at the end of the day I said to people there, do you or do you not have gay and lesbian people here? Oh, they said, well if we do we don’t know if we do. I said, how do you not know? Well, they said, they do not tell us! I said, did you know there are parts of my country where a gay or lesbian person wouldn’t tell you either, because they could get killed? And it used to be dominantly that way in my country that no one could tell the truth about who they are? I said, do you think people are born this way? They said, that’s not our context, but if it were our context, we’d be doing what you’re doing. We’d have to do what you’re doing, which is face it.
I thank God that gay and lesbian persons haven’t given up on the church, because the church surely hasn’t been, historically, very supportive. But some could say, why would it be? This is sinful! Even what the Bible says about this is so much more complex than what some people reduce it to. I believe that some people are born gay or lesbian, I believe the research is increasingly showing this is true. And if it’s true, and I believe God hates nothing that God has made, then we have a serious problem as supposedly religious people if we’re going to say to a gay or lesbian person, maybe you were born that way, but God loves the sinner but hates the sin.
So then you get a guy like Gene Robinson, no surprise here. This is a man who’s been a hardworking, smart, successful priest to the church, who has loved the church and loved its people. For years he’s served the church and people know him. He was married and he had kids. At a point in his life, he came to the awareness that despite all of that, the truth of himself is that he is a gay person. He went to his wife and he said, I think this is what’s going on. They went into therapy together, and after they came to the realization that it was true, they divorced each other and have since been very supportive friends. Their children are remarkable children who went through that experience and came out of that experience seeing their parents as real people who love each other and love them. Gene Robinson, some years ago, met somebody and got involved in a relationship that he has been committed to and monogamous in, and in my opinion, if that’s not all a story about faithful commitments and being faithful to the commitments that we’ve made and facing the truth and being honest and loving to each other—I don’t know what that’s a story about if that’s not a story about that! And furthermore, the diocese of New Hampshire, which has known this man all these years, says, you know what, when it comes time to elect a bishop, he’s the guy we want to elect. Well I don’t find that surprising, that’s a heck of a story!
Though I don’t go to the cathedral often, it’s a stunning piece of New York and, for me, has been a comforting place to visit over the years, during walks for a moment to sit and rest, or for Christmas services with my family, or more recently when my wife and I saw a children’s choir perform there, all the way from Raleigh, N.C., doing pieces by Mozart that were so boring we left after ten minutes.
This interview was originally intended to be a “People We Like” feature, but over the course of 90 minutes (I had expected the interview to run about ten, the following text is an edited version of our talk), Dean Kowalski proved too interesting a conversationalist for a short profile. One note: The talk was interrupted many times by flocks of parrots (or birds that look a lot like parrots with long tails and big nasty beaks) cawing loudly and flapping outside Kowalski’s windows, though he seemed not to notice.
RB: A lot of people in New York who walk by the cathedral have seen it under scaffolding for as long as they can remember. Where is the reconstruction project now, and where do you see it going in the next five to 10 years?
JK: I think the construction of the cathedral, as it eventually was conceptualized, ended up being a much bigger venture than anyone thought it would be. The diocese spent some decades debating whether or not a cathedral should even be built. They started talking about having a cathedral in the 1870s. Other cathedrals, including St. Patrick’s, were either already built or under construction. They didn’t acquire the land to build the cathedral until the 1880s, and then they laid the cornerstone in 1892.
Although they’d come through a period of ambivalence, they’d finally come to an idea that there oughta be a great American (but also international) interfaith cathedral in this great, international, interfaith city of New York. They began to think very big. They built something that’s enormous for a denomination that has only 63,000 members in the diocese of New York.
I’m not sure they thought through what that would cost, especially given that there was significant ambivalence; their own denomination might not come up with all the resources that were needed. But in 1862, you also have the opening of Ellis Island as the major gateway of immigration. Seventy-one percent of the people who came into this country during that wave of immigration came in through Ellis Island. So you’ve got all these forces that are thinking big, that are saying, if you’re going to do this, how would you do this, what it would look like?
They also had initially conceptualized it as kind of a British or European motif when they acquired 12 acres of land from Leake & Watts, an orphanage—this was still the undeveloped part of upper Manhattan. You had St. Luke’s hospital here, you had what was King’s College—this would be the acropolis of mind, body, and spirit, the theory went. And they fronted the cathedral finally not in the middle of the parcel, facing what was then the city, looking south, but they decided to build an urban cathedral, and they fronted it at 112th Street, leaving open a whole parcel on which they could build other things.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the then Bishop of New York, Manning, pitches to this diocese that we can finish the cathedral. The cathedral at that point was just the great choir and seven chapels around it, and going down to the steps it didn’t have the nave at all. Looking at the cathedral now you see this two football-field-long cathedral, but for years it was just that eastern-most part of the cathedral, the high altar and the chapels, seven of them representing the seven dominant immigrant groups that were in New York at the time the cornerstone was laid. Manning said, we can raise $15 million and finish the cathedral, and in one day he raised $15 million, which in those days was an enormous amount of money.
RB: Isn’t that when he got FDR involved?
JK: FDR, who was not yet the governor, I believe, was the chairman of the campaign. They raised 15 million dollars, and it turned out not to be enough money to finish the cathedral. Although in less than a decade, they built the nave. People say to me today, well, would you be able to finish the cathedral in our lifetime? See, the issue really is, should we finish it, how much would it cost, not could you do it. You could do it with new technologies, if you had the money.
RB: In fact, in 1967, Bishop Donegan’s plan was to not finish it, to reflect the neighborhood that surrounded the cathedral, as a measure of solidarity.
JK: Well, I think he positioned it saying, we won’t spend any more money on the cathedral until there aren’t any poor people in the city. But, I think part of it was also that the post-Manning period where the diocese had tried to garner and focus this support was a time where some people felt too much attention was put on all dollars going to finish the cathedral. So Donegan said, we’re not going to do that. No more money to the cathedral. Unfortunately that pit people against each other, those who said, what about the cathedral, and those who said, enough already with the cathedral.
It made it sound like the cathedral was a waste of money, or, poor people are more important and why doesn’t the cathedral understand that, when in fact the history of the cathedral as a great civic institution as well as a religious institution had already established a track record as an enormously important institution in the city of New York, nationally and internationally. But at that point it started to run out of money. Not just in terms of construction, it also started to spend its endowment. So it got into a lot of fiscal trouble.
The cathedral, in terms of its mission, will always be incomplete; you don’t have to leave it unfinished for it to be incomplete.
In the 1980s, the then-dean of the cathedral Jim Morton came up with the idea that they would work on the south tower. And they would create jobs for local kids, teaching them how to be stonecutters. The scaffolding went up, they did the stone yard and got enormous publicity and spent millions of dollars, and all they ended up doing in effect was adding 40 feet to the tower.
The problem was not only that they couldn’t figure out how to make it economically viable as a business, but it distracted people from some other issues that were going on in the life of the cathedral. You now have a cathedral that’s a hundred-years-plus old, so you have parts that have had deferred maintenance, roofs that leak. If you want to finish the cathedral, the first thing you have to do is attend to deferred maintenance.
So when Jim Morton left, the stonecutters’ project had been closed for about 13 years, but there were still people who, because the scaffolding was still there, kept thinking the stonecutters were at work. A new dean comes in before me, an interim dean, and he says, we’re not going to build anything new until we’ve taken care of what we’ve got. And the New York Times and others positioned that as, well, there was a dean who had a dream to complete the cathedral, but then a new dean came and all he wants to do is take care of what they’ve got; the dream to complete the cathedral has died. I get elected and the first question Dan Wakin of the New York Times asks me, which kind of dean are you? And I said, Dan, the whole notion of taking care of what we’ve got is to position us so we can complete the cathedral. No, he said, you’re not answering my question; are you just going to take care of what you’ve got, or are you going to complete the cathedral. Well, you can’t do one without doing the other first. You’re not answering my question! I am answering your question! Fortunately he didn’t write about that, except to say, well, he follows these two deans, one with the dream of completion, and one without.
I personally think that the symbolism of a completed cathedral that has more financial and spatial resources, to be what this place has already been but be even more, in a time of American and international history when we need an interfaith, international, even trans-national, trans-faith civic and religious institution—I think we need something like that given what’s going on in the world right now, more maybe than we even needed it in 1892. Some people say you don’t finish a cathedral because God’s never finished with us. Frankly, I don’t follow the logic of that. The cathedral, in terms of its mission, will always be incomplete; you don’t have to leave it unfinished for it to be incomplete.
RB: In terms of the church as a civic institution, obviously it has a large role in New York City. What have you seen, working here, since Sept. 11? Have you seen a marked change in New Yorkers’ spiritual lives? Have you seen people questioning their faith, or perhaps becoming more entrenched in their faith, in reaction to Sept. 11?
JK: I think the people I know who have really struggled spiritually since 9/11 look at the landscape politically and religiously in this country and in the world and have two reactions: one, why is there an increase in fundamentalism, in all areas of the world and in so many different religious traditions, on the left and the right so to speak? Why are there so many more people who, when faced with such complex problems, think you can solve complex problems with simplistic, fundamentalist, black and white answers? And then they put the spin on that, so to speak, that somebody’s got a point of view or policy that’s been explicitly blessed by God. I think a lot of people who are struggling with their own faith are saying, is there something about religion, or is there something about the human condition, or is there something about the mixture of those two things that causes people, when we face such enormous challenges, to become so reductionist? So rigid? So glib at saying that’s the enemy, or that’s evil. I think a lot of people are really struggling with that.
And the second thing they’re saying, the ones who I know that are really pushing themselves spiritually, is how can I make sure I don’t do that? That whatever your tradition, religious or otherwise, might be, it probably has something to do with staying open and staying humble. Saying, I can only approximate some of the truth if I’m lucky, I’m never going to know the whole truth, I don’t have the truth by the tail, I can’t be so sure that I’m right that I should stop listening to you or separate myself from the other. The great danger occurs when we’re sure that we’d be better off without them.
Remember, we come from a tradition of separation of church and state, though some people in this country seem to be a little confused about what that should mean…
As dean of the cathedral, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. I don’t know whether God has explicitly or directly put me in these different places in the last six months—other people set my itinerary. But you know, you wonder sometimes, is this divine providence? I don’t know. God doesn’t buy my airline tickets. But some foundation said, we want you to go to Tanzania. So I was in Dar es Salaam.
I listened to Muslim and Christian people in Dar es Salaam, all of them saying, we’re terrified by the extremes, whether they’re Christian or Muslim. Because most of them were not extremists. They were enormously proud of their secular constitutional government in Tanzania. They have religious leaders—they want their leaders to be religious, but they want their leaders to protect everybody. I was talking to a regional governor who was put under an enormous test because there was a very violent protest that got stirred up by a Muslim group, and he’s a Muslim. And the real question that got raised was, would he have them arrested and put in jail? Which he did. And that was enormously important to a lot of other people who weren’t sure that he would “do that to his own.” But he said to me, I am an elected official whose responsibility is to protect all people of all faiths. That’s what a secular government is about. Remember, we come from a tradition of separation of church and state, though some people in this country seem to be a little confused about what that should mean…
Then I go, some months later, to Israel. I see a government that has been one of the most important ventures idealistically and ideologically, almost in a utopian way, to create a Jewish state, that would be a place where all Jews could go and live and be safe, but would also protect the rights of all others. And now, that’s not what’s happening. Because they don’t feel safe, they are treating certain others, particularly Palestinians, in a very different way. Now I don’t know the answer to this. I know there’s been enormous violence on both sides. And I know that people have the right to be safe. But I also saw the construction of a wall by a Jewish government that will not create viability on both sides of that wall.
In fact I talked to a lot of Israeli Jews who were saying, many Jews have left Israel. The only reason there’s a net population stabilization is because of the influx of Russian Jews, and the birthrate of Israel, which is very high. But many people are saying on both sides of that wall, I don’t want to stay. Others are saying, no one’s going to ever get me out of here, whether it’s Israeli Jews or Palestinians. And it was very scary to me to be there, to see that, because of issues of security, the very definition of that government was now being called into question, philosophically and theologically. And frankly, what was most scary for me was it made me look at my own government in a different way, saying, in the name of the security, what in the world are we doing? What are we doing in Guantanomo, because we don’t feel safe? Here we have a government that is predicated on some very clear assumptions about the innocence of people not proven guilty, and we’re saying, that shouldn’t apply? Or for the Geneva conditions, we have the freedom to decide where they apply or not? This is just amazing to me.
Then I went to Johannesburg, just the other week. It’s now the 10th anniversary of the democracy of the new South Africa. And I saw enormous poverty, graves everywhere while we were driving around were being dug. With this pandemic of AIDS that is not only something that has already affected a huge portion of the population, but they aren’t able, with their president and others who are in denial or don’t want people to know they’re infected or talk openly about how it’s being transmitted, they’re not really involved in meaningful prevention strategy. But I still was mostly hearing incredible, wonderful optimism. People so proud of the litany of progress—they were much more interested to talk about the great things that have happened in the past 10 years. With the exception of AIDS in my experience, they were very willing and open to talk about the problems, but I left wondering, what is it about the people of South Africa that makes them so optimistic? And so thankful, so appreciative, that in droves they vote, and in this country fewer than half of the people eligible to vote will vote?
As I traveled, it was heartening to me to hear people talk knowingly about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and how for them it’s a symbol of hope that it inspires them. I rarely meet anyone in New York who doesn’t know something abut the cathedral—they may only know St. Francis Day, or only about the Memorial Day philharmonic concert, or may only come at Christmas or Easter, but it’s a great New York institution, and I see through it how enormously important to the world what happens in New York is. And I mostly think New Yorkers, since 9/11, are very careful to say, life must go on, and it has to be the kind of life we say we believe in. Otherwise the terrorists really win. And I’m mostly very proud of what I see in New York. I’m less proud of what I see going on in other parts of the country, or what are some of the policies of our national government.
RB: The history of the cathedral has a lot of deans and a lot of bishops making social declarations from the pulpit, being strident in political affairs—civil rights, the Vietnam war. What is your opinion about the recent election of Gene Robinson, a gay bishop in New Hampshire, and the threats of separation from other Anglican churches around the world?
JK: Well, I hope as I respond that I don’t fall in the trap of being blasphemous, which is to think that I’m right, which precludes any humility. Obviously I have some strong opinions, but I think the danger if you get too strident, you drive people away from the mission of the cathedral, which is to put under this large roof, that was built much bigger than a roof than we need for Episcopalians, the great conversations of our time.
But you know, if the Episcopal Church gets blamed for telling the truth about human sexuality, I can live with that. If there are people who get upset because we came to realize that it simply isn’t responsible to live out a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—when people who are born as gay or lesbian persons want to make responsible, faithful commitments, and we say to them, this society isn’t ready to accept that, other parts of the world culturally don’t believe that, well all of that’s true!
I was in Africa, I was in Dar es Salaam. And our African bishops are supposedly all against what the Episcopal Church has done here—meaning, the American expression of this Anglican worldwide community, which does not mean Church of England, it means a worldwide network that started with the Church of England but this is a post-colonial church, at least one hopes. Many of the African people I was talking to said their greatest fear was that we’re going to assume that a particular bishop spoke for them, like the Archbishop of Nigeria who’s been very vocal and very well-publicized and has said that if the Episcopal Church is not repentant then it should be disinvited from communion.
I believe God hates nothing that God has made
And at the end of the day I said to people there, do you or do you not have gay and lesbian people here? Oh, they said, well if we do we don’t know if we do. I said, how do you not know? Well, they said, they do not tell us! I said, did you know there are parts of my country where a gay or lesbian person wouldn’t tell you either, because they could get killed? And it used to be dominantly that way in my country that no one could tell the truth about who they are? I said, do you think people are born this way? They said, that’s not our context, but if it were our context, we’d be doing what you’re doing. We’d have to do what you’re doing, which is face it.
I thank God that gay and lesbian persons haven’t given up on the church, because the church surely hasn’t been, historically, very supportive. But some could say, why would it be? This is sinful! Even what the Bible says about this is so much more complex than what some people reduce it to. I believe that some people are born gay or lesbian, I believe the research is increasingly showing this is true. And if it’s true, and I believe God hates nothing that God has made, then we have a serious problem as supposedly religious people if we’re going to say to a gay or lesbian person, maybe you were born that way, but God loves the sinner but hates the sin.
So then you get a guy like Gene Robinson, no surprise here. This is a man who’s been a hardworking, smart, successful priest to the church, who has loved the church and loved its people. For years he’s served the church and people know him. He was married and he had kids. At a point in his life, he came to the awareness that despite all of that, the truth of himself is that he is a gay person. He went to his wife and he said, I think this is what’s going on. They went into therapy together, and after they came to the realization that it was true, they divorced each other and have since been very supportive friends. Their children are remarkable children who went through that experience and came out of that experience seeing their parents as real people who love each other and love them. Gene Robinson, some years ago, met somebody and got involved in a relationship that he has been committed to and monogamous in, and in my opinion, if that’s not all a story about faithful commitments and being faithful to the commitments that we’ve made and facing the truth and being honest and loving to each other—I don’t know what that’s a story about if that’s not a story about that! And furthermore, the diocese of New Hampshire, which has known this man all these years, says, you know what, when it comes time to elect a bishop, he’s the guy we want to elect. Well I don’t find that surprising, that’s a heck of a story!
—Published July 8, 2004
