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Old 08-06-2003, 07:11 PM   #15
*\Conan/*
Red Dragon
 

Join Date: March 1, 2001
Location: Virginia, USA
Age: 64
Posts: 1,512
Yorick, Yes it will divide. No other way it seems.

Great poll and as always I respect your language and writing, all of you blow me away with great responses. Here is an article that may surprise some about who was a first in DC.


All God's Children
As Episcopal Leaders Debate Gays and the Church, One Washington Parish Already Has Its Answer
By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 5, 2003; Page C01


It's Sunday morning at All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church in Woodley Park. The turnout is decent for August, when the choir takes a break and Sunday school is closed. A mother in the back row whispers to her small, restless children. A couple up front are celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary. An 81-year-old woman leans on her cane as she prays. She's been coming here for 50 years, and had all three of her children confirmed at this altar.




In a middle pew is a couple who drove up from Virginia Beach to attend services with their son, who is openly gay and planning to join the church. Across the aisle is a gay couple who wear rings as a symbol of their commitment, and lean into each other sometimes as they sing from the hymnal. In the aisle, a mother rocks a little girl in her arms, trying to shush her.

The Mass, as always, is a formal one. The rector, and the congregation, feel strongly about that. They believe in sticking to the liturgy, in having the incense, the bells, the kneeling and the gentle music from the pipe organ. It is a traditional church. Founded in 1911 and established by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington in 1913, All Souls was once known as one of the most conservative Episcopal churches in the District, its rector legendary for his strict positions on church and social issues.

Things are different now. Different, and the same. When the Rev. John David van Dooren took over All Souls 11 years ago, he was, he believes, the first openly gay Episcopal priest in the District. And right now in Minneapolis at the Episcopal Church's annual national convention, the major topic of debate is whether to confirm the church's first openly gay bishop, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Whether to sanction gay unions also is expected to be on the agenda. The vote on Robinson -- postponed yesterday after allegations of past inappropriate touching surfaced -- is such a divisive issue that conservative bishops and parishes have threatened to split away from the church if he is confirmed.

Van Dooren is following the news closely. He knows his own appointment was a risk for his parish. Beloved by the community when he served, closeted as a curate there, he had been invited back to serve as rector -- to a church dwindling in membership, at risk of closure by the diocese, in need of revitalization. His invitation came with a special request from Roy Woodall, then the senior warden. Woodall wanted van Dooren to be honest with the church vestry about his personal life.

"You look at what they founded this church on way back when," Woodall says, "and what they said was it was to be a church for all souls."

It was time for van Dooren to finally put those words to the test.

"It's not an issue here," van Dooren says. He is speaking of the debate inside the Episcopal Church over homosexuality -- over the validity of gay bishops, gay unions, gay marriages. The latter issue is one of current national debate outside the church: Last week alone, both President Bush and the Vatican weighed in on gay marriage, both opposed, and the Senate is expected to address the issue when it returns from summer recess.

"A lot of us can't understand why there would even be a debate, because we see it work," van Dooren says. "All the people who say, 'Oh, the church would plummet, the church wouldn't work,' well, we see that's just not the case. This is a vital church. The love of the Lord is just alive and well here."

To illustrate, van Dooren, 43, gives a visitor a tour of the photographs -- taken by him -- that line the rectory hallway. There is the mixed-race couple he wed early in his tenure. The white gay couple who came to him to baptize their two adopted African American children. The children gathered together at Sunday school, a program he instituted. The elderly, pearls-wearing woman who came up to van Dooren after he became rector and told him, bluntly, "I think you all are nicer than normal people." She has since passed away, but the memory still makes him laugh. "It was her way," he says, "and I thanked her very much."

It worked from the beginning. Surprising, but true. Even van Dooren had had his doubts. Speaking to then-Bishop Ronald Hayward Haines when he first took the post, he remembers hearing support but wariness: "He doubted it could work because of the church's conservative history -- that while the people might not be there still, history lives." (The current bishop, the Right Rev. John Bryson Chane, could not be reached for comment, but he spoke in support of Robinson's nomination at the national convention last week.)

Of course, a few congregants had concerns. One member of the vestry seemed dead-set against it, Woodall recalls, but eventually "she became one of his biggest supporters." A young man in his thirties told van Dooren that while he supported him as an individual, he felt that he must leave the church.

The rest embraced him.

"We loved him," says Regina Dading, the 81-year-old with the cane, who attended the church for 50 years but didn't "join" until van Dooren urged her to.

And so van Dooren moved into the rectory with his partner, Gary (the couple asked that his last name not be used for professional privacy reasons), with whom he has shared his life since 1987.

"I think it helped, a great deal, that they knew me first," says van Dooren. "I had been a curate, so they knew who I was. So even the people, some of the older ladies wouldn't necessarily have been for it, on paper -- they loved me."

The membership grew. With fewer than 50 active members when he took over in 1992 (Masses sometimes drew a mere dozen), the church now boasts more than 400, and regularly has 250 attend each Sunday's high service. About a quarter of the congregation is gay, van Dooren estimates. Urban revitalization resulted in more young families living in the District, and many of them, like the Prestons (Stephen, Mary and children Julia and Collett) or the Motturs (Al, Elizabeth, Tommy and Caroline), joined and brought children to the fledgling Sunday school.

"It's where we want to raise our children," says Elizabeth Mottur, who has moved twice since joining All Souls but continues to commute to the church, now from Bethesda. "You want them to belong to an accepting church. They can see heterosexual relationships because they live that, at home, with their parents. They need to see this."

One couple, the Vances, grew disillusioned with their old church for its rigid beliefs, particularly on homosexuality, and switched to All Souls, because, Landis Vance says, "I was looking for a diverse, accepting church and had two friends who told me I should come here."

A couple looking for a church after the trauma of 9/11 called one in their Bethesda neighborhood to ask if they would be welcome as open lesbians -- and the priest directed them to All Souls.

The entire time, van Dooren made it his guiding principle that the church would be rooted in Christ, that his sexual orientation would not be a diversion to the church's mission. He did not want All Souls to become a "gay church," but rather a church welcoming to gays, just as he was not a "gay priest," but a priest who happened to be gay.

Still, issues come up. Partners Don Harrell, 38, and Chris Locklear, 35, joined because of van Dooren's leadership, and felt comfortable going to him two years ago to discuss finding a way to recognize their union inside the church's walls.

At first, van Dooren said no. Not because he did not believe in gay unions. Far from it. Every time he performs a wedding, he says, he thinks to himself that there should be a way for gays to have that same source of strength and commitment in the church. But he didn't see a way under church doctrine.

Harrell and Locklear persisted, so van Dooren went to his bishops and said: "Tell me what I can do." What followed was a delicate attempt to craft a service that did not violate Episcopal principles yet gave Harrell and Locklear the satisfaction that their love and commitment had been witnessed before God. Language was crucial: There could be no talk of a "wedding." This would not be a "marriage" with all that the word entails, both legally and spiritually, but rather a "blessing of a union."

On Aug. 31, 2002, Harrell and Locklear stood at the altar of All Souls and exchanged rings and promises in front of 150 witnesses. In front of van Dooren. In front of God.

Asked how he reconciled his misgivings, van Dooren says: "When my own parishioners come to me and say, 'I have this loving relationship. We want to live in monogamy. We want to live in faith. You can bless my house. You can bless my car, but you can't bless this commitment?,' how can I say no?"

Reconciliation did not come easy in van Dooren's own life. Raised in a conservative Anglican family in a conservative community, van Dooren knew he was gay from his earliest memories but didn't accept it.

"I just always knew that it was not accepted and I never was exposed to a book or anything that said it was," he says. "So I grew up with this secret that was so difficult. I thought I would work it out somehow, either through marriage or whatever I would do."

He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1982, and decided that the church would give him his answer. He enrolled in the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, determined "to debate myself out" of the idea that he was homosexual. At one point, he even decided to enter the monastery, convinced that homosexuality was God's way of calling him to celibacy.

Eventually, he had a complete crisis of faith.

"It just, in a sense, toppled," he says. "Some of my thoughts were fairly . . . conservative, and my house of cards fell. What was left wasn't much, but it was authentic, and I built back from there."

Van Dooren emerged from that dark year at peace with the idea that he had "given myself wrong information in my mind, that God could love me, and I could serve God and give my life to God as a gay man."

His earlier doubts, though, left him with an awkward understanding of those who stand against who and what he is -- including his own mother. Closeted through the 1980s, he met Gary, then at Bolling Air Force Base, at a party in 1987. Gary was, in van Dooren's words, "my soul mate." Eventually they moved in together. And every time van Dooren's mother came to visit, Gary moved out. (His father died in 1985, unaware of his son's sexual orientation.) Still, his mom suspected, and one day she confronted him. The result was heartbreaking to him.

"My own mother is a conservative Christian, and when she found out about this 13 years ago, she said, 'I will never go to your home, I will never go to your church -- no true Christian would,' " he says. "And she never has. We've maintained a relationship, a very loving one, but obviously it's very limited because she can never hear about my church or my life with my partner, which pretty much makes up a lot of my life."

As sad as the situation makes van Dooren, he sees it as a constant reminder of what rests in the minds and hearts of those who still cannot accept a gay priest, or the idea of a gay union sanctioned by either his government or his church.

"They don't wake up in the morning and say, 'I think I will be bigoted today,' " he says. "They, such as my mother, truly have a conviction that they are on God's side. But I know what I know what I know, that they are wrong on this issue. Because I see the evidence otherwise. I see the evidence in my heart and life.

"I look at my community," he adds, "and I just think: If they can just see this."

It is coffee hour after Sunday services, and in a downstairs room the congregation is gathered, chatting, smiling, sharing with their community and offering up hosannas for the man they lovingly refer to as "John David." Harrell and Locklear are talking of their upcoming one-year anniversary. Another member, Mark Hoffmann, who joined the church with his partner seven years ago, is making arrangements to drive one of the elderly congregants to her doctor's appointment the next morning.

Denisse Prado, an 18-year-old acolyte, gushes about how the church has raised $36,000 to help her enroll in Catholic University next fall. Tommy and Caroline Mottur are twisting themselves around their mother's legs as she tries to ladle punch.

"How much of this is John David?" Elizabeth Mottur says, repeating a question. "It's hard to separate All Souls from him."


© 2003 The Washington Post Company



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