Retired Anglican priest Garth Bulmer says the decision to announce his homosexuality was both personal and political.
When retired Anglican priest Garth Bulmer says goodbye, he doesn’t like to draw things out.
“Once I decided I wanted to go, I wanted to go right away,” he says, referring to his decision to end his tenure as rector of St. John the Evangelist’s church, the historic Centretown congregation, last December.
“(St. John’s) is a wonderful place and such exciting things go on there all the time,” he says, “but I just basically lost my energy and my passion to lead that community. I started having these experiences like I’d be sitting in a meeting and I’d actually grab my chair because I felt like I needed to bolt . . . When that starts happening, you know it’s time to move on.”
The 62-year-old is esteemed both locally and nationwide for his years of vibrant leadership at St. John’s, which has stood on the corner of Elgin and Somerset streets since 1891 and was once the church where Sir John A. Macdonald worshipped.
Today, the church is home to about 500 families and, in recent years, has garnered a special reputation for social activism spearheaded by Bulmer.
“(St. John’s) has been a church that has taken very seriously its involvement in the neighbourhood,” says Bulmer. “Depending on who you ask, ‘Oh, that’s the gay church’ or ‘that church is involved in social justice stuff’ would tend to be the main responses.”
Under Bulmer’s direction, the parish has worked extensively to bring members of the GLBTQ community to the congregation and to provide affordable housing and relief to refugees.
“St. John’s itself sponsors more refugees than any other Anglican parish in the whole city. Actually, (more than) all of them put together,” says Bulmer.
Moreover, the ministry’s Circles of Support and Accountability project works in tandem with Correctional Services Canada to provide “a covenant of trust” for high-profile sex offenders who have been released into the community, Bulmer says.
One of the circles has been active for more than 10 years.
“We support (released offenders) in practical ways to help them find employment, housing or whatever they need to live a good, comfortable life like we all need,” says Susan Love, program coordinator and friend of Bulmer’s. “As Garth once said, we support a lot of fellows who’ve committed these offences and (St. John’s) is the safest church in the city because we know where they are – we’re in their lives.”
As a boy growing up in Milden, Sask., a farming community of only 400 outside Saskatoon, Bulmer says he knew by age eight that he wanted to be a priest. He was ordained in 1970 after studying theology at McGill University, eventually making his home at St. John’s in Ottawa.
Bulmer’s 38 years of priesthood focused on creating “bridges of understanding” among different levels of society, he says. This was not only his way of emulating Jesus Christ, he says, but also a personal crusade propelled by his own homosexuality.
“I think (the social values of my generation) generated in the soul of a gay person a kind of suffering which, I think, always brings one to a deeper compassion, a deeper understanding of other sufferings,” he says.
Bulmer was known during his tenure at St. John’s for his tenacity in urging the Anglican Church to approve the blessing of same-sex unions, even threatening not to bless heterosexual unions himself. The Anglican Diocese of Ottawa approved a motion put forward by Bulmer last October allowing clergy to choose to perform same-sex blessings in church.
“I felt vindicated,” he says.
About 15 years earlier, Bulmer personally blessed a same-sex union before about 150 parishioners from St. John’s church, prompting the bishop at the time to issue a letter to all clergy condemning the practice and warning others they would be fired if it happened again. Bulmer says this was the first and only public same-sex blessing in the city’s Anglican Diocese.
However, it wasn’t until after retirement that Bulmer publicly announced he is gay in an interview with the Anglican Journal.
“I had an interview about being in retirement. I thought, this is the time to do it – why not do it now? I mean, there’s nothing like coming out in a national newspaper if you get the chance,” he says.
Bulmer was married for 25 years and has two sons but, over time, the marriage broke down, he says.
“I obviously was not going to come out as a gay man and be married; that wouldn’t be fair,” he says.
When he revealed his homosexuality to the Anglican Journal, Bulmer says he was inundated with supportive e-mails and phone calls, not chastised for keeping it secret all those years.
“Certainly my not telling (the parish) beforehand had nothing to do with any fear that I had that this would become a crisis at St. John’s,” he says. “I’ve witnessed dozens and dozens of people who’ve come out, many of my age group, and it’s been a very difficult process for them because almost all of them were married at one point and had kids.
“I always felt like a bit of a hypocrite, maybe, because they were doing what they had to to deal with their stuff. I wasn’t. I was certainly advocating and trying to support that to happen for other people, but not for me.”
Bulmer says the decision to announce his homosexuality was not only personal, but also political.
“I wanted to do it because of the political issues at play in the church,” he says. “There’s so much nonsense that’s taught about gay people ‘choosing’ to be gay and utter bullshit, all over the place. I thought it was appropriate for me in this critical time when the church is experiencing such angst about the whole thing that I was one more nail in the coffin of homophobia.”
Bulmer says he wouldn’t have been ejected from his position as church rector had he revealed his homosexuality before retirement. The only reason that a disciplinary action can be brought against a gay person is if he or she is in a gay relationship, he says.
Although Bulmer has enjoyed overwhelming support from parishioners in Ottawa and nationwide for his integrity, he says some Anglican churches in Canada aren’t so hospitable.
When asked about the Anglican Network in Canada – a group of about sixteen conservative Anglican congregations who’ve broken away from the Anglican Church of Canada – Bulmer says “it’s a lot of nonsense”.
“We’re supposed to work very hard at trying to understand one another in the church and keep the dialogue open,” he says. “In my mind, the Anglican Network is trying to enforce a way of looking at scripture that says, if you can’t do it this way, you can’t belong. I think they’re absolutely wrong and that they’re simply doing what the church did for centuries to victimize gay people.”
A firm believer that religious language is metaphorical, Bulmer says more conservative Anglicans are convinced the Bible should always be taken literally.
“Religious language is symbolic language. Somebody in the network would turn around and say, ‘That’s exactly what I mean. You’re a perfect example of what has gone wrong in the church when you talk like that,’ ” he says. “Well, maybe they’re right.”
John Lofstedt, a 26-year-old intern prior to pursuing priesthood at St. Alban’s church, which belongs to the Anglican Network, disagrees.
“If (the Bible) were completely symbolic, there would be no truth. We believe the Bible to be true; the Bible came from God and because this was something that God inspired these writers to write, it’s accurate and it’s more than symbolic – it’s truth to live by.”
Poised to leave the controversy behind him and move to Montreal, Bulmer says he’s ready to slow down for once in his life, but not necessarily ready to stop working.
“I’d like to work as a short order cook somewhere, but I don’t have any experience as a short order cook, so I guess I probably have to start off as a dishwasher,” he says.
For many years he lived by the pithy statement, “the man with the plan wins,” Bulmer says.
“Now I think I’d like to live by some other epithet. I don’t exactly know what that would be.”