Obama's First Days According to Rev. Gene Robinson 

New
Hampshire’s Bishop Gene Robinson has had a busy month
-- delivering the invocation at the inaugural opening
ceremony, sitting on the President’s platform
during the swearing in, and being the focal point of
so much media fascination.

Besides the LGBT
folks on President Obama's staff, Robinson probably has
more insights about the new commander-in-chief's first
couple weeks on the job than any gay politico, and
here he shares his reflections with Advocate.com and
tells us what he anticipates in the days ahead.

Advocate.com:I noticed that you addressed your opening ceremony invocation to
the "God of our many understandings.” What
inspired that approach?V. Gene Robinson: What I wanted this prayer to
be was something that, really, Americans of every faith
could pray along with me. I went back and read
inaugural prayers for the last 30-40 years and was
just horrified at how overtly and aggressively Christian
they were and all I could think was, 'If I’m a
Jew, If I’m a Muslim, If I’m a Sikh or
Hindu, where am I in this prayer?'

So I addressed
the prayer to “the God of our many
understandings” -- it’s actually
something I learned in the 12-step recovery program
I’m in for alcoholism. My experience is,
it’s a phrase that allows people to buy in, no
matter what their understanding of God is, and is inclusive
in a profound way. No one of us knows everything there
is to know about God. I would say that no one religion
or one denomination knows all that there is to know
about God. And so each of us has our own perception, owns
our own piece of God.

You also asked for certain things, such as “anger
at discrimination” and
“discomfort,” that are pretty atypical in prayers. There is a wonderful blessing that I use often
in my ministry -- it’s called a four-fold
Franciscan blessing. It prays for things that we
wouldn’t normally consider to be blessings -- like
tears, like discomfort. And the reason I love that
blessing is that it takes people by surprise and they
really perk up and listen. I took that as my
inspiration.

The most amazing
feedback that I got was from non-Christian people -- a
number of Jews, a number of un-churched people, a number of
people from different contexts who would not describe
themselves as Christian -- who said to me that, for
the first time ever at such an event, they felt
included and felt as if they could, in fact, pray along with
me. That really meant the world to me.

Also, on the
other side, I have received hundreds -- maybe even as many
as a thousand -- email messages and letters and so on from
“good Christian people” literally just
attacking me for not using Jesus’s name, not
using the name of the trinity, saying that I abandoned my
faith, that I had denied Christ. There’s almost
more negative reaction to that than anything
I’ve done in the last five years.