In the predawn stillness, the Rt. Rev. J. Jon Bruno lay awake in his bed. It's in God's hands, he told himself, forcing himself back to a fitful sleep.
A former police officer, the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles is a man acquainted with crises. There was the time 30 years ago on the Burbank police force when he shot and killed an armed man suspected of drug-dealing and kidnapping. He lost sleep then, too, over what was considered a justified shooting.
Then there was the time his 3-year-old son, Philip, fell from a third-story balcony. The boy was temporarily paralyzed, his life on the brink, before he fully recovered.
This time is like that, Bruno said. "Painful and sad."
In the last two weeks, three conservative parishes in his six-county Los Angeles diocese had left the Episcopal Church, alienated by what they said was their church's drift toward heresy and wrongful affirmation of homosexuality.
They renounced Bruno as their bishop and aligned themselves with the Anglican Church in Uganda, whose conservative archbishop was more to their liking, a man they held up as "a wonderful, godly archbishop."
Now, at 57, Bruno faces a formidable challenge, perhaps the most serious in his 2 1/2 years as the chief shepherd of 85,000 Episcopalians and 147 parishes in six Southern California counties from Ventura to Riverside.
"Anybody who says there's not grief over this in my heart and spirit would be absolutely wrong," he said. The defection of the three parishes is a "major crisis."
To conservatives, it is a crisis partly of Bruno's own making, for he symbolizes many of the reasons for their discontent.
Bruno supported the elevation of a gay priest last year to bishop of New Hampshire.
He has blessed the same-sex union of one of his priests, the Rev. Canon Malcolm Boyd, and that priest's longtime companion, Mark Thompson.
And in June, when a conservative Episcopalian group asked Bruno to sign a statement affirming that the only way to an afterlife is through belief in Jesus Christ, he declined. Bruno, like Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, said that while Jesus was "the way, the truth and the life" for him, he could not presume to speak for God when it came to Jews, Muslims and others.
For conservatives, those issues have become a test of fidelity to biblical tradition. To Bruno, they test something equally important: Christ's message of inclusion.
