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There is an old joke seminarians tell—it was told to me many years ago when I was in seminary. It concerns an elderly Christian who was asked by a minister, who was trying to ascertain his parishioner's theological views, whether he believed in infant baptism. The old man's response left no doubt as to where he stood. “Believe in it?” he replied, “Hell, I've seen it!”
I have seen the ordination of women to the priesthood. Furthermore, I have experienced in my own life God's call to women to be priests. Not only did I myself struggle to understand the nature of that call for many years, but in my ministry to women during the past three years I have met and talked with hundreds of Episcopal women also in the midst of trying to decipher what God wants of them. As this is written, there are approximately one hundred and fifty women deacons serving in the Episcopal Church, most of whom are clear that their call is to priesthood. There is probably a further hundred in the process of seeking ordination through diocesan structures. In the spring of 1974, fifteen percent of the students in Episcopal seminaries were women. The proportion is no doubt higher now, for the number of women in Episcopal seminaries doubled every year from the fall of 1971 through the fall of 1974. In addition, as I travel around the church, I am often approached, usually shyly and with embarrassment, by women who confide to me that they feel called to the ordained ministry and are seeking advice on how best to test that call.
The first question these astonishing statistics lead us to ask is, “Why now?” Why, in the seventh decade of the twentieth century after Christ, is God suddenly doing something new and strange in the calling of women to priesthood? Even if we allow that it is actually part of a movement that began in the nineteenth century, God's call to women may still strike us as suspiciously sudden in the sweep of Christian history.
Perhaps, as often happens, the sudden change is not in God's action but in our ability to perceive and recognize that action. Women have been called to priesthood for a long time—but the church's utter inability to recognize that call and women's own deep diffidence about such a shocking vocation have kept it hidden. There is evidence, still sketchy and dim, that women have had priestly, and even episcopal ministries in Christian history, but, apart from the important role which abbesses played, until recently sainthood has been the only ecclesiastical role open to both women and men. In the past, women who felt called to priesthood hardly dared admit such a call to themselves. Those for whom such a call may have been irresistible, and who dared share it, were no doubt told that it was impossible because God does not call women to priesthood and, therefore, they had better reexamine their spiritual state and purge their souls of such dangerous delusions. In fact, one woman was told almost exactly that by her bishop in 1972.
The church's slowness to recognize God's work is not new nor is it unusual. In the third chapter of the first book of Samuel in the Old Testament there is a poignant illustration of this deeply human tendency. The child Samuel, apprenticed to the elderly priest Eli, awakens in the night to the sound of a voice calling his name. Thinking that Eli is calling, he awakens the old man to do his bidding. Eli sends him back to bed since he did not call. Again Samuel hears the call and again he awakens Eli who sends him back to bed (somewhat testily we might guess). When Samuel awakens Eli a third time asking if he called it finally occurs to the old man that the call may be from the Lord and he tells Samuel to respond. When the Lord calls again it is with a message of destruction for Eli so terrible that the boy does not dare to tell the old man. Eli insists, however, and when Samuel relays the message his response is “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.” Belatedly Eli recognizes the work of the Lord and his obligation to accede to it.
Women have heard that voice calling in the night. Some of the less timid have gently nudged the sleeping church and asked her if she called. Somewhat testily, the church has replied that she did not. Many women have taken “no” for an answer and gone about the Lord's work in other ways. Others, however, have heard the voice again and have asked the church a second time if she called. Still she answers that she did not, but the voice persists and the realization that it is God and perhaps not (yet) the church that is calling grows stronger. Women who have been called are giving up that conviction less readily and nudging the church yet a third time. Her response is yet to be determined.
If one starts to speak of voices in the night, one takes on an obligation to try to explain just what one means. What is the nature of God's call to priesthood? Can women be somewhat more articulate and concrete about the nature and form of “our call”? Such an assignment is difficult, but like most difficult tasks no doubt good for the soul. Women who claim a call to priesthood find themselves quizzed about the matter endlessly; I suspect that is why so many women are terribly embarrassed about it. They trust the call, but dread the ordeal of attempting to “justify” it to their fellow Christians for the rest of their lives.
Women who claim a call to priesthood report a tremendous variety of ways in which they experience that call. Some say they have known since girlhood that they were called to priesthood. One woman priest, now eighty years old, tells the story of confronting her mother with her vocation. When she was eleven years old, her mother came into her room one evening for what she now realizes was scheduled to be a little chat about the birds and the bees. The mother began by asking her daughter what she wanted to be when she grew up, fully expecting the standard response that she wanted to be a mother and planning to lead from that response into the particulars of motherhood. When the daughter responded instead that she wanted to be a priest, the mother fled from the room in tears. The daughter recalls the episode as the ouly time she ever saw her Victorian mother either run or cry. Later, in 1914 when she entered college she told the college president that she wanted to enter The General Theological Seminary when she was graduated. Together they planned a course of study that would prepare her for seminary since the college president was certain that the priesthood would be open to women by 1918. She finally went to The General Theological Seminary in 1972.
Others come to their vocations later in life. One woman, an architect by training and profession, became interested and active in the church when her children were small and the family was living in a small town. She discovered that she was a natural pastor to other women and decided she needed some training to deal with the problems that were being brought to her. At the same time, she realized that her interest in others and her ability to help grew out of her Christian commitment. When her children entered school she began part-time seminary work and is now in the ordination process.
The women called to priesthood are a varied lot. Some are “cradle” Episcopalians, others are new to the Episcopal church and some are new to the Christian faith. Some are Anglo-Catholics, others are evangelicals, many are somewhere in between. They are liberal and conservative, feminists and antifeminists. They are mothers, and grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. Some are single, some are married, some are widowed, some are divorced. Some are young, some are old, most are in-between. They are debutantes and blue-collar wives. Most are white and middle class, but some are Black, or Hispanic; others are poor or rich. Some are pursuing full-time ministry; others plan part-time jobs or “worker priest” vocations. Some are daughters, wives or widows of bishops and priests, others have parents or husbands who wouldn't know what a bishop was. All want to test their call in accordance with the guidelines the church imposes and many are in the process of doing so. Some will decide they are not called to priesthood, others will be told by the church that they do not meet the standards. All will be asked repeatedly to explain and elaborate on their motivations.
In short, the women called to priesthood are very much like the men who are called to priesthood. There is one difference and that is that the women's announcement that they feel called will be greeted with a good deal more skepticism and dismay than will their brothers’. Men who feel called to priesthood are not generally required to apologize for that fact nor to justify their reasons for not wishing to remain in the laity in the same way women are. In fact a devoted Christian layman will often experience pressure from other Christians to be ordained priest so he “can serve the Lord full time.”
It is good to remember that the basic call that all Christians share is to witness to the Lord Jesus Christ in the world. There have been times—and such times will come again— when all Christians must be ready to stand by that call to the death. In the first epistle of Peter, Christians are advised to “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence....” Nowadays nobody asks the average Christian to make that defense in the normal course of events. Clergy are asked more often than laypeople and women clergy more often than men.
And so finally I am being asked to account for the hope that is in me. I have spoken of voices in the night and promised a fuller explanation. I will not engage in yet another theological treatise on priesthood and what that may or may not mean in the twentieth century. Let me say only that it is a call within a call, that basic to my vocation my baptism and the attendant commitment to “. . . not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully (sic!) to fight under his banner....” To be a priest is to be recognized within the Christian community as a person for others—a rallier of the troops in the fight we share. I find in that role a tremendous joy and a sobering obligation. It is not a role one chooses but a role for which one is chosen by God and acknowledged by the community.
Perhaps the best way to explain my voice in the night is to share the history of my own call. Read it in the knowledge that it is one person's story and in no way “representative” of women called to priesthood. It is simply my perception of how God has acted m my life.
I was baptized at the age of eleven because my thirteen year-old brother was ready for confirmation and our parents, never great churchgoers, had not gotten around to having us baptized as mfants. My brother remembers the occasion with acute embarrassment and saw to it that his own children were baptized as infants not because he is religious but so that “they'll never have to stand there with all those babies.” I, on the other hand, remember feeling profoundly different after the experience and wondering if there might not be a commitment there that I would later be called to act on.
I was not active in church as a teenager or in college. Though nominally an Episcopalian, I got into an altercation with my college because I left blank the question on religion on a form they sent me after I had been accepted. They wrote back that they had to know my religion to put me with a compatible roommate. Sensing a subtle inquiry into whether I was Jewish, I wrote them a long essay about the oneness of God and the harmony of the universe. Puzzled, they put me with a Quaker roommate. As they had hoped, she and I struggled long with our religious questions.
When I was graduated from college, I went to work as a Girl Scout professional worker rather than for the government because I was aware I wanted to work with people rather than ideas. After I had been working about a year, I went home to visit my parents. The rector of our church, a long-time, close friend of the family, dropped by one morning and startled both my mother and me by announcing he had come to pay a “pastoral call” on me. My mother retreated in some puzzlement to her gardening and he and I sat rather formally in the living room. To my amazement he began by announcing that I should be working for the church and that he thought I knew it. Since I had not given it a conscious thought until that moment, I was even more amazed by my immediate response. “Yes,” I responded, “I know that, but I cannot and will not work for an organization that treats women as miserably as the Episcopal Church does.” His response was a sorrowful nod. The most competent member of his staff was an older Director of Religious Education, a widow who, we both knew, made less than the twenty-five-old curate and who could expect nothing better in the church despite her skill and long experience. He said no more about my working for the church.
He had raised the subject, however, and as I struggled with what to do with my life the church was in the back of my mind. At that time only one Episcopal seminary admitted women to the Bachelor of Divinity program and I actually got up enough interest to go there and inquire, but was told by a woman in the office that what I was interested in was evening courses for laypeople.
Knowing from my scout work in the inner-city of Hartford, Connecticut, that my future probably lay with the oppressed, I decided to spend a summer finding out what life was like for native Americans. Since the only group I knew that did any work with Indians in my home state of Minnesota was the Episcopal church, I asked what was available and ended up in a seminarian training program as a resource person on educational techniques for small rural churches. That summer exposed me to the church at work in small-town America, in both Indian and white communities. While it convinced me further that I had a vocation to work with people in the name of Christ, it also reinforced my observation that there was no place for women in professional ministry in the Episcopal church.
After another year of traveling and teaching in a ghetto high school, I knew it was time to go to graduate school. I went back to the seminary and insisted that the women in the office give me a regular application and let me talk with a faculty member. I applied also to social work school, realizing that, for a woman, that was the only practical approach to ministry. By the fall of 1961 I had been accepted at the seminary and also at a social work school halfway across the country. The night before the seminary was to open, I sat with my sister and debated my quandary. Seminary was what I wanted, but I did not want to end up jobless or underemployed like every woman I had ever met who worked for the church. My sister suggested I go over to the seminary the next day just to see if I liked it. If I did not I could drive to the social work school and be there in time for its opening which was five days later. So, on my twenty--fifth birthday, in the midst of a hurricane, I entered Episcopal Theological School. I stayed.
It was clear to me that the only way to avoid being taken advantage of by the church I proposed to serve was to have a skill that was marketable both within and without the institution. So, after a year of seminary I entered social work school as a part-time student and worked on both my B.D. and M.S.W. degrees. When I had both degrees in the spring of 1965, the most promising job I found was to be part of an ecumenical team ministry in a Presbyterian parish in the inner-city in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was an exciting place to be, and though I felt somewhat hampered by my lack of ordination it seemed more important to maintain the ecumenical nature of our ministry by remaining an Episcopalian. Part of my job was to maintain contact with the three Episcopal churches in the neighborhood and to encourage their involvement in neighborhood projects. Word got back to me that the faculty at Episcopal Theological Seminary had heard false rumors that I had been ordained in the Presbyterian church and that they were delighted because it had long been clear that I should be ordained. I began to think for the first time that my ministry might someday include insisting that the Episcopal church face up to its discrimination against women instead of cheerfully sending its promising women on to other denominations.
Before going to St. Paul, when I was job-hunting in the early months of 1965, a seminary friend of mine put me in touch with his bishop, whom he admired greatly for the pastoral assistance he had received from him in his decision not to be ordained. I had heard about Bishop DeWitt's exciting urban ministry in Philadelphia and I wanted to talk with him about my being a part of it. He was very discouraging because I was a woman, and told me he would take no more women churchworkers in his diocese because he had a canonical responsibility for women workers but no practical power to be of any assistance to them. He urged me to make my career in social work and avoid entanglements with a church that could only disappoint me.
In the spring of 1967, I was offered a job as a welfare rights organizer in a social welfare agency in Philadelphia. It was an exciting opportunity for the kind of social change ministry I was interested in and, though it was not a church-related job, there was high interest in the project in the religious community in Philadelphia. While in Philadelphia interviewing for the job, I called Bishop DeWitt who remembered me well and again warned me that there was nothing in the church for me. He would welcome me to his diocese as a social worker, but I must understand there was no place for me in the church. I took the job.
Eighteen months later, the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization was launched and autonomous and no longer needed the help of white social workers. Because of the community organizing skills I had developed, I was offered a job on Bishop DeWitt's staff as “suburban missioner,” that is a liaison person for suburban Episcopalians who wanted to work on urban problems. Again Bishop DeWitt and I had a conversation about women and the church. He wanted me to join his staff, but he still felt there was no future for me in the church and was concerned that I should be building my career in social work instead. I suggested that my future was no more precarious than that of another member of his staff who was highly controversial and unpopular with many church people. He replied “His situation is different—he's a priest”.
I served as Bishop DeWitt's suburban missioner from 1968 until 1972. In the spring of 1970 a group of women in the Episcopal Peace Fellowship decided it was time for Episcopal women to discuss their situation as women in the church. They called a conference on that subject at Graymoor Ecumenical Center. About sixty women attended and came away from a stimulating weekend having authored a statement calling for opportunity for women to serve in the church at every level including the priesthood and episcopate. After the Graymoor conference, I decided that the time had come to face up to the fact that God had been steadily pushing me toward ordained ministry for many years and that, despite my resistance, here I was unaccountably still in the Episcopal church. I went to see Bishop DeWitt about ordination. All my arguments went unused when his immediate response was that he no longer had any doubts about the ordination of women—the only question left was how and when. He helped me begin the application process.
I attended the 1970 General Convention in Houston as a postulant for Holy Orders in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. There were four women at that convention who declared their call to priesthood. When the convention clarified the canons with regard to women's eligibility for the diaconate at least, I proceeded with my postulancy and was ordained deacon in the spring of 1971.
At the Houston convention, it became clear to me that there were large numbers of Episcopal women who felt called to priesthood, but had never dared speak of it before. My first experience with a woman confiding to me about her vocation occurred at Houston. It also became clear at that convention that many laywomen saw the church's non-ordination of women as a sign of their own second-class citizenship.
In January 1972, I took a leave of absence as suburban missioner and began a two-year project as a consultant to women in seminaries. Immediately after the Houston convention, the number of women in Episcopal seminaries began rising and the church needed some preparation for this influx of women. In the course of my seminary work, two of my students surveyed the women graduates of Episcopal seminaries since 1960 and found what I had suspected. Most of the women reported that their seminary years had been great, but the church had been unable to find them satisfying work after graduation. My own research at the seminaries yielded similar data. While our seminaries had many woman students, there were very few women faculty, administrators, or trustees.
After the General Convention in Louisville in 1973 ignored the presence of about fifty women who declared their call to priesthood and again refused to deal with the question, I began to be discouraged. I had seen two General Conventions turn away from women in priesthood because in terms of church politics it looked as though it would be more trouble to ordain us than not. I also knew it had taken twenty-five years for the General Convention to approve the seating of women as lay deputies due to its inequitable voting system and the parliamentary delays of the minority that opposed such a move. I saw the grim prospect of the ordination becoming a perennial issue at General Convention and hundreds of women being diverted from the ministries to which they were called to fight over whether they were called at all. When the Louisville Convention ended with the call for yet another study of the ordination of women it became clear that the route of General Convention approval was the route of delay unacceptable to women but even more unacceptable to the God who was calling us to ordained ministry.
Therefore, when the opportunity to be ordained priest in July of 1974 arose, there was no choice for me but to go ahead. In looking back over my life I see that God has called me to different tasks at different times. It became clear to me in July, 1974 that my vocation for now is to try to get the Episcopal church to face up to its non-ordination of women and what that says about the church to the world it seeks to serve. Since my ordination the conviction has grown that my ten sisters and I are insisting on our vocations now so that other women will not have to spend their ministries in futile self-justification. With the acceptance of women priests, we are also hopeful that the church can gain credibility with the women and men of the world who cannot take seriously an institution that discriminates against women in fact, however noble its rhetoric.
So, as I said at the beginning I have seen the ordination of women. I resisted the call to ordained ministry in my own life for a long time because I felt I had better things to do than fight the Episcopal Church. When I owned my call, I tried in very ladylike and reasonable ways to convince the church that women could be and, indeed, were called. Finally it became necessary to act on the call despite the church's desire to delay.
The time for argument and apology about the ordination of women to the priesthood is over. Women have been ordained and are functioning as priests and the community is being nourished, the troops are being rallied through their ministries. Like Samuel, women are nudging old Eli—the priestly guard of the sacred things, the church—for the third time. We can only pray that the church, like Eli, will, finally, realize what is happening and respond, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.”
The Reverend Suzanne R.Hiatt is assistant professor of pastoral theology at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1972 to 1974, she lectured on homiletics and womens' studies at the schools of the Episcopal Consortium for Theological Education in the Northeast.
In 1958, Ms. Hiatt received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe College and, in 1964, her Master of Divinity degree from the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. After receiving a Master's degree in social work from Boston University, she worked from 1966 to 1967 as a parish assistant for the Dayton Avenue Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1967 she was named assistant consultant in public welfare for the Health and Welfare Council of Philadelphia and from 1968 to 1972 served as a suburban missioner for the Diocese of Pennsylvania.
Ms. Hiatt was ordained to the diaconate in 1971 and to the priesthood in Philadelphia in 1974.
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