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And Jesus said to them, “Follow me.” Mark 1:17a
For the sake of the unity of the Church and the cause of ordination of women to the priesthood I beg you to reconsider your intention to present yourself for ordination before the necessary canonical changes are made. Am deeply concerned about the relationship obstacles which can result within your diocese as well as in the Church as a whole.
—Telegram from John M. Allin, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, to eleven women deacons, July 23, 1974.
Dear Bishop Allin:
I have received your telegram. Each day I am reconsidering my intention to be ordained, God willing, on July 29. This is a time of prayer. If I do proceed with plans as scheduled, as I intend to at this point, it will be for the sake of the unity of humankind in Christ. My hope is that the Episcopal Church, of which I am fond and to which I have committed myself professionally, will follow suit on this particular “issue” of women’s ordination. You have my prayers. I ask for yours.
Sincerely, Carter Heyward July 25, 1974
And so it was that on July 29, 1974, the Feast Day of Mary and Martha of Bethany, something happened in the Episcopal Church that set shock waves in motion throughout the Christian Church. Church people came together and acted on convictions that had been born and nurtured within the Church itself. Somewhere within our corporate religious past, we had been taught that all women and men are people of God; that any person of God can be called to any ministry in the Church; moreover, that God compels us to act again and again for whatever is just and decent.
The Church had told us something it apparently had not meant us to hear. But in Philadelphia’s Church of the Advocate, hundreds of Episcopalians, joined in Spirit by people throughout the world, came together to celebrate the Good News we had heard. Called by God to the vocation of priesthood, affirmed in this call by Episcopal parishes and, de facto, by dioceses (large clusters of parishes), eleven Episcopal women deacons were ordained priests by two retired and one resigned Episcopal bishops in the presence of over 1,500 people.
Praised and criticized; admired and despised; accepted by some, ignored and rejected by others, the “Philadelphia Eleven” may well never have come together had not a common God compelled us toward a common vocation and a common moment. We are women with different personalities, backgrounds, experiences, ministries, and perspectives. We respect and value our diversity. Although much of what I write could have been penned by my sister priests, I cannot speak for them.
***
In writing “theology”—i.e. about one’s relationship to God— the theologian must in all fairness to her readers, give some idea of her purpose: To whom is she writing, and why ?
I write to any woman, man, boy, or girl, who is interested in the current Episcopal controversy over women priests. I write also to any person who is exploring his or her own relationship to God, whatever the person conceives “God” to be. I write especially to women who have something of themselves invested in religious institutions, particularly the Christian Church.
My purpose in writing is to tell my story, in the hope of stimulating the readers to tell their own. Central to my story is a theme: That I, a woman, not only have had since birth a right to be eligible for ordination to the priesthood; but moreover along with all women and men, a right to choose and shape my own life; a responsibility in fact to claim my own authority and live accordingly. No one can deny me this right, or bear the burden of this responsibility for me.
It is easy to be persuaded that, if a woman demands radical autonomy and self-determination, there can be no place for her in such institutions as the Church. If this were true, I would have to maintain that any institution which must thrive on my unfulfilled being—my submissiveness, my nonassertiveness—is an institution that has outlived its value in my life. But I am not persuaded that this is true.
I see women as the single most creative force within the Christian Church. We, as a group, are those challenged most immediately with the task of renewal—of making new what is old— within and beyond ourselves in the Church and elsewhere.
We are asked to bring something new to the world around us—as workers, wives, daughters, mothers, scholars, artists, politicians, priests. We are called to tell our stories, and in telling our stories we manifest a new reality—the new reality of being female and speaking up and being heard and reshaping—on the basis of who we are—those institutions that matter most to us. Where we cannot be heard and where we cannot reshape, we are called to the reality of building new community.
The woman with a story to tell in the Christian Church is the new theologian. We pick up where our sisters Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women who witnessed to the Resurrection left off. With them, we tell of our theological experience, our relationship to God. With them, we insist that what we have to say is worth hearing. For we have been filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, and we are compelled to manifest, in whatever ways we can, the reality of God’s presence.
Whether the church accepts you or not, you have in a very real sense already won the battle.
—Letter to me from seminary dean, summer, 1974.
My faith is in God:(1) mysterious process, creating new life, destroying old life within, between, and among us. A God of that which we see as “darkness” and “light.” A God of that which we feel as “pain” and “joy.” A God of that which we name as “good” and “bad.” A God of that which we experience as “birth” and “death.” A God in whose holy movement all contradictions are woven together into a unity and a peace not to be attained by human will, human knowledge, or human effort.
I see and know this God through the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a particular young Jewish male in whose being opposites coincided: humility and power; fear and courage; work and faith; suffering and peace; pain and joy; death and life; particularity and universality; humanity and divinity. Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, who transcendent of time and space is here with us today, as we are with each other today, brothers and sisters here today, reaching for one another through pages of a book. Sharing our humanness and our relationship to that common God. Tedious Growth. Terrible Good, which passes all understanding.
I believe that this God here today and way beyond today is a Holy Spirit, weaving us together with threads of commonality. A Spirit in whose movement there is no barrier—neither color, nor ethnicity, nor class, nor nationality, nor sexuality, nor gender, nor ideology, nor religion, nor age. A Spirit whose community is humankind. Whose movement is irrepressible. Whose nature is not to be understood or categorized into doctrinal boxes.
I believe that we are created alone; and that we journey together alone, as simply human beings in community with human beings; and that all of us are called to rebirth and to re-formation even moment by moment. I believe that we were created to laugh, to weep, to dance, to stumble, to sing, to hide, to risk, to pray, to grieve, to leap in faith, to act decisively, to step back and rest, and to rejoice along the way. Thanks be to God in Christ, Christ in us, and us in God. Amen.
***
My experience on this small planet—my involvements and observations, relationships and estrangements, educational processes and work, other events in my life, and faith itself—has led me to marvel at how it is that so many layers of a single reality are interwoven, even when we can see only so little.
For me, life is sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. And agapé (a “love meal”) is Holy Communion. Sacrament is very real to me, most all of the time; and wherever it is, it is substantial and it is valid. I agree with Jesuit theologian Juan Luis Segundo(2) who suggests that a “sacramental crisis” is threatening the Church. He continues: The crisis is not that we do not take such rites as baptism, communion, and ordination seriously enough. The crisis is that we do not take such concrete events as grocery shopping, studying, shooting pictures, making love, walking the dog, protesting injustice, and feeding the hungry sacramentally enough.
We are baptized to go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit, believing full well that at any moment (kairos), theology will be shaped to reflect, however inadequately, the movement of the Spirit among the human beings who are rejoicing in its power. Such theology—reflecting in a glass darkly what is actually happening among faithful human beings—is the conservation of future Church.
So my experience is teaching me.
***
Christian tradition is, for me, more problematic than my faith or my experience. It is more problematic for me because of my faith and my experience. For some people, tradition is a crutch; for me, it is a stumbling block, not yet so big that I can’t get over it.
The temptation is always to throw out the baby with the bath —which is to say, in this case, to throw out the tradition taken as a whole rather than those parts of the tradition which are used so brutally and offensively against human beings.
And yet, I am in some important ways a traditionalist. History, continuity, and sacramental connections between all points of time and space, are very real to me. I find much joy in remembering our ancestors—like Sarah and Abraham. I’m grateful to them for what they have given us: our roots.
Perhaps because I find deep meaning in the tradition of our Judaeo-Christian, and Episcopal, community, I am especially sensitive to the hiddenness, the rejection, and the defilement various peoples have met within the tradition. In Christian tradition, this invisibility or violation has been to some great degree true for non white people; for Jewish people; for non-Western people; for poor people; for homosexual people; and for female people.
As a female, I do not find much theology within the tradition that helps me make sense out of my experience as a woman along a continuum of past, present, and future women. For traditionally, the context of theology has been male experience. As a female attempting to discover her roots in the tradition, I look back and only occasionally see myself there: WOMAN— temptress, virginal mother, “gateway to the devil,” “misbegotten seed,” witch, saint: Everything but simply human.
To this I must say no. Because I am simply human.
With my sisters-in-Christ, I have had to go back again and look again and feel and think and explore again, to find out whether or not in fact our humanness is fully affirmed in Christ Jesus. If it is not, then not only are our ordinations to the priesthood “invalid,” as the bishops have maintained, but also our baptisms; and Christianity becomes for us no more than a male construct, club, and caste. But if women’s humanness is affirmed in Christ Jesus—despite predilections of Church Fathers on this matter—then not only our baptisms, but also our ordinations are valid. Real. Alive.
Of course you are a priest—unless there have never been any, can never be any, and the whole category is meaningless.
—Letter to me from woman religious (nun),
Diocese of New York, summer, 1974.
Sophie Couch always wanted to be a priest. Perched in the apple tree, mischievously munching on green apples, she and I had many ponderous heart-to-hearts back when we were four or five.
“I’m gonna be a priest! Just like Mr. Burke.”
“But Sophie!” I protested.
“It’s what I’m supposed
to be. I know it. I can feel it in my bones! I think in some funny sort of way
I’m already a priest, and so are you.”
“But Sophie,
we’re girlsl” I insisted, wrinkling my brow and spitting out a seed
for emphasis.
“So?” she queried.
***
The matter seemed simple to me, and closed. For Sophie Couch the matter was not closed. For her a matter was never closed or in any way definitive of who she was or who she might become. Sophie Couch was a young dreamer, a visionary, a child of far-reaching faith. Best of all, Sophie Couch was mine. She was my imaginary playmate, an extension of me, created to fill some of the relational gaps I experienced in being an only child for six years.
An imaginary playmate is a godsend. She is the raw matter out of which dreams are conceived, born, and nurtured into maturity. An imaginary playmate manifests a child’s capacity to look beyond what seems to be and to come to know herself in other ways. Imagination is the stretching beyond what is apparent towards that which is concealed; the moving beyond what is towards that which might be.
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, ‘Be rooted up, and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
Luke 17:5-6
Imagination is the fabric out of which faith is cut—faith as a grain of mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds, the smallest faith. Not much at all, but some. And if you had it, look what you could do. You could say to the sycamine tree, the massive tree with the deepest roots, virtually impossible to uproot, “Be rooted up!” You could demand not only that it be uprooted, but also that it plant itself in the sea, where a tree could not possibly grow. And it would obey you.
Jesus was exaggerating. Faith is itself an exaggeration—an enlargement of what seems to be true, a bending of one’s minds towards that which seems unreal.
Psychotherapists know how significant to healing the processes of dreams and fantasies are, the moving beyond what is conscious and under control into mysterious worlds of symbols, imagination, and chaos. This journey is crucial to a person’s movement from brokenness or dysfunctional fear towards wholeness or what Tillich has called “the courage to be.”
The faithful person will have an elastic mind, one that can bend without breaking. Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Luke 18:17). To this day I thank God for Sophie Couch, a sense of imagination that bent my mind beyond apparent parameters of reality and extended me into spaces that I have come since to know as equally real.
Faith is a process of being which embraces doubt. It has as much to do with play as with work, with laughter as with sobriety, with imagination as with concrete reality. In our work we are engaged in cleaning house, piloting planes, typing papers, counting stars. These activities are important to the extent that they nurture our faith. In our faith, we deal with relationship to self, God, others; relationship that we cannot work to produce, or earn, or resolve at Church conventions.
Faith is fundamentally incapable of articulation. It is a gracious process, a flow of being through us, by which we act not on the basis of what we know, or of what we can control, but rather on the basis of what we believe and of what controls us, which is to say, God, that inexpressibly good power which spirals through the universe, creating and recreating our being, our imagination, our faith.
Jesus worked on faith having no other goal than to live and grow in harmony with God. If we cannot fantasize beyond that which we can see and know to be real and possible, beyond that which we can work at and conceivably bring into being, then our faith is weak. In faith, Jesus went to Lazarus, and to the cross. In faith, Resurrection became reality.
***
A need for certainty is something we cultivate. We want to be sure of things. Ambiguity is hard to take. We want answers, not avoidances; yes or no, not maybe. It is easy to believe in that of which we can be sure. It is difficult to believe in that of which we cannot be sure. We have trouble embracing a faith in which there is room for doubt.
But doubt is as crucial to faith as darkness is to light. Without one, the other has no context and is meaningless. Faith is, by definition, uncertainty. It is full of doubt, steeped in risk. It is about matters not of the known, but of the unknown.
Certainty is a name for a territory that has been explored, mapped out, and staked. Faith is about that which is still unexplored, yet unmarked. We Episcopalians must decide whether or not we will continue to invest church law and polity with a degree of unbending certainty we have never been willing to invest in even the most compelling mandates of the Bible.
Faith is a process of leaping into the abyss not on the basis of any certainty about where we shall land, but rather on the belief that we shall land. We do not risk without some awareness that we are afraid to leap. Then leaping, we tremble towards integrity.
Faith is about the new, the mysterious, the surprising. Nobody has ever been there before. Nobody knows what it is. God, who is waiting there, calls us forth. Words and names adopt static, definitive connotations. Out of respect and fear, the people of Israel did not dare pronounce the holy name, the Tetragrammaton, the four initials “YHWH,” which we have since spoken as “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” “the Lord.” It may be that our faith is diminished when we dare to utter God’s name, let alone attempt to define, categorize, or theologize about that holy being which is moving and taking us into new, unknown places.
***
Idealism is an optimistic worldview in which human beings conceive of all good things as possible. If we work hard enough, gather enough knowledge, behave as we should, things will work out. Send money to the hungry, and they will be relieved. Pool human resources, and wars can be brought to an end. Educate Episcopalians, and they will accept the changes.
Liberal politics are grounded in idealism. Similarly, “humanism” incorporates an idealistic ethic whereby human will, human effort, and human consensus are seen to point to the solution of humankind’s problems.
Idealism looks like faith. It is open to the future. It is often imaginative. It is built on concern about human beings. It is hopeful. But idealism is unlike faith in one significant way: for the idealist, human beings can transform the seemingly impossible into reality, much in the spirit of Don Quixote. We can seek, and we can realize, impossible dreams. For the faithful, we can do no more than we can do. The realization of impossible dreams is dependent upon the mysterious and elusive movement of God, in which we are employed in ways that we cannot imagine, let alone write into our political platforms.
This does not give us a mandate for political irresponsibility. For it is precisely the business of the faithful to work for the betterment of humankind and to dream impossible dreams in order that our visions for justice and peace be far-reaching enough to challenge and upgrade our work and our faith. But we had best know well that we are not finally in control of this world, this nation, this Church, or ourselves.
Faith as a grain of mustard seed—neither our work, nor our certainty, nor our idealism—will be that which brings us to our maturity as Christian people, faithful people, for whom the mind-bending magical possibility of an uprooted sycamine tree planted in the sea cannot be discarded offhandedly unless we can also discard all possibilities of mystery, grace, love, and surprises. Which is to say, all possibility of God.
Your visit showed me that you are fully and completely a minister of true Christian faith; Anglican faith. I am unsure what fart your sex played in that reality, but we are not solely the bodies that encase us.... Your spiritual communion with us in the space in time we shared did provide a sanctuary for something far greater than ourselves, as sexual beings or as individuals. God is truly not dead. I am suddenly rather taken aback by these strong words I have written. I believe they have been in stages of composition for more time than I can know. The affirmation of faith is an incredible thing. It embraces positive energy, but I am now left trembling.
—Letter to me from laywoman, Diocese of Albany, winter, 1975.
***
It was with my childhood playmate Elliott that I first became aware of what I now would name androgyny, the interesting blending of so-called “male” and “female” characteristics in all people. At the time I had no name for this experience of myself and my friend as children whose gender was neither asset nor liability to our interests. We played with bride dolls and trucks. We played cowgirl and house. We wore Lone Ranger T-shirts with our mother’s high heels. We scrapped and we cuddled. We were equally as at home in the kitchen helping our mothers fix peanut butter sandwiches as we were in the creek tiptoeing after crawfish. My relationship to Elliott gave me hope that Sophie Couch’s ruminations about life and vocation were correct: perhaps I really could be myself when I grew up.
Hopefully and rather privately, I lived with my vocational yearning to be ordained until I reached adolescence. A typical teenager, I came crashing into those Dark Ages. It was hard to lay aside my softball bat and try to be a “lady.” It was traumatic to exchange horseback riding for ballroom dancing. But I did, for despite my parents’ protestations, I had become convinced by my social world that “to be a girl” was to be “cute.” While scaling the walls of the neighborhood school with my pal Tina might strengthen my muscles, dancing school might make me cute, a description that had never seemed to apply to me any more than it did to Annie Oakley or Eleanor Roosevelt. Up until then I had not cared. Suddenly I did.
I began to turn my back on the aspects of myself I considered “unfeminine.” One of the first to go were my fantasies about being a priest. I began to think instead of wearing some handsome boy’s monogram sweater. To bolster my female ego, nothing would do but that I catch and land only the most popular boys (read: sports stars). To have done so, which I did not, would have been confirmation of my cuteness or, if not that, of some teenage boy’s peculiar capacity to transcend his own ego needs to meet mine.
Whether we are thirteen or fifty, “adolescence” is a time in our lives in which we battle with a monster. The monster is a loss of center, loss of self, loss of soul. “Soul” is an exceedingly deep, even primal, knowledge of being in relationship to God; of being a singular and significant thread in the fabulously complex, many dimensional, ever-expanding tapestry of an essentially good creative process. To lose one’s soul is to be blocked off not from God’s presence, but from awareness of God’s presence and movement, both within and beyond oneself. To lose one’s soul is to lose one’s sense of the authority on which she lives.
***
The adolescence-monster bit me, as it will from time to time, but it did not destroy me. Sophie Couch would not let it. Discouraged that I could not be a homecoming queen or a cheerleader, I was nonetheless aware that I had a number of perfectly acceptable strong suits: scholarship, leadership, music and drama, and the Young Peoples’ Service League (YPSL) at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
I immersed myself in these endeavors, and I excelled. Moreover, I was happy. My days were spent doing homework; editing newspapers and yearbooks; cherishing Rodgers and Hammerstein; dancing in imitation of Mitzi Gaynor, South Pacific’s “Nellie Forbush”; and going to church, probably the strongest of these interests.
Perhaps I saw the Church as a refuge, a place to hide from societal pressures. Perhaps I saw it as a womb, a place to remain young and undeveloped. Perhaps I saw it as a home, a place to be myself. I think the Church was each of these to me and especially, at that time, a home, a place in which I could let my hair down and relax.
St. Martin’s rector, Mr. Moore, was a gentleman in the tradition of South Carolina’s thoroughly southern lower-coastal aristocracy—familial, soft-spoken, gracious in an innately pastoral way. His assistant, Mr. Forzly was an extroverted, bubbling, wonderfully witty man who both kept us in stitches and made each person feel important. Both men seemed unflappable. Upon one occasion, shortly after my confirmation, Mr. Forzly, calmly and in smooth rhythm, fished about in the chalice for my braces retainer which had slipped into the cup as I drank. His nonplussed manner of simply sliding it onto my raised palms, much in the likeness of a second wafer, spared me the mortification I was prepared to feel. Both priests liked me, and I knew it. Unlike school, in which competition was the key to both academic and extracurricular affirmation, my life in the Church seemed devoid of my having to prove anything to anyone.
***
Fran, Jane, and I were in the same grade. We were Episcopalians. We were as different as three white middle-class southern girls could be.
Fran was flirtatious and popular with boys. She was unusually artistic and bright. She adored nature, animals, and the out-of-doors. Her red hair, fiery disposition, and an occasional dreamy otherworldly quality made her seem at times to be an enigmatic pink angel, with a singular sense of self-determination.
Jane was a musical prodigy, a church organist at twelve, and —according to the adults—a genius. Jane was weird, and wonderful. She was a nonconformist in both interests and dress. She was socially retiring, and at anyone’s party might well be found sitting at the piano in another room in communion with Chopin or Bach.
Most of the time Jane seemed to live in another world, one which she shared only with Fran and me. Her world was full of spirits and sacred things at war with demons. Jane was a sacramentalist and an Anglo-Catholic (“high church”) complete with missal and rosary. To me, she was a holy person. I wondered occasionally if she had been born out of her time. Maybe all holy people seem to have been born out of their time.
We called ourselves the “Silly Scholars,” and for all the giggly, wide-eyed hours we spent together, we might as well have been in heaven. One of our strongest, and most secretive, bonds was our common interest in the priesthood. For hours at a time, and for years, we discussed “the priesthood” as one might discuss “the Congo” or “rare plants.”
But “issues” are of course born of human passion. They are empowered by the needs, desires, whims, and aspirations of human beings. This is as true for a theological issue, or doctrine, as it is for any other.
So it was that Fran, Jane, and I were not reflecting simply upon “the priesthood.” We were talking about ourselves, and our longings. We were seeking and, by the grace of God, finding an exit from isolation into community.
***
The three of us tried to go to Holy Communion every day, partly to celebrate the holy communion among us all the time. One special day Fran, Jane and I found a coconut and celebrated communion with it in the side yard.
We began making our private Confessions on a somewhat regular basis, having requested that Mr. Moore, our hero and role model, hear us, even though St. Martin’s was not a parish in which private Confession was the norm.
The night before my first Confession found me as nervous as I might have been the night before my wedding. Tediously, I tried to recall and record every “sin” I had ever committed and to guess the number of times I had committed it—like having “yelled at my mother eight hundred and forty-one times,” having “lied fifty-two times,” and having “sneaked into the school on weekends twice.”
When the time came, Mr. Moore and I greeted each other and advanced awkwardly into the chancel. Facing the altar, a hardback chair sat immediately inside the sanctuary rail. Mr. Moore took his seat and I knelt weak-kneed behind him at the rail. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” One by one, I listed my sins. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Mr. Moore said something to me about God’s forgiveness, and then stood up, turned around, and smiled at me. His smile brought extraordinary relief. My quaking ceased suddenly, I held his eye, and I smiled cautiously back. Then I giggled and gaited confidently down the aisle and out the door into the laughter of Fran and Jane.
***
My second Confession was much briefer, since I had only to recount the “sins” of a several-week period. The private Confessions gradually subsided and finally ceased when I began to recognize the essence of Mr. Moore’s smile in the expressions of Jane, Fran, Mama, Daddy, and other friends and strangers who conveyed to me an acceptance of who I am.
***
By the time we got to high school, Fran, Jane, and I had given up our semiconscious yearnings to be priests. As the pendulum swings by tension and pull, we swung back again into more realistic ruminations of what we might do upon graduation from college, the latter being a given. Fran talked about being a veternarian, a biologist, or an artist. Jane would be either a scientist or a musician. I wanted to be a teacher like Miss Smith.
Miss Smith was dynamic, sharp, aggressive. She knew history, and she knew how to teach it in such a way as to make students crave it. Moreover, she was single and, at the same time, seemed full and happy. Her energy was contagious. Here was a female who was strong and attractive, independent and warm, engaged in a profession she apparently enjoyed. In addition to everything else, Miss Smith was a communicant of St. Martin’s. She was my ideal, my idol, my role model. Maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could grow up to be a teacher like Miss Smith.
Then, too, I might be a nun. Jane was considering entering a convent (which later she did enter, and leave). She and I talked incessantly about what this would mean and what type of Episcopal religious order we would want to join. Jane leaned towards the contemplative. I knew that I would fit better into a more physically active community, a teaching order perhaps.
I was beginning to think seriously about vocation. I wanted badly to blend my talents with a religious vocation of some form. Christian education offered a female vocation that did not appeal to me. Why, I cannot be sure. I had known one quite capable director of Christian education, but she was much older than I and the constellation of her role parameters had seemed fixed in such a way as to preclude my professional identification with her.
Like Miss Smith, I wanted to teach. Like a nun, I wanted to teach within the context of the Church. Like Mr. Moore, I wanted ... I was not sure what I wanted.
I could not find my vocational shoes on the feet of anyone I knew. I needed to find a vocation that would fit me. But where? Where could I go with the me that I knew best? What was I to do ? I was confused.
***
People have different ways of reacting to the ecstatic and traumatic process of self-discovery and the internal conflicts precipitated by this process. Some people get depressed, others manic; some pop uppers, others downers; some batter their parents, others themselves; some flee into the ministry, others into marriage. Some people get migraines; I got nauseated.
I do not remember much about my senior year in high school. Memory is selective. I do remember that I spent a fair amount of time throwing up. Once again I was at work in academic, extracurricular, dramatic, and ecclesiastical activities, discovering yet again my competencies. But I was experiencing increasingly these interests and skills as purposeless and painful.
So what if I had a goodly portion of brains, character, and charisma? So what if I were chairman [sic] of the Diocesan Youth Commission? So what if I were at my best immersed in Episcopal matters of youth work, liturgy, theology, and education? So what!
Then and there, at age seventeen, I felt myself nearing a deadend, not because I was ready to give up these interests; not because I was tired and bored. I was approaching a dead-end in church vocation because, and only because, I was female. I was furious, but bottled up like a soda that has not yet been shaken so furiously as to explode, I lapsed into depression. During that year, my interest in the church all but disappeared.
Continuation of "A Priest Forever"
Notes
1. This faith statement is adapted from an address given at Colloquium on “Women and the Priesthood,” General Theological Seminary, New York City, February 24, 1975.
2. See Juan Luis Segundo, S.J., The Sacraments Today (New York: Maryknoll, 1974).
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