A Priest Forever

by Carter Heyward

published by Harper & Row, 1976, pp. 16-39. (Section II)
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

I feel that you and your associates are hurting the very church that has already given so much of itself to you.

—Letter to me from priest, Diocese of North Carolina, summer, 1974.

I left for Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Lynchburg, Virginia, in the fall of 1963. During my four years there, I attended church from time to time, with only minimal feelings of attachment, and absolutely no sense of commitment, to it.

At Randolph-Macon, I became interested academically in religion. The religion department was superb; the religion faculty, affable and inspiring. Having stepped out of the Church, I stepped into religious studies and spirituality, and found myself immersed in matters that intrigued me.

Moreover, as the Church had once provided me with space to be myself, Randolph-Macon became my home, offering me four years of gracious opportunity to take myself seriously. In an all-female student environment, the tasks to be done, jobs to be filled, skills to be built, and vocational fantasies to be explored became the business of women. For the moment, we could be the editors, the scientists, the presidents, the artists, the varsity sportspeople, and the ministers, without any fear of perversely trespassing on the turf of “male ego.” Here, at last, was a place for our own ego-building; here, at last, a vocational heaven. And I gloried in it.

***

At the encouragement of a college friend, I spent the summer of 1965, between sophomore and junior years, as a teacher’s aide in a remedial second- and third-grade class at the Henry Street Settlement House on New York City’s Lower East Side. Something significant happened to me that summer. I am still not sure what it was. Maybe it was the impact of New York City—its beauty and its terror. Maybe it was the stimulation, and inspiration, of the people with whom I worked. Maybe it was my journey to what was, for me, like a foreign land, far away from everything I had ever known. For whatever reasons, this was a sacramental summer, in which every conversation, action, color, smell, sound, sight, value, touch, and emotion seemed to point towards some deeper level of reality—within me and around me. I felt small, and open. I felt free, as if my being were itself a sacrament, an outward sign of grace. It was as if I had worked my way out of a nineteen-year-old cocoon and was balanced at the edge of a twig trying to decide whether or not to fly.

As children mastered “double Dutch” jump rope with amazing agility and parents talked about the cost of living with alarm; as Norman Thomas spoke to us about socialism, and Barbra Streisand sang to us that no one would rain on her parade; and as my colleagues and I weathered a water shortage on the streets of New York, something happened in me. I began to think beyond Randolph-Macon’s “red brick wall” towards the shaping of values on which I could act. I returned to college and resigned from the school’s prestigious “secret societies,” to which I had been elected the previous year. I left them because they were, for me, a sign of the spoils, the competition and clamor predicated by a need to prove something to someone.

***

I write in retrospect, of course. Upon my resignation, I held up “ideology” as my reason for taking this action. The issue, I was careful to point out, was social justice. I did not believe that organizations which were closed and exclusive and existed, insofar as I could tell, primarily to extol themselves were helpful in the creation of community spirit.

I believed this then. I believe it now. But it was important for me to gradually make the connection between the ideology and my own experiences. It was important for me to come to realize that such ideas had not been simply handed to me—by Norman Thomas, Karl Marx, Dorothy Day, or for that matter, Jesus of Nazareth. The “ideology” was, in fact, my belief, and my belief had grown out of my own life processes which had included the experience of exclusion: my black maid’s exclusion from our dining-room table; my exclusion from her house, the sixth-grade baseball team, the eighth-grade sock-hop, the acolytes’ group, and the possibility of ordination in the Episcopal Church.

The capacity to act on a belief—to resign from the secret societies, to join resistance to an outrageous war, to take small steps towards Philadelphia and come what may—is grounded in a gracious sense of freedom, such as that which I had felt stirring within me on Henry Street. It is the Sophie Couch in each person, the soulful, imaginative knowledge of oneself and others as commonly unique reflections of something that is basically good, something that is God. In its movement, its image, its spirit, we are called to go with it wherever it goes.

***

One may be shot down, put down, or ignored, and she is still able to laugh. For the movement rolls on, and with this holy process, she herself is able to roll with the punches. In the words of the Church Militant, “the victory is won.”

In these moments of decision, we are indeed fortunate that we have all of you who walk where we have not. Your enthusiasm and commitment will help to make us all strong.

—Letter to me from lay woman,
Diocese of Massachusetts, fall, 1974.

I wanted to continue my studies in religion after graduation from college. With the encouragement of my major professors, I decided to go to Seminary. I chose Union Theological Seminary in New York City both because it was in “The City” and on the basis of its long-standing reputation as an excellent interdenominational school. I had no more than a fuzzy vocational notion of what I might “do” with a seminary education.

For four years I had been all but peripherally uninvolved in the Church. Here at Union, for the first time in my life, I met women of many denominations who were talking about ordination and actively seeking it. I was astonished. I did not know how I felt about women being ordained deacons, priests, and bishops in the Episcopal Church. Faith and common sense assured me that there were no reasons why women should be excluded from Holy Orders. But I had concluded somewhere along the way that I did not want to be ordained, and I could not understand why any woman would want to be.

***

A nauseous sensation gripped my gut every time I set foot in the Episcopal parish to which I had been assigned for my seminary field work. I felt as if I did not belong there. The Church was no longer my home, a place in which I could be myself, a place in which I could give creatively from the core of my being. To have been myself, immersing myself in those endeavors which could spring from my center, I would have been acting too much like a priest, a male seminarian, a man. I was furious at the Church, but as in the past, I could not reveal my anger, or even experience it in a sustained, constructive way. Hence, I was lethargic, quiet, depressed. I did not know what this meant. I did know that something was the matter.

My field work colleague, Bob, must have known that I wanted to be ordained. I was even able to say so, couching my wish in terms of conjecture, “If I were a man, I would be...” I did not want to be a man; I wanted to be a priest. The Church, on the basis of a strand of catholic tradition which in turn is rooted in a fear of women, had equated the two: PRIEST = MAN.

For a woman, the PRIEST = MAN equation is a Catch 22: She is likely to be a strong, aggressive person to be seeking ordination to the priesthood at this time, given the opposition with which she must contend. Hence, she is perceived by some to be “acting like a man.” Given her tenacity, it is likely she would have been welcomed long ago by ecclesiastical authorities if she were male. However, left standing on the boundaries of acceptability, if not completely outside, she infers that only “real women,” if any at all, can be ordained priests. And yet if she were behaving like a “real woman” (compliant, undemanding, sweet), she would not be a likely aspirant to a vocation in which women cannot long manifest “sugar and spice and everything nice.”

***

In Massachusetts, a priest said to me recently, “I want women priests to be real women, not to cut their hair short and wear pants." Gritting his teeth and smiling simultaneously, he spoke to me as I stood before him in my blue summer slacks and with my hair barely reaching the center of my neck. “By the way, I wasn’t referring to you!” he added hurriedly.

“Oh?”

***

In North Carolina, a priest said to me several years ago, “I really can’t stand to see some of the women deacons running around in short skirts. How do you girls expect us fellows to be able to concentrate on the Lord!”

I looked at him and wondered how much time he spent concentrating on the Lord.

***

During my first year at Union, I had begun to be barely conscious of the vocational and sexual snares in which we women were caught. Not only was vocational calling creeping into my consciousness, and confusing me, my sexuality was also beginning to surface. I was wet behind the ears sexually, an innocence I had tediously nurtured not as much out of self-respect as out of fear. I had not known what to make of the strange, exciting, stirring flow within myself that seemed to propel me simultaneously outward toward others, and inward toward my own soul.

I believe that the sexual flow within us is sacred, a manifestation of spiritual movement. It offers the possibility of that which we name as “good” and that which we name as “evil.” Creative and destructive, unifying and alienating, sexuality is a sign of the power moving through us and all creation, the holy being, God, who moves bearing life and death in a strangely conjunctive way. To realize such power within one’s own body—oneself—and to cultivate a capacity to move with this sexuality in a joyful, responsible way is both freeing and frightening. Terrified by sex, I had chosen to pretend for twenty-two years that it had nothing to do with me.

At seminary, I experienced myself as coming alive to sexual feelings in a way I had never known. It seemed as if I were “turned on” to everybody about whom I had any warm feelings. Within myself, I was aware of a surging energy that ached to carry me passionately both toward the core of my being and into the created world of marvelous people around me. “Horny” would be too flip a word. I yearned to embrace and be embraced. I longed to come alive in relationship to myself, others, and the gift of life we shared. I had never been healthier, and it scared me, spiraling me to the edge of sanity.

Fearful of my sexuality, depressed about myself in general and my vocation in particular, I plunged into my own private space and took refuge behind walls I had constructed to protect me from myself. It was in this fall of my first year at Union, 1967, that I began to make a long journey downward. A going down, and a reaching up; a movement into hell toward a discovery of myself as integral to the movement of God.

Bev Harrison, at the time dean of women students at Union, responded to me as if I not only mattered, but were moreover a person of some very real significance—to her and to others. While I felt myself paralyzed by fear and confusion—I would not study, play, laugh, socialize—Bev was gentle, consistent, and imperative in her persuasions. She told me I could make it. Bev, not I, was aware that the crux of my so-called “problems” was my stubborn refusal to accept the socially and ecclesiastically defined role-parameters of my gender. She, not I, was aware that my only authentic problem lay in my agonized belief that I had a problem. Bev Harrison’s gift to me was her standing back and letting me go under alone so that I might come to know, splashing about in the swamps of my own self-doubt, that I would have to save myself or drown. Bev and others could offer me encouragement. Only I could make the decision to live, and to live creatively.

And so, I went under, sinking into swirling currents of rage, directed against myself rather than against the conditions in Church and society which had bottled me up. Into deeper depression; into futile attempts at manipulating those around me to take responsibility for my salvation; into despair. Weeks. Months. I could not stand the pain of the loneliness and the confusion. I could not tolerate this feeling of helplessness, and I could not lay claim to an autonomous strength, ours by grace, with which I could help myself. I could not seem to pick myself up and walk, as Jesus had commanded those who asked him for help.

My roommate, Jean, was frightened by my catatonic brooding. Moreover, she was annoyed. She was able to see that I was only heaping grief upon myself; that I was indeed my own worst enemy. For I could not be gentle with myself. I battered myself relentlessly.

***

Eventually the Church would pick up this battering and take the lash to us. Although painful, the Church’s reaction to our ordinations was predictable. I could have expected nothing other. For I had learned that such frenzied madness leveled against people who are trying to move in harmony with the Spirit cannot be avoided; and that it is furious, futile clamor. I could only look with some pity, and much purposeful annoyance, on the Episcopal Church’s “confusion” about us, much as I could see myself seven years earlier as having been a pitiful soul in need of a caring kick-in-the-can to get up and get with it.

I began to get with it. People who are concerned about their psyches often study psychology as if it were going out of style, and people who are concerned about their souls often turn to the Bible and theology. I began to read Freud, Jung, Psalms, Jeremiah, Romans, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Charles Williams.

During college, I had read several of Charles Williams’ novels. I went back to pick up where I had left off. Upon occasion, one will read a book or come upon a work of art which speaks so deeply to her own soul that she feels almost as if the work were her own. This is, I think, an uncommon reaction, unique and personal; it has been my reaction to the works of Charles Williams.

In his last and most intricately constructed novel,(3) Williams develops the character of Pauline Anstruther, a young woman who lives in dread of meeting herself. Pauline is terrified. She knows that the meeting will occur. She does not know whether it will enhance her life or insure her death—or both. She knows only that she cannot continue to evade this communion of selves. The novel’s several themes are interwoven to culminate in Pauline’s reunion with her Doppelgänger, an event that is both terrible and unspeakably good.

God is, for Williams, not an evil God; nor simply a good God. God is a “Terrible Good,” a power so extraordinary as to incorporate mysteriously, sacramentally, all that we have come to name as either “good” or “evil.”

As I reread Descent into Hell, I knew that Pauline Anstruther was, in some sacramental way, Carter Heyward. I knew the terror within myself and within the movement of God. And I had some sense of the good within. The God that I knew was indeed a “Terrible Good.” Slowly, I began to recognize my confusion and conflicts as integral to whatever creativity, courage, or vocation I had.

And he said to all, “If any one would come after me, let her deny herself and take up her cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save her life will lose it; and whoever loses her life for my sake, she will save it.”

Luke 9:23—24 AUTHOR’S PARAPHRASE

At the center of Christian faith is a curious paradox: if we are to save our lives, we must lose them. If we are to live as whole people, we must be broken. If we are to know peace, we must enter into conflict. If we are to be certain about anything, we must be able to celebrate the ambiguities within us and around us. If we are to ascend into heaven, we must descend into hell.

For years, I envisioned losing and finding one’s life as being not only distinctly separate experiences, but also as best accessible to me in chronological order: I must first live in doubt and conflict. I might later grow into faith and peace. Metaphorically, I must first be crucified; I might someday know the glory of the resurrection.

Gradually, I began to realize that life does not exist for me somewhere further down the pike. We do not become whole people, saved people, peaceful people the day we finish therapy, give our lives to Christ, get married, get ordained, or set ourselves in some new direction. Again and again we are aware of our wholeness and our salvation when we are able to face and enter into the brokenness and confusion within us, between us in relationship, and around us in the world.

In paradox the contradictions are concurrent. We do not lose life today and “win” it tomorrow, as a reward for having died. The losing and the finding are a single process, a single reality. I live and I die simultaneously. I am faithful and doubtful at the same time. If I know who I am today, and I do, it is in the knowing of myself as a person who, like anyone, does not know much at all about who she is.

Awareness of paradox—contradiction, confusion, and wisdom —at the heart of things is fundamental to awareness of sacrament: what we feel, or see, or touch, or eat is only one aspect of what really is. The bread is more than bread; it is body. It is more than body; it is a peace that we cannot understand. It is more than peace; it is our unity. It is more than unity; it is God. It is not only a transcendent Being; it is God-in-us. It is not only God-in-you-and-me; it is God-in-all. It is not only God-in-all-people; it is God-in-all-creation, God-in-wheat-and-rain-sun. It is God-in-bread.

Like bread, each of us is a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. We manifest many signs of grace, and signs of much terror as well. What we see each time we look at ourselves is only some aspect of who we are.

***

Feeling weak and wobbly, I began to think paradoxically of standing up and walking. The support I received from people at Union Seminary this first year was empowering. They could not do what I needed to do for myself. They could, however, stand alongside and care. In their presence, the terror seemed to subside and I could begin to realize the holiness of many moments. These people were my priests. From them I learned something about my own vocation, a priestly commitment to sacrament— the hiddenness of God, a Terrible Good, in all reality.

Rarely have I met a person with such power in conveying the Spirit of God, and of priesthood, with such integrity. And for the first time in my experience such a priest is also a woman/feminist. I want you to know how grateful I am. Only occasionally any more does worship inspire me to the point that I feel really good about being a woman in ministry in this time in history! You affirmed me and called me into the risk and hope of tomorrow.

—Letter to me from United Methodist minister, Atlanta, Georgia, Winter, 1975.

After a year at Union, complete with the instructive experience of the spring rioting at our neighbor Columbia University, I withdrew from seminary and returned to work at St. Martin’s in North Carolina. Over Easter vacation, I had met David, a young Australian priest who had joined St. Martin’s staff as curate. Not only was he charming; he was immersed in the very ministries that were attractive to me—liturgy, teaching, counseling, community and youth work. Our interests seemed synonymous —peace movement, race relations, working in support of Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign (1968), folk and rock music, art, drama, the out-of-doors, and a special affinity for any movie, book or conversation that related to our common sacramental view of reality. David and I were soul mates, feeling as if we had been born together, sometimes it seemed in another world. From the beginning, we were almost inseparable.

At the time, David was opposed to women’s ordination much in the spirit and jargon of many of our present hard-core opponents who believe that a male priesthood is fundamental to a divine schema. Although I had no conscious inclination to seek ordination myself, I found myself standing in unambiguous opposition to David’s position. The more we argued about this “hypothesis,” the more uneasy I became. Somewhere inside I knew that we were not talking simply about “women’s ordination.” We were discussing our relationship—whether or not I myself intended to be ordained. I grew to both love and hate this man and the charm, charisma, and comfort of the implications he laid before me regarding his role as the head and mine as the helpmate. I wanted both to follow him and to run in the opposite direction. His feelings about me were equally as ambivalent, I was to learn.

Late one spring day in 1969, as David and I drove back to the church from an afternoon of hospital visiting, we talked about where we saw ourselves headed in our relationship. I felt ready to go with him back to Australia and said so. He had other feelings:

“Carter, I think you’re trying with your whole heart—lovingly, enthusiastically, skillfully—to live out the vocation you seek through my vocation. Sometimes I get the feeling that you want to be me. I must say to you that I think you’d be a burden to me, or to any priest you were to marry, because your identity is too wrapped up in the priesthood. You’re trying to hang onto something you can’t have.”

I asked him to stop the car and let me out. Without further conversation, I got out, walked back to the church, and that night, fell apart. I was devastated. Several days later, I left Charlotte on a trip to visit old college and seminary friends along the East Coast. I spent two weeks back at Union Seminary, discussing my situation with former classmates and professors, among whom there seemed to be an unspoken consensus: I should consider returning to seminary to pursue my own ministerial vocation.

Several weeks later when I returned to Charlotte, David was packing to leave for Australia. I saw him only once before he left. He looked as white as a ghost as he bade me farewell, and I recall standing expressionless and silent before him. He had become a symbol of pain to me. I was unsure what the pain was about, but I experienced it as wrenching and thoroughgoing, and I had no words for it.

***

Fortunately, and to my surprise, the church work in which I had been involved professionally for nine months was dependent upon neither David’s presence nor his love. In the course of my work as St. Martin’s parish assistant, I had begun to emerge unwittingly and almost unconsciously into a sense of my own vocation. I worked well at St. Martin’s and loved it. I did not yet know what this meant, but the questions were surfacing, and an active, intentional search for my vocation was on.

On a gamble that I might find something I was looking for there, I reapplied to Union Seminary, finished my work at St. Martin’s, took an interim position in the Model Cities program in Charlotte’s public school system, and returned to Union in the fall of 1970. As was timely enough for me, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church opened the diaconate—order of deacons, first of the three orders of ordained ministry (deacon, priest, bishop)—to women “on the same basis as men” that same fall.(4)

Although I did not expect it, the time was at hand. If my first year at seminary had been marked by trauma, this second year was graced by rapid growth which I myself could feel even as it set in.

I can attribute this growth to two simultaneous and complementary processes in my life at the time: psychotherapy and a women’s consciousness-raising group, from both of which I initially shied away, and each of which landed me near the heart of Christian faith: a realization of my own being’s movement in harmony with that of the Holy Spirit.

***

The Carter-David dynamics had suggested to me that therapy might be helpful. Soon into the 1970-71 school year, I managed to swallow some of my anxieties about therapy and enter it. My therapist, Bob, was a young man, about David’s age, a pastoral counselor. I visited him each week, discovering as months wore on that this person both challenged me at the core of my being, fantasies, and fears; and supported me in what were some very painful growth processes. Slowly, I began to look forward to our sessions together.

Alongside, my closest Union friends, Jean and Linda, had urged me, time and again, to join them in the formation of a women’s consciousness-raising group, in which we would reflect together on being female. At first, resistant to anything that seemed to ring of “women’s lib,” I had insisted that I did not need such a group. Several months into the year, I decided to give it a try, primarily for the companionship it might offer.

***

In therapy, I began to recall times, places, and processes in which I had rather passively attached myself to some person and attempted to live my life through him or her. I began to wonder where my determination to assert myself had gone.

In consciousness-raising, I began to remember Sophie Couch —the determinative, self-assertive me.

In therapy, I began to talk about my own vocational goals, including ordination, which I had denied for so long, even to myself.

In consciousness-raising, I began to hear other women discussing similar vocational aspirations and similar denial.

In therapy, I began to view myself as a potent individual; and as I had always viewed other people, a person very human and worthy of tenderness.

In consciousness-raising, I began to experience community. I began to realize that I was not alone.

In therapy, I began to see myself as victimized—by Church, society, and most surely, by myself. My rage began to surface.

In consciousness-raising, I began to feel strong, and hopeful— or, at least, on my way.

***

At the same time, across the Pacific, David too was growing. He was attempting to discover more about his own vocation and his own relationships to people like me—to me in particular. About a year after our separation, he and I began corresponding.

He wrote of his new parish and friends in Melbourne. I told him about my decision to return to Union, my therapy, my consciousness-raising group. I told him that I believed myself called to the priesthood. He made no response to the latter, and continued to write me, with increasing frequency, about his parish work; his warm, confused feelings about me; his own internal growth processes—both invigorating and frightening to him. I shared with him much of my own inner struggling including my ambivalent feelings about him. As months passed, he and I once again became close - this time at a distance of thousands of miles. Both of us agreed that it would help to see each other again.

Toward the end of my first year in therapy and consciousness-raising, David suggested that I come for a couple of years to visit him in Australia. As if spiralled backward despite myself, I found myself thinking in terms of actually going. I would put my own ordination on the back burner for awhile.

***

The women in my consciousness-raising group were astonished at my serious discussion of this trip. My therapist Bob withheld all spoken judgment and simply listened each week as I presented my plans to him.

I was eager to see David. I wanted to go. At the same time, something was the matter. My decision did not set right with me. I found myself swinging back and forth:

Yes, I wanted to see David.
Yes, I wanted to be ordained.

The former would entail a gamble, a risk - for neither David nor I could have any idea of whether our relationship would "work out" for two days, let alone two years.

The latter, too - ordination - would involve risking. I would be risking not only rejection from bishops, parishes, and denomination, on the basis of my gender (for I believed that my gender was the only conceivable impediment to my acceptance as a candidate for ordination). I would be risking my self-image as well, stepping into a space in which I would most surely be charged with all manner and means of "unfeminine sins" against the “masculine ego,” on whose turf I would be seen as trespassing. I would be risking good feelings about myself. I would be risking an entry into loneliness.

It was in that spring of 1971 that I chose to apply for ordination. The time had come for me to concentrate on my own vocational goals. Furthermore, I must have known that I could not enter creatively into relationship with someone else unless I were involved in creative relationship with myself.

I wrote David of my plans. He was disappointed, and yet affirmative of me. He wrote back that he wished we could have made an attempt to work things out, but that he did believe my decision was right - for me, and definitely for the Church itself. He noted that he was still unclear about women and the priesthood, but that he would continue to think and pray over the matter.

Happily and hopefully - with the unconcealed delight and support of my therapist, my North Carolina parish leaders, and my seminary friends and faculty - I made official application for ordination to the bishop of my home diocese. I felt honest, purposeful, clear about what I was doing. I also felt scared, for it was so new.

In July, 1971, I received word from the bishop. His response to me was “No, not at this time.” In August, I visited him to find out why I had been rejected and was told that I was confused.

“In what specific ways?” I asked.

He said he didn’t know exactly but he had the impression that I was kind of helter-skelter.

***

Being rejected in my application for ordination in North Carolina was a blow to me for I had always considered North Carolina my home. It was there that I had longed to live out my vocation. The ethos, the people, the ways of the state were my own. I was unhappy to realize that I would have to grow further away from my birth-roots if I intended to move with God towards a vocation to which I believed myself directed. But Christian vocation is seldom what, or where, we expect it to be. When Jesus said, “Follow me,” this call ordinarily involved his disciples’ departures from places, people, and occupations with which they had been at home.

Furthermore, the bishop’s rejection of me on the grounds of “confusion” about which he could not, or would not, elaborate initially hurt - and confused! - me.

Of course I was confused. What woman in her right mind would not be confused if she felt herself drawn—by faith, talent, and with strong parish and seminary support—towards ordination in a Church in which her gender made her, at best, a curiosity piece and, at worst, an abnormal intruder into male space?

But, on the other hand, I was bound to wonder... “Maybe I am mixed up, wrong.” The decision not to join David exacerbated my self-doubt.

The most insidious demon against which we women have to contend is the human inclination to swallow and digest what is said about us.

We begin to reclaim our souls when we are able to cast out this demon of self-doubt and move on—angrily, caringly, emphatically—in a knowledge that we have been violated, not because we are “confused,” “aggressive,” “sick,” or “incompetent,” but rather because we are people who are attempting to live fully our potential.

***

In a society and a Church in which woman has been put into a place out of which she cannot move, any effort on her part to burst out of this place will be considered strange or abnormal. Those invested with institutional authority are likely to get their backs up and balk defensively at her efforts. For such a woman is a threat to both men and women who have heavy investment in maintaining the present order.

And the threat is not imaginary. It is real. As women enter into new ecclesiastical roles, with responsibilities not only for decision making and leadership in heretofore male arenas of activity, but also for new symbol-building, the present order will change. All roles, those of both men and women, will change. Nothing will remain the same. We are agents of transformation.

Our transforming power is not inherent to our gender, for we are simply human, like our brothers. Our power lies in our having been born, nurtured, and acculturated into a corporate symbol: a symbol not necessarily of “femininity,” but rather a symbol of difference. Together, we offer a difference to the Church, a difference that includes the corporate experience of exclusion, and the particular experiences of being daughter, wife, mother, lover, and the various other roles we have played.

I do not offer any peculiar brand of “softness” or “sweetness,” “seductiveness” or “saintliness” to the Episcopal Church. I offer myself—my softness, my toughness, my sweetness, my bitterness, my seductiveness, my honesty, my saintliness, and my sinfulness of the Church. As a woman, together with my sisters, I offer a difference—a different ethic, derived from collective exclusion, which I will help build on behalf of other “outsiders”; a different visual, audible, sensory image I will help create; a different theology I will help shape; a different priesthood into which I have been ordained; indeed, a different Episcopal Church, as one manifestation of catholic Christendom.

***

People seem amazed that so much turmoil has spun off the Philadelphia ordinations. But why? The Church is in throes of rebirth. An old order is passing away. The process of renewal is always denied by a few, resisted by many, unwelcomed by most, and chaotic to all.

The wisest among us will move with the currents of the chaos, not resisting them, but rather letting ourselves be washed in time onto new shores. We will not recognize the shores, but they will be our home. We can be then amazed appropriately by God’s capacity for recreation and offering of new life to us, God’s confused people.

You have planted many seeds, given us all much hope and great joy. I pray your efforts will be blessed by success and that it will not change you. For my part, I promise to nourish those seeds within my reach.

—Letter to me from laywoman,
Diocese of Long Island, fall, 1974.

Attending an interdenominational seminary was educational in the exposure it offered me to the diversity of experiences and symbols within Judaeo-Christian tradition.

At Union I was able to begin consciously shaping my theology not as apart from the Anglican tradition, but rather as Anglican within a larger ecumenical tradition.

Moreover, at Union, in my own experiential contexts of therapy, consciousness-raising, prayer, conversation, reading, work, growth, I began to take heart, to have faith, to feel empowered. From this position of faithful strength, I began to better understand and articulate my identity. In so doing, I began to better understand and articulate the meaning of “priesthood”:(5)

All human beings are people of God.

For Christians, the sign of this reality is baptism, by which a person acknowledges (or has acknowledged for her) her being as a person of God.

All baptized people are priests, comprising “a priesthood of believers,” which is the Christian Church. Fundamental to the Church are its faith, its community, its inclusiveness, and its mission.

Faith is personal investment in God’s presence and God’s transcendence. It has to do with caring about God and with awareness of God. Faith is well sustained by what German theologian Dorothee Sölle calls “phantasie”(6) and by what I have termed “imagination”: the capacity to bend one’s mind beyond what seems to be the case and to see beyond what is visible to the eye.

Community (koinonia) is when two or three are gathered together in faith. A common language (such as creed, prayer book, catechism) is helpful, but not mandatory, for community. Sacramental awareness of reality—or awareness of hidden, “invisible,” layers of reality—is vital for community and enables the community to stretch its imagination, in faith, beyond its own physical parameters to include people, processes, and events from other places and times.

Inclusiveness is that characteristic of extension beyond present boundaries, in order that community can grow, change, and remain always open to new possibilities. Inclusiveness is usually strange and frightening for members of the community. But exclusiveness, which purposes to limit community within fixed parameters, is deadly. A community cannot live long unless it changes and grows. And community will not grow and change unless it assumes that “outsiders” have as much to offer the community as the community has to offer them.

Mission is that to which the faithful and inclusive Christian community is called. There are many biblical mandates for mission: among them are Matthew 25:31-46, in which we are told to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked; Mark 12:29-31, in which we are told that we are to love the Lord our God, and our neighbor as ourself; “The Beatitudes” as recorded in Matthew and Luke. These are only a few of many passages of mandate in Scripture. We are always selective in the ones we choose.

The fundamental mission of the Church is to bring people to faith. Taken as a whole, the Holy Scriptures make plain this mission: we are to bring people to faith by action in faith towards people. By its very nature, faith brings people to a peace they, and we, cannot understand; and by its very nature, faith consistently undergirds a strong ethic of awareness, concern, and involvement in matters of human justice, human freedom, and human dignity. For, in faith, all people are seen for what they are: people of God, no more and no less than I myself.

All Christian people are called by God to this priestly and inclusive community of faith and mission. This community needs people within it whose primary investment of energy and time will be to the sustenance of the community’s faith and mission. The community will call forth such people from within it to be its “priests.”

These members of the community will be called forth for “ordination” as priests. These people will have skills and interests that will be focused specifically on the facilitation of the Church’s growth in faith, community, inclusiveness, and mission. These people need to be “sacramental functionaries,” which is to say, they need to have a functional sacramental eye for how it is that faith, community, inclusiveness, and mission are interlocked —often invisibly—and held actively in creative tension.

The ordained priest has one primary task: to help maintain the faithfulness of the community.

The ordained priest is self-consciously a sacramental person, acutely aware of many layers comprising a single reality.

The ordained priest is, in faith, a person of prayer—of phantasie and imagination.

The ordained priest is a member of community. Within it, he can be himself. From it, he derives strength.

The ordained priest is an inclusive person. She is actively aware of the functional and ethical imperatives for inclusion of people in community—regardless of color, religion, age, state of health, nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality.

The ordained priest is a missioner. He is nonapologetic for his mission. He is prophetic, pastoral, liturgical, instructive, enabling, leading, following; he had best be able to cope with ambiguity and to embrace the unknown and unexpected.

The ordained priest is her vocation. For her, there is no demarcation between the person and the mission, no bifurcation, between who one is and what one does. She is what she thinks, feels, knows, believes, says, and does.

The ordained priest is a priest forever. “Priesthood” is not a coat he can take off and leave behind at the office. Functional, it is—like any function, carved out in the person’s character. Etched upon his soul. “One cannot go home again.” A retired doctor is still a doctor in terms of skills, interests, values, essential vocation. Similarly, a retired, removed, or deposed priest is still a priest. Ordination is thoroughgoing and indelible.

The ordained priest is simply human. She shares the same needs, fears, confusions, problems. She is a member of the same humanity.

The ordained priest is called to a life of holiness. To live a holy life is to live a simply human life, in faith.

***

I realize that nowhere in the preceding reflections do I mention, explicitly, “Jesus Christ.” Throughout the reflections, Jesus Christ has been close at hand, and is written implicitly between each line. Perhaps another task of the priest is to make explicit what is implicit—to point to Jesus Christ’s presence everywhere; and to make implicit what is explicit—that is to demythologize and humanize what is, at best, the meaningful language of a common faith; and what is at worst, ecclesiastical rhetoric.

My participation in ordained priesthood is not something that I can separate from my involvement in the diaconate and in the priesthood of all believers. My baptism, similarly, is not something that separates me from nonbaptized persons. Simone Weil was a mystic philosopher who, because she believed in Christ Jesus, refused to be baptized. I understand this. I pray for the day when the people of God will have obliterated barriers: not only between women and men, Catholic and Protestant, clergy and laity, but also between Christians and non-Christians. When, in fact, all people are assumed to be the people of God; when baptism is a sign of inclusion of the Church in the world, and not of the exclusion of the Church from the world. When it becomes superfluous to “talk about” Jesus Christ—as it will be when women and men are so fully aware of God’s presence within, between and among us that Jesus Christ is being lived out rather than talked out. Each person will be doing, and being, and living Jesus Christ. There will be nothing more to say. We will have discovered the laughter at the heart of things.

Are you hooked by clericalism? Are you hooked by wanting power? Are you into wanting to be a priest so that you can change the overload of clerical influence, or do you just want your share of it? Up until now I haven’t heard any statements from any of you that sound as if you are out for anything but your share of the action.

—Letter to me from laywoman, Diocese of New York, fall, 1974.

Many of us have chosen to grow as creatively, charitably, and critically as we can where we have our roots—as long as we can, with integrity. And we have our ecclesiastical roots in the Episcopal Church. Inherent in its present structure is a threefold order of ordained ministries, which—despite idealistic protestations to the contrary—remains a hierarchical arrangement or “chain of command” from top to bottom. Bishops are on top; then priests; then deacons. And laypeople? Sometimes it seems as if laypeople exist so that clergy can find self-esteem and grow in faith, rather than all Christians—laity and clergy—existing so that all people might find self-esteem and grow in faith.

I take great comfort, and find inspiration, in the fact that Jesus did not hate or leave his religious tradition, but rather loved it and worked to restore it to its soul—its awareness of God’s active presence. Where it was errant, Jesus challenged it, often harshly. Where it made ungodly, compromising demands upon him, Jesus ignored it and went about his business, together with his disciples.

It is ironic, though understandable in terms of sin, that just as Jesus, a Jew, found himself in confrontation with Judaism, we Christians today find ourselves confronting Christianity.

***

With this general condition as backdrop to current Episcopal affairs, the reader should recognize certain specific Episcopal conditions in order more fully to grasp that context of the events that have transpired.

Male or female, a person must be ordained a “deacon” for at least six months prior to his or her ordination as a “priest.” In the biblical tradition of Stephen, a deacon is a “server.” The diaconate, or order of deacons, is the fundamental order of ordained ministry in the catholic tradition to which the Episcopal Church adheres. The diaconate is that order upon which the other two orders—priesthood and episcopate—rest. A person does not graduate from the diaconate. A priest or a bishop is still a deacon—a servant to the world. In order to be a good priest or bishop, the person must be a good deacon, one who sees service as fundamental to ministry.

The second of the orders, priesthood, is the common order of ordained ministry in the catholic tradition. I used the word “common” to mean usual, ordinary, that which is to be expected. When an Episcopalian enters the ordained ministry, it is commonly expected that she or he will be ordained a priest. Priesthood is the “sacramental” order of ministry. The priest is that person ordained to administer sacraments, as well as to teach and preach a sacramental faith within the community of believers—which is to say, a faith in the unseen or invisible presence of God in all reality: in birth, life, death; in all events and processes. Since the Episcopal Church is one in which sacrament is central to both its theology and its liturgy, those who purpose to commit themselves professionally to the sustenance of the Church’s theology and worship must be sacramentalists.

The third order of ordained ministry is the episcopate, the order of bishops, or “overseers,” in the tradition of Peter and the other apostles, those commissioned by God to be chief pastors— “pastors to the pastors,” “priests to the priests.” A bishop is elected from among priests to serve as the head of a “diocese” (large cluster of parishes; often about half the size of a state). There are at present over one hundred dioceses in the Episcopal Church and over two hundred bishops, some dioceses having more than one, and some bishops being retired or resigned from official diocesan responsibilities.

Continuation of "A Priest Forever"

Notes

3. Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (New York: Pelligrini and Cuhady, 1949). This novel has since been published in paperback by Eerdmans of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

4. For some eighty-five years prior to 1970, women had been set apart as “deaconesses,” considered a separate order from men deacons. Deaconesses had been educated in separate schools from male seminarians and then “set apart” to work in mission fields, Christian education, chaplaincies, or schools. Deaconesses were required to remain single. They were not considered eligible for ordination to the priesthood, although many of the deaconesses believed themselves called by God to the priesthood. Bishop James Pike of California was in 1965 the first bishop to actually permit the ordination of a woman deacon, The Rev. Phyllis Edwards, and to declare her a deacon in the same order as men deacons. Five years later, in 1970, the General Convention authorized the ordination of women deacons by declaring that henceforth, deaconesses would be considered deacons on the same basis as men.

5. The statements that follow, about priesthood, were presented, in slightly altered form, as part of an address given at Colloquium on “Women and the Priesthood,” General Theological Seminary, New York City, February 24, 1975.

6. See Dorothee Sölle’s fine exposition on phantasie and obedience in Beyond Mere Obedience (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1970).

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