God Is Not a Boy’s Name
Becoming Woman, Becoming Priest
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The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman
GOD IS NOT A BOY’S NAME
Becoming Woman, Becoming Priest
Copyright © 2016 Lyn G. Brakeman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2627-1
hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-8506-3
ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7378-7
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Brakeman, Lyn G.
God is not a boy’s name : becoming woman, becoming priest / Lyn G. Brakeman.
xii + 180 p.; 23 cm.
ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2627-1
1. Brakeman, Lyn. 2. Episcopal Church Clergy Biography 3. Episcopalians Biography
BX5995.B69 2016
Manufactured in the USA.
For Mom, whose tenacity brought me into life and gave me God.
For Dad, who showed me the point of good religion and soul-seriousness.
For both parents, who loved me imperfectly with perfectly good intentions
and helped me become a priest.
For my sister Laurie, who stuck by me through thick and thin.
For my children, natural and acquired through love, without whose
graciousness my life and vocation would not have thrived.
For Dick, my husband most gracious, a natural theatric,who read most of this story aloud to me just to let me know how it sounded.
For all friends and writing buddies, casual and professional, who have ever touched my life with grace. You all know who you are, and god knows God knows who you are.
And for God, whose three-personed name is unflinchingly hallowed and genderless.
Introduction
In the 1940s, when I was a child, God was named He, Him, His, Himself. Today God is still named He, Him, His, Himself. I knew from the beginning, however, and came to know more deeply as time went on, that God was not male—despite evidence to the contrary in churches, and even in common parlance. My odd spiritual awareness came to me through the experience of a little girl under a big dining table—and a T-shirt.
When I was three and two-thirds exactly, I had my first spiritual adventure. I remember my age, because it was before my sister was born, and I was still an only child—adored and adorable. My mother thought I was a miracle and told me I was a gift from God. Miracle status made me squirm, but the God idea had promise. It provided courage and curiosity enough for me to one evening lose patience with my parents’ nightly cocktail hour and huff off on my own to conquer the world, or at least to find a new one. Well supplied with Ritz crackers from the cocktail tray, I crawled under our large dining room table with cross beams and a cloth to the floor. Under that table, three worlds of wonder opened up to me simultaneously: the world of words, the world of being a girl, and the world of God.
Under my table I discovered a God who listened to my every word with no judgment, a God who let me know I mattered, no matter what. Was this the God who had given me to my mother as a gift? In a favorite book I saw God sitting in a garden listening to all the sounds on earth, even weeny sounds like mine. I bonded to this intimate, listening image, and held it dear. Although this God had a long white beard and was clearly male, it didn’t matter to me—until five years later when an old man with a long white beard sexually molested me in a theater. He might as well have been God. I lost my agency, my authority, and my connection to my body. I nearly lost sight of God. Nearly.
I went on to do all the usual things for a woman of my class and privilege—college, marriage, children, chocolate chip cookies. It was not until the 1970s that I first saw the bright blue T-shirt bearing the slogan, “God Is Not a Boy’s Name,” written in pretty white script—womanly. It was one of the campaign slogans coined by women who were pushing the patriarchal Episcopal Church to ordain them priests. There on that shirt, for the very first time, I saw the outer sign of the inner conviction I’d had as a little girl: God is not male, even though He is called He.
I bought the shirt, tried it on once, puffed up my chest, and looked in the mirror. Then I placed it into my dresser drawer for safekeeping. From its hiding place, the shirt drove me on, and into, a long, passionate fight with the Episcopal Church to be ordained a priest. I was an institutional naif, a budding feminist, mother of four children, and suburbanly bored housewife on fire for my vision. I was also in a whirlwind of midlife personal chaos.
The Episcopal Church was in its own whirlwind. There were changes in all the staples of its political and liturgical life: new Book of Common Prayer, new catechism, and new Hymnal—not to mention a change in clergy gender. In 1976 the National Church finally voted that women could be priests. Immeasurable spiritual zeal, combined with midlife hormones, made me irresistible, I thought. The church disagreed—more than once. I kept on trying—more than once.
Memory, and writing, and my children’s unfolding lives gave me hope while I binged on the exhilarating, joyfully insane, delicious power of freedom. I’d heard that freedom was a divine gift; I didn’t know it was also dangerous and devilishly hard to navigate, worse than a whirlwind. Still, I was a woman fully alive—seeking God, meeting Jesus, rediscovering the power of my personal sexuality, exploring the politics of gender equality, drinking too much, grieving painful losses, and nearly sinking. Nearly.
The Eucharist, a meal that was punctual and regular and nurturing, gave me religious stability. It was a sacrament that fed me anyway, and through which I recognized an embodiment of the intimacy I had once known and now craved. The Eucharist is served from an altar. It replicated the Ritz cracker meal I’d invented under the table.
Ordination made me a priest, a vocation that continued to evolve as I continued to become a fully realized human being. These two maturation processes intertwined and still do. The more I presided at Eucharist, the more I noticed that women and girls continued to get short shrift in society and church—injustice in my world and God’s. I retrieved the old T-shirt and wore it like a vestment as I kept lobbying for my conviction that God is not male, and further, that Christianity needs a just and loving language for humanity and divinity. It is idolatry to worship an all-male deity we know has no gender. I had to tell the whole story.
God Is Not a Boy’s Name is written in gratitude: for the meeting of God and a little girl under a table, for the quirky wisdom of a T-shirt, for the upcoming fortieth anniversary of the historic 1976 vote to ordain women priests in the Episcopal Church, and for the fact that, so far, no one has ever been brash enough to include God as a choice in one of those books that lists name choices for children.
Chapter 1 Under the Table
I was born through tears, none of them mine and all of them cried before I emerged to contribute my own. My mother had suffered three miscarriages, wept often on her doctor’s shoulder, and stormed heaven with her prayers. My first life achievement was hanging in there for nine months. I’ve been tenacious ever since.