In 1974 a group of eleven women were ordained priests outside of canon law in Philadelphia, a headline-making scandal. By 1975 four more women were “illegally” ordained in Washington, D.C. Through this movement, well organized and lobbied, women began to hold the church accountable more forcefully than ever. Outside the church too, women were holding society accountable. Amazing reversals were happening. My own state elected Ella Grasso as its first woman governor.
Many people reacted to the newly ordained women priests with verbal venom and hatred. The Washington ordinations nearly didn’t happen because of a bomb scare. Bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in before the service began. The Rev. Lee McGee, one of the Washington ordinands, later told me she’d imagined being in the sanctuary before the ordination service quietly praying for her new vocation. “I never thought I’d be praying for my life,” she said. To get ordained a woman priest had become a justification for mass murder? We could all be blown up! Was this only the lunatic fringe, or were women truly hated?
The courageous women who pioneered this movement had help from bishops who provided support and ordained them. The bishops were retired but still had authority to perform sacramental acts. Hence, the “rogue” ordinations were sacramentally legitimate, yet politically “illegal,” occurring before the assembled church officially voted to change the canon law. The “mind of the church”—a phrase conveniently used to postpone action forever—was not yet settled, and women were the disrupters. I couldn’t imagine myself going out on such a limb and risking alienation from something as big and powerful as Mother Church, to say nothing of the God people called “Father.”
A chilling quote was running around the grapevine of wrath. Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven priests, had received a vile letter after her ordination: “Go to hell, buck teeth! Someone ought to kill you. You’re filthy.” By now I’d read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and was a newly minted feminist who believed that the personal was political, and that the most offensive slurs were comments about a woman’s body and looks. How ironic, since women continued to devote so much time, money, and energy to self-beautification, in order to attract positive male attention. How many unnecessary diets had I tried? Thank God I’d already had braces.
The God I’d met in my childhood book and under the table was a God who shone favor on girls, and listened to me. My spirituality was intimately linked to my gender. I was one of three daughters in a family; my first school was founded and headed by a woman; all my teachers were women and all my classmates were girls. The patriarchal church and world in which I lived was crumbling, but my theological foundations held as I wondered how God felt about such desecration of women priests, such vehement rejection of half of His image, yet everyone I asked admitted God had no gender. Some people shouted out that what it said in Genesis about God’s image being created both male and female didn’t count, because it was in the Old Testament. In my mind, He placed God into one of those genders. Oh yes, but He really meant both, we all knew. Perhaps it was then that I began to think of God’s putative non-gender in a serious way, and to cringe about the obvious fact that while the heavens proclaimed the glory of God, all the damn English pronouns quietly and consistently proclaimed the infallible masculinity of God. It made me angry.
Ironically, the church’s inexorably male God language was so incongruent with the God I’d experienced that becoming a woman priest actually looked like the most congruent action to take. Should I reposition my Ritz-cracker “eucharist” from under the table to where it belonged—on top of the table, an altar where I would preside? Was anger a proper stimulus for a holy vocation? Yes. Anger had motivated me as a child and led me to God. Anger was behind the cries of women for justice, the moves to get ordained before the official vote to ordain, and on their T-shirts. I loved the one that read “God Is Not a Boy’s Name.” I thought of buying it but didn’t.
I wasn’t ready to be good yet. I felt like a woman in heat, howling inside like a cat. I lost more weight. I loved feeling hot and joyfully out of control and kept the moral incompatibility of my sexual fantasies and my lofty religious aspirations safely in the inanimate pages of a journal. Hungry for both sexual and sacramental intimacy, I tried but couldn’t separate these two urgings. Both drove me onward, and both felt inevitable. Hearing nothing from God and, frankly, not praying for restraint, I flirted ruthlessly with the sheer joy of life itself, with men wherever I encountered them, while at the same time dreaming of presiding at the Eucharist.
My therapist cheered my growth spurt and made no judgments, so I fell in love with him, to no avail. Vocational thoughts intruded in strange but recognizable ways. Motherhood, I told myself, was like priesthood. For over ten years I’d preached, taught, celebrated, fed, bathed, and blessed four young lives. I dreamed of going to seminary.
The blond parish rector, one of my flirtees, said one day: “You’re attracted to the things of the altar. Have you ever thought of being a priest?”
“No.” I lied.
Did this rector, named Steve, know what was inside me? I grew up trying to escape mother’s eagle eye and trusting only God to see through me, but this man’s spiritual eyesight caught me off guard. I laughed at him, reminding him that the mind of the church wasn’t settled.
“It will be,” he said.
“I have to become a woman before I can become a woman priest. I don’t feel ready and seminary is expensive.”
“Just a thought.” He shrugged and smiled. “Forget it.”
His comment was like telling a jury to disregard some crucial piece of evidence. I could not forget it.
Most people thought that women’s ordination would be approved at the 1976 General Convention. A revised edition of the Book of Common Prayer was in the works, as was a hymnal revision. I hoped the committees would make gender language more inclusive, and that they’d excise “Onward Christian Soldiers” from the hymnal—until a woman told me that as a young child regularly abused by her mother, she’d marched around carrying a broomstick cross, a little soldier singing for Jesus. “It gave me courage,” she said.
I wanted courage. God had asked me a question, and so had the rector of my parish.
“Were you serious about my being a priest?” I asked him.
“Mmmhmm.” He looked up from his desk and smiled all his charm my way.
“What would it take?” I asked.
I tried to concentrate on the details of the ordination process he explained, but his hair got in the way, a shock of blond hair that kept tumbling down onto his forehead. Fascinated, I watched him toss it back in place.
“You first have to become a postulant, as soon as the church votes, and it will. That means the bishop and his committees discern a call to priesthood in you and deem you fit to go to seminary. Lyn, are you listening?”
“Sure.”
“Well, what do you think?
“I think I’m scared the committee will ask me too many questions about my personal life.”
(I also think I could be falling in love with you.)
“Don’t worry. Pray about it and let me know. You’d be a good priest.”
(Would I be a good