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 lover?)
I didn’t pray. I called Yale Divinity School and made an appointment for an interview and a visit. Just to see. Just in case. My father had graduated from Yale University in 1933. The idea of being a Yalie enticed me. Commuting was feasible. My children were growing up. What if . . . ?
The Yale Divinity School campus is rectangular. Marquand Chapel stands on a rise at the center, surveying the campus from on high and calling faithful worshipers into its bosom of praise. Red brick, white trim, a parade of steps up either side of the entrance to the simple white door, a clock tower with a cross on top—nothing like most Episcopal churches built of stone and with a steeple. It startled me at first. It looked like the Brick Presbyterian Church of my childhood. I was home.
Before I went to my appointment, I entered the chapel’s open doors and sat in a white pew. Wordless for once, I listened to my heart speak— thumpety thump—into the silence. God bless me, I said again and again and signed myself with a cross—head, genitals, right breast, left breast—a very full-bodied, un-Protestant thing to do, but an action that solicited God’s help to align conflicting forces within. I simply whispered, “God, let me come here.”
Chapter 4 Set. Breathe. Ready. Go.
In the summer of 1976 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church voted to approve what had already been proved in 1974 and 1975—that women could be priests. I knew this would happen. I’d dreamed of this, but now it was real and upset my efforts at denial.
I heard from some women priests who were at the convention that the atmosphere in which the gathered church, wrapped in awesome silence, had waited for the 1976 tally to reveal whether or not the ordination of women in all three Holy Orders had been explicitly approved, which was tantamount to a Yes vote on women priests, was electric. It was a dramatic, historic, hope-driven temps vierge moment of absolute openness when everything or nothing could happen—and change lives forever. The final tally: the clergy order, 114 votes cast, 58 votes needed for affirmative action, Yes, 60; No, 39; Divided, 15. In the lay order, 113 votes cast, 57 needed for affirmative action, Yes, 64; No, 37; Divided, 12. The motion passed. Even as I reread these statistics, I can feel my own tears prickling.
Church unity, perilously threatened by the 1974 and 1975 illegal ordinations, had remained shaky, but now its purpose, which was to cover up the truth for the sake of “peace,” fell away completely to reveal what was really upheaved: male unity. Some men had betrayed the old boys’ club compact. In time I’d understand more about this shattering, but for now all I knew was that women rejoiced and I was voted in. You would have thought it was an ecclesiastical tsunami the way some people carried on about Jesus choosing only male disciples, therefore
