no. How awful. Well, such things happen, perverts you know,” she said, and then turned and walked into the kitchen.
My ploy for unlocking her heart hadn’t worked. I felt sad. “Such things happen” in fact helped us both avoid the pain of the old man.
At Smith College I was back with girls again. I fell passionately in love with ideas in any field including that of my own mind, and also with a few professors and the madness of weekend beer binges. I’d broken up with Bill, which infuriated my mother, but I wanted to check the pulse of my libido and to have dates at Harvard, Dartmouth, Amherst, my whole narrow little Ivy League world. My heart was set on achieving academic success, but I also worried about marriage, babies, having real sex with orgasms, Bill, and the whereabouts of God. Bill and I, never very far apart, resumed dating. Almost flippantly I suggested I accompany a good friend to Mass. She had to go, she said. Or what? I asked. Sin, she said. So I went to Mass, and bingo!—or more biblically, Behold!—there it was, my under-the-table meal the Holy Eucharist, all laid out for me to remember and relive.
I was riveted watching these worshipers—sitting, standing, making signs of the cross on themselves, walking together up the aisle to kneel at the altar rail, rubbing shoulders, sticking out their tongues to be fed like baby birds. I inhaled sweet incense, listened to murmured Latin, and watched. I noticed a woman up front, too, a statue and bad art but unmistakably female. I secretly imagined that this was how God might worship.
Communion in the Presbyterian Church where I’d grown up had felt lonely. Everyone sat motionless in their pews while trays of neatly cubed bread were passed around, followed by more trays of glass cups, each with a “jigger” of grape juice. It was tidy sacramental individualism.
I wanted my meal and oh, I craved my God.
I took instructions one summer to become Roman Catholic. My mother was so horrified that she invited the priest for dinner. It was her way of overcoming her disgust at rosary-bound piety and her own sister’s conversionary zeal. She needn’t have worried however, because it wasn’t long before I discovered that this church was male with no hope. There was the one stone virginal woman up front, yes, but no room for flesh-and-blood women up front.
Back in college for my senior year I consulted Mr. Unsworth, the handsome college chaplain whom Dad called “pipe smoking and tweedy.”
“You have some religious yearning,” he said. “I wonder why you didn’t major in religion.”
“I thought of it but I chose Spanish because I’m good at language and wanted to go deeper into Hispanic literature and culture,” I said, omitting mention of the fact that I also had a crush on one of the Spanish professors, an olive-skinned Iberian poet with huge eyes.
“Tell me about your religious background,” the chaplain said.
“I fell in love with the Catholic Mass. It was rich and sensory, not like the dryness of the Presbyterian worship I grew up with, but when I took instructions to become Catholic I found out they had too many rules and didn’t like women,” I said.
“Oh, Protestant too plain and Catholic too tight,” he said, with a grin that made me blush. “Have you tried the Episcopal Church? A blend that might suit you. There’s a parish right here in Northampton. They have Eucharist at least once a month. Try it, then go talk to their priest, to explore more. Let me know how it goes.” He rose and extended his hand. God, he was handsome.
“Thanks,” I said, excited that he’d said “priest.” This Episcopal Church had priests. How could there be a church that looked Catholic but wasn’t? I tried it; their meal was open to all baptized Christians; I qualified. Public kneeling was a first for me. I loved the feel of it. Episcopalians stuck out their cupped hands, not their tongues. Maybe here there was a chance for women who weren’t statues to be up front. I was confirmed in my senior year of college by Bishop Robert M. Hatch, who put his hands on my head and invoked the Holy Spirit. I felt small and big at once. How much the blessing of a bishop would come to signify in my life I could not know. At least I didn’t develop another crush.
My mother I’m sure was relieved, but it was Dad who was impressed by the confirmation liturgy.
“This was beautiful, Lynda,” he said. (He called me my full name when he was seriously impressed or seriously angry.) “Not sure about all the fancy robes, but the Communion all together at the altar was nice.”
“That’s what I like too Dad,” I said. “A little more dressed up than Presbyterians.”
“Our dour Scotch blood,” he said.
“Scottish, Dad, Scottish.”
“I grew up in the Episcopal Church, you know,” Mom said. “Daddy and I were married at St. Bartholomew’s in New York. This service seemed a little too fancy and Catholic for me.” Years later, by the time I was married with children, Dad chose to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church himself. I got the oddest, proudest queasy feeling that he was following me into this church.
College gave me a diploma but no requisite diamond ring. I wasn’t ready to “settle down” so I spent the summer in Spain with families in Madrid and Santander. In Spain I inhaled religion—Catholicism on steroids, but I soaked it up. The statue lady came alive. The people worshipped a woman—a woman praised as if she were God, a woman held in high holy esteem, a woman beloved. The Señora in Santander called her family to prayers daily with loud clapping, her hands like small enfleshed shofars. And always we hailed Mary. She after all did precede Jesus! I still pray the Hail Mary in Spanish, the way I learned it.
Make no mistake, patriarchy was alive and well in Spain. The women ran things at home and were emotionally dominant, but the men ran the world—and sex. I attracted the attentions of a few married men, whom I rebuffed, in bad Spanish with a flattered ego, explaining that, in las USA, women didn’t do such things, which meant that I was too scared to do such things.
Paco, the older son in my Madrid family, invited me to go to a bullfight. I feigned disapproval. Toro, toro, toro, ven, ven, guapa, he teased, waving his arms and an imaginary cape before me. I went. I was quickly drawn into the heat of the crowd. Olé sounded like hosanna. Would I have yelled “Crucify him” in the crowd that turned on Jesus, their hero? A bullfight is no barnyard event. The crowd swayed and moaned and roared as one. My God, this experience was lustful, just like religious mystics wrote about their ecstasies. Great God Almighty, I’m having a public orgasm. Please God let me have one in private, too.
In Spain I smelled holiness, dark and musty in cathedrals. I tasted the blood of ritual sacrifice—raw and unhygienic, like and unlike the sacramental meal I craved. I’d read Cervantes’s classic Don Quijote, but now its spirit was in my bones despite the fact that I could not decide if I was Don Quijote, foolishly stabbing at windmills and filled with indignation at the ills of the world he believed was transformable, or the squat lumphead peasant, Sancho Panza, loyal to the end and scared to quivering about going against just about anything.
•
The Episcopal Church had promise, but the ordination of women was like one of Quijote’s windmills. I felt spiritually enlarged being part of the 80-million-member Anglican Communion. The 2.2-million-member Episcopal Church had a governance of checks and balances, much like the US government, so power wasn’t concentrated in a central authority. It was not a dogmatized institution, yet it had a hierarchical structure and an all-male priesthood. Women could be ordained deacons but not priests. Deacons were canonically restricted to a ministry of service to church and world—which very nearly fit women’s traditional social roles.
Why,
