table with my typewriter, and wrote as many inches as I could, trying to infuse drama into tedium. My mother and my children did more babysitting than was good for any of them, a fact for which I remain grateful—and slightly guilty.
The Episcopal Church was as astir with change as I was. Right after my kitchen epiphany the church voted against a resolution to make it possible for women to be ordained priests. As a result, many women and some men restarted the life of the church, in ways about as untidy as mine. Women were raising hell, for the sake of heaven. Rules more ancient and entrenched than my, or even my mother’s, ideas of propriety, would be broken to force the church out of its torpor. If it couldn’t be done through proper channels, then it would be done outside canon law, outside God’s law too, some thought. Women took independent action and invaded the priestly caste. Would the church repent? Would I?
The Episcopal Church and I began our midlife crises together.
Free, wild, and frightened, I sat in the pew at my parish church and started to wrestle hard with my faith. What, besides God, did I believe in? I stared at the altar meal, my under-the-table meal, seeing it again as if for the first time—this time in a church that was willing to wrestle hard with women.
In the same year the church voted women’s ordination out, they voted that lay people (not just male ones) could be chalice bearers. Women were also permitted to read the Sunday Bible readings, and serve on parish vestries. I signed up for everything.
Being a chalice bearer required serious physical discipline just to hold the chalice steady for sips without emptying it down some woman’s cleavage while she knelt, her pious head bowed and the brim of her large hat making her lips un-locatable. It took more skill, in fact, than to scoot wee wafers into cupped fists as the priests did. Feeling a little like one of the Great Wallendas, I donned a black cassock and a long white-winged surplice over it. Such a pinafore! Thus I began a ministry inside the altar rail of God’s dining room table. I gripped that chalice for dear life.
Most astonishing among the expansive changes the church was enacting, was the new wording of the catechism defining ministry. The “ministers of the church” were formerly defined as “bishops, priests, and deacons”—the ordained. Now, the ministers of the church were “lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons”—hierarchy radically reordered on paper. It meant that baptism, not ordination, made a person a “minister,” a status prophesied by a T-shirt slogan of the women’s ordination campaign: “Ordain Women or Stop Baptizing Them!”
The Episcopal Church prided itself on its changelessness—a characteristic it ostensibly shared with God. But now, many parts of its touted tradition were becoming unrecognizable: prayers, hymns, the definition of “minister.” Would the gender of clergy follow? Would the final staple of the Episcopal security system fall away? The pace of change was so swift that many good folks felt the wind knocked out of their souls. They often sought safety and comfort in resistance. Though many felt qualms about women at the helm, at heart they needed a reassuring mother.
The Eucharist, already rich in sacramental beauty and a reenactment of my childhood spirituality, became charged with new meaning for me. I’d recognized divine womanliness in the preparation and serving of this meal, but now saw that God fed people with her [sic] own body and blood. How much more intimate and nourishing could you get? The holy blood of Christ was less like martyrs’ blood or blood spilled by young men in wars, and more like the blood of life spilled by women for fertility. Maybe the patriarchal church had the divine gender wrong?
I kept my ideas to myself, but I began to wonder if this meal was a very different kind of sacrifice than the one proclaimed in the prayers of consecration week after week: We remember his death, we remember his death—his bloody, awful death. What about Jesus’ life? Did Jesus die for me? I had no answers that worked, and I felt crazy-confused, so I stopped thinking. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would die for my children. Likely I would, but I knew for sure I had bled to give them life, and that this Eucharist had more to do with life than death—just as it had for me when I’d invented it under the table.
Next, I began to see Eucharist as a meal of justice: everyone was welcome, everyone got food, everyone got the same, not too little, not too much. One Sunday I sat and watched as everyone streamed up the aisle to kneel side by side at the altar rail, rubbing shoulders and extending their hands to receive their just portion of holy food. It wasn’t a dole. It seemed a miracle, because many of these same people had been quarreling vigorously all week about the rector’s latest decision, his tenure and sermons, the hymn choices, on and on. The Eucharist brought justice and with it peace—until Monday.
The church needed to be like its meal. Women weren’t getting justice. We should be behind altars, not just lecterns, preaching in pulpits, not just making announcements from the pew, distributing bread, not just wine. Caught up in the whirlwind of this transformative era and fed by the Eucharist, my spirit soared with feminist visions. For me the ordination of women was less about baptismal rights and more about sacramental justice: all sacraments, including the sacrament of ordination, should be open to all people. There was precedent for this in early church history, though I hoped there would be no bloodied martyrs this time. Jesus’ blood was enough, and, by this time, I was sure bloodshed of any kind was not ordained by God. I was equally sure that there was something we should do to help besides bleed. The church which I’d thought was, well, just spiritual, was about to be shaken. I wanted to be passively passionate and stand on the sidelines, but political action, which made me dizzy, was unavoidable.
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
