Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
For more features from the life of our diocese, check Diocesanlife....ONLINE; and Bethlehem
News.
What Women Clergy Have Taught Me
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Diocesan Life, July/August 2001
Twenty-five years ago this summer, the Episcopal Church changed
its canons to permit the ordination of women to all orders of ministry.
In 97 of our 100 dioceses, women priests and deacons are a fact
of church life. Several dioceses have women as their bishops.
I have spent considerable time and energy working to keep those
who have not accepted this change aware that they are loved, respected,
and fully a part of the Church. That concern was a part of last
month's column. This month let me balance that by telling you why
I am so grateful for the presence of women as colleagues in the
ordained ministry.
In my Long Island parish I had two women associates. Several more
worked with me in my New Haven days. Since coming here I have had
many women colleagues, and I have benefited from their presence
and counsel in many ways. So I am not writing about theory: I am
reflecting on what I have witnessed.
I am not about to review theological arguments yet again. Rather,
I aim to describe how I perceive that ordained women have enriched
my experience of Christ.
The center of Christian faith is the "paschal mystery," the passage
of Jesus through suffering and death to the life that gives us
life. Each of us is called to live that mystery, offering ourselves
for the sake of the creatures of God. Often that means prolonged,
even daily, suffering. Always it means that through our participation
in Christ's self-giving, God gives life to someone.
The women clergy who have touched me most deeply have done just
that. In faithfulness to their vocation they have endured open
hostility, casual snideness, and patronizing behavior that perhaps
comes more from ignorance than ill will.
Like Peter cutting off Malchus' ear, I usually want to punch people
who use the word "priestess," with all its demeaning psychosexual
implications, but this would help nothing.
This is not to say that the women I admire have been wimps or
victim types. Far from it. Along with bearing pain (many of them
have already had a mother's experience of giving life through physical
pain), endurance has meant pointing out injustice, educating the
church, and remaining people of good will towards those who mistreat
them. Certainly there are many "angry women" and there are "angry" or
even "threatened" men, but the theophany for me has been that the
vast majority of women priests have taken on this extra ministry
of self-giving with holy equanimity.
As one of the many who struggle with a tendency to reactivity
and self-pity, I remember marveling at how the Reverends Allison
Spencer and Marjorie Floor, my parish colleagues in Long Island,
were too focused on caring for God's people, much too thankful
to God that their vocation had been realized, to spend a lot of
time complaining. That got my attention.
Watching the reception of women clergy in the Episcopal Church
USA has also deepened my belief in the Incarnation -- not as a
long-past event, but as God's everyday method for conversion. People
who, like most of us, are resistant to change, get hung up on arguing
imponderables, bogged down in scriptural and theological debates
where either point of view can be sustained with piles of data.
When the Sanhedrin wanted to do something about the Jews who believed
Jesus was the Messiah, it was Gamaliel who said they should watch
awhile and check the results. People who could not get around the
ordination debate but who found themselves effectively ministered
to by women clergy also found their fears and suspicions vanish
like vapors. They could not remember what the fuss was about.
The anthropologists' conclusion that men fear women is not arguable,
although it is not always remembered. How much this cultural factor
has influenced our theological discussion will be for future scholars
to decide after the embers of debate have cooled.
In the meantime I can say that for many men the experience of
women as leaders, pastors, and authorities has been redemptive
of that fear that so cripples human community. I do not have to
ask myself whether women *can* exercise spiritual authority in
the church in a way that brings health: I have seen it.
Receiving the ministry of women clergy in sacramental celebrations
has expanded my awareness of God's generosity. All of what makes
us human was taken up by God in Christ's incarnation, death, resurrection,
and ascension. We are only beginning to appropriate the riches
of women's experience, only beginning to hear their report, yet
the very sight of them presiding at the altar is the forceful reminder
to me that attending to that other half of the history of salvation
is vastly more delight than duty.
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