Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
What women clergy have taught me
"The anthropologists' conclusion that men fear women is not arguable..."
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
July, 2001Twenty-five years ago, the Episcopal Church changed its canons to permit the ordination of women to all orders of ministry. Women priests and deacons are a fact of church life in 97 of our 100 dioceses. In several, women are bishops.
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 benefited from the presence and counsel of many women colleagues.
I am grateful for the presence of women as colleagues in the ordained ministry. I reflect on what I have witnessed, on how ordained women have enriched my experience of Christ.
The center of Christian faith is the passage of Jesus through suffering and death to the life that gives us life. Christians are called to live that "paschal mystery," to offer ourselves for the sake of others. Often, that entails suffering. Always, it means God gives life to someone through our participation in Christ's self-giving.
The women clergy who have touched me deeply have endured open hostility, casual snideness, and patronizing behavior that perhaps comes more from ignorance than ill will.
I marveled 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.
Like Peter cutting off Malchus' ear, I want to punch people who use the word "priestess" with all its demeaning psychosexual implications, but this would help nothing.
The women I admire have not been wimps or victim types. They have pointed out injustice, educated the church, and remained people of good will towards those who mistreat them.
Certainly there are angry women and there are angry or even threatened men, but the vast majority of women priests have taken on this extra ministry of self-giving with holy equanimity.
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 debates where either point of view can be sustained with piles of data. People who found themselves effectively ministered to by women clergy, however, 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 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.
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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