Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

• Cody J. Sanders

Cody J. Sanders is a Baptist minister and Ph.D. student in Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, TX. Cody was a Fellow in the inaugural class of the Human Rights Campaign Summer Institute for Religious and Theological Study and is a participant in the Beyond Apologetics symposium on sexual identity, pastoral theology, and pastoral practice.

• When I heard about the death of 15-year-old Billy Lucas early in September, I was terribly saddened. It is a tragedy when a young person completes suicide in the aftermath of daily torment and harassment. After this, I sat in stunned silence in front of my computer screen as news stories continued to appear about the suicides of 13-year-old Asher Brown, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, 13-year-old Seth Walsh, and 19-year-old Raymond Chase. Today, it is very clear to me that profound sadness and stunned silence is no longer a suitable, appropriate, or adequate response.

From Lamentation to Indignation

My sadness began to change into something different with each successive news story about another gay teen hanging himself, shooting himself, and jumping off of a bridge. As I saw the faces of these young victims and imagined the family and friends left to cope with the chaos of their suicides, my lamentation began to morph into an indignant fury.

My indignation grew as I shifted my gaze from the individual acts of suicide to the contexts in which these suicides are set. Suicide happens for numerous reasons. Some seek relief from enduring physical and psychological pain that seems infinitely unrelenting and others after severe bouts of depression. These teens, however, were not seeking relief from some persistent, internal state of depression or physical illness. The pain they faced had an external source: the cruel, unremitting, merciless pounding of daily humiliation, taunting, harassment, and violence.

And all of this pain visited upon these young lives because of one thing they had in common: they were not heterosexual.

These suicides are not acts of “escape,” or a “cop-out” from facing life. When LGBT people resort to suicide, they are responding to far more than the pain of a few individual insults or humiliating occurrences. When LGBT people commit suicide it is an extreme act of resistance to an oppressive and unjust reality in which every LGBT person is always and everywhere at risk of becoming the target of violence solely because of sexual orientation or gender identity. They are acts of resistance to a perceived reality in which a lifetime of violence and abuse seems utterly unavoidable.

The landscape upon which LGBT teen suicide is set calls for far more than our sympathy and sadness. There are times in which it is important to be guided to action by our anger. This is one of those times.

From Interpersonal Violence to Group Subjugation

Our response to bullying is a response to violence. Beyond the inflicting of individual pain, violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people has effects far beyond the individual target. This is what Iris Marion Young terms “systematic violence” in her famous “Five Faces of Oppression.” It is a violence of instrumentality—violence with the effect of keeping an entire group subjugated and in a state of oppression.

Young argues, “Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person”.* The only thing one must do to become victimized is to be a member of a particular group (e.g. to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender). We must widen our perspective from individual acts of bullying and violence to the instrumental purpose these serve in subjugating LGBT people to particular religious and cultural ideologies in which reality is defined from a strictly heterosexual perspective — and gay and lesbian people become non-persons.

As more churches and denominations ordain gay and lesbian clergy, more gay and lesbian people are featured in media, and more medical, psychological and psychotherapeutic organizations reject notions of the pathological in sexual minorities, dominant religious and cultural ideology is in a state of crisis. It is no longer an unquestioned assumption that heterosexual experience represents the definition of reality for all people. The power to define reality for the masses is at stake and this power comes with all manner of political and ideological implications. Thus, there is a vested interest on the part of the religious and political right in keeping LGBT persons silent and subjugated.

Whereas political rallying on issues like same-sex marriage and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell serve to maintain some ground on the preservation of anti-gay cultural ideology, the intermittent reinforcement of violent attack is an even better tool to ensure the silence (and suicide) of LGBT people and their subjugation to the closet.

While a majority of LGBT people may avoid ever becoming the victim of a violence, none will be able to avoid the psychic terror that is visited upon LGBT people with each reminder that this world is one in which people are maimed and killed because of their sexual and gender identities. It is this psychic terror that makes life so difficult for many LGBT people. It is this psychic terror that does the heavy lifting of instrumental, systematic violence. It intends to silence and to destroy from within.

While most of us will never be physically attacked by another human being, all of us know we are targets.

A Theology of Anti-Gay Bullying

Anti-gay bullying is a theological issue because it has a theological base. I find it difficult to believe that even those among us with a vibrant imagination can muster the creative energy to picture a reality in which anti-gay violence and bullying exist without the anti-gay religious messages that support them.

These messages come in many forms, degrees of virulence, and volumes of expression. The most insidious forms, however, are not those from groups like Westboro Baptist Church. Most people quickly dismiss this fanaticism as the red-faced ranting of a fringe religious leader and his small band of followers.

More difficult to address are the myriad ways in which everyday churches that do a lot of good in the world also perpetuate theologies that undergird and legitimate instrumental violence. The simplistic, black and white lines that are drawn between conceptions of good and evil make it all-too-easy to apply these dualisms to groups of people. When theologies leave no room for ambiguity, mystery and uncertainty, it becomes very easy to identify an “us” (good, heterosexual) versus a “them” (evil, gay).

Additionally, hierarchical conceptions of value and worth are implicit in many of our theological notions. Needless to say, value and worth are not distributed equally in these hierarchies. God is at the top, (white, heterosexual) men come soon after and all those less valued by the culture (women, children, LGBT people, the poor, racial minorities, etc.) fall somewhere down below. And it all makes perfect sense if you support it with a few appropriately (mis)quoted verses from the Bible.

With dualistic conceptions of good and evil and hierarchical notions of value and worth, it becomes easy to know who it is okay to hate or to bully or, seemingly more benignly, to ignore. And no institutions have done more to create and perpetuate the public disapproval of gay and lesbian people than churches.

If anti-gay bullying has, at any level, an embodied undercurrent of tacit theological legitimation, then we simply cannot circumvent our responsibility to provide a clear, decisive, theological response. Aside from its theological base, anti-gay bullying is a theological issue because it calls for acts of solidarity on behalf of the vulnerable and justice on behalf of the oppressed.

But this imperative to respond reminds us that the most dangerous form of theological message comes in the subtlest of forms: silence.

The Longer We Wait, the More Young People Die

There is already a strong religious presence in the debate around anti-bullying education in schools. Unfortunately, it is not a friendly voice for LGBT teens. There is also no lack of rhetoric on sexuality stemming from theological sources. But the loudest voices are not the voices of affirmation and embrace. In a recent article, I urged churches that rest comfortably in a tacitly welcoming or pseudo-affirming position to come out and publicly proclaim their places of worship as truly welcoming and affirming sanctuaries for people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.

I cannot count the number of times I have heard well-meaning, good-hearted people respond to this appeal, saying, “Things are a lot better for gay people today than they were several years (or decades) ago. In time, our society (or churches) will come around on this issue.” To these friends and others, I must say, “It’s time.” For Lucas, Brown, Clementi, Walsh, and Chase the time is up. For these teens and the myriad other bisexual, transgender, lesbian and gay youth lost to suicide, the waiting game hasn’t worked so well.

As simply as I can state the matter: The longer we wait to respond, the more young people die.

If this were a hostage situation, we would have dispatched the SWAT team by now. And in many ways, it is. Our children and teenagers are being held hostage by a religious and political rhetoric that strives to maintain the status quo of anti-gay heterosexist normativity. The messages of Focus on the Family and other organizations actively strive to leave the most vulnerable among us exposed to continuous attack. The good news is that we don't need a SWAT team. We just need quality education on sexuality and gender identity in our schools and more faithful and courageous preaching and teaching in our churches.

Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland offers profound words to any individuals and churches seeking to wash their hands of this issue. She states,

“If my sister or brother is not at the table, we are not the flesh of Christ. If my sister’s mark of sexuality must be obscured, if my brother’s mark of race must be disguised, if my sister’s mark of culture must be repressed, then we are not the flesh of Christ. For, it is through and in Christ’s own flesh that the ‘other’ is my sister, is my brother; indeed, the ‘other’ is me…”

If anti-gay bullying is a theological issue, perhaps what is called for is a creative theological response. A theological response that challenges the systematic violence that upholds an oppressive religious and cultural ideology will not be a response through which we can hedge our bets. It will be a full-bodied, whole-hearted giving of ourselves to the repair of the flesh of Christ divided by injustice and systematic exclusion.

Ministers who remain in comfortable silence on sexuality must speak out. Churches that have silently embraced gay and lesbian members for years must publically hang the welcome banner. How long will we continue to limit and qualify our messages of acceptance, inclusion and embrace for the most vulnerable in order to maintain the comfort of those in our communities of faith who are well served by the status quo?

In the current climate, equivocating messages of affirmation are overpowered by the religious rhetoric of hatred. Silence only serves to support the toleration of bullying, violence and exclusion. In the face of what has already become the common occurrence of LGBT teen suicide, how long can we wait to respond?

Comment: I found this article on Facebook today and received permission from my brother Cody to post it. It is a message that needs to get out. I am gratified to find a Baptist addressing this issue especially here in TX. But at the same time I weep for those who have had to respond to the hatred that wrong-headed theology and wrong-headed Scriptural interpretation by taking their own lives.


I attended the 48th reunion of my high school class recently and then spent some time with a classmate going over our yearbook with that “where is s/he now?” thing that all of us of a certain age tend to do. I was saddened to find that several had succumbed to suicide. Several had died of AIDS. They were wonderful guys___Sweet men who were creative and capable and had so much to offer the world. This is not a new issue. It is as old as time itself. To be different is to invite such ridicule, such animosity and even the Church contributes to the maligning. The religious establishment is going to have to admit its complicity in the degradation of those LGBT persons and their deaths. We as Church must repent and return to learn a new way of being Church by including those who have been cast out.


If the Church were as proactive about condemning bullying as it is about rooting out sexual sin, we might find more people in our pews. If our theology spoke as passionately about loving those who were cast down as it has about “standing firm” for Jesus, the media’s image of Church and clergy might be a bit less vituperative. And if we as Church began to express our repentance for excluding those who merely want to live out the integrity of how God made them, then we would have a Gospel message to pass on to the future generations about salvation, renewal and resurrection.

Bishop Leo Frade: Burning Qu'an

September 7, 2010




How can anyone think that an act of hate and religious fanaticism-the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001--can somehow be redeemed by an act of intolerance and religious stupidity?



I have been trying to decide whether Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove Center in Gainesville, who is planning to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, has any idea of how much harm and persecution his action will bring upon Christians living around the world--and specifically those living in countries with a majority Muslim population. I have traveled extensively in the Middle East, and I am quite familiar with the precarious situation of Christians in that area.

I can only appeal to him to desist from an action that will hurt his Christian brothers and sisters around the world; they are the ones who will suffer the consequences of his fanatical act.

As an American, I also appeal to his patriotism and concern for our U.S.

troops. General David Petraeus, our commander in Afghanistan, has warned

that this planned act of disrespect and destruction of the Muslim scriptures

will both endanger our troops already in perilous situations and harm our

relationship with those Muslim countries that are our sincere allies.

Every page of the Quran that burns will recruit to the ranks of Islamic

extremists hundreds of irate Muslims, who will see in this action a

confirmation of claims by Al Qaeda and the Taliban that Americans are

engaged in our own jihad against the followers of Islam.

What would Jesus do? I am quite sure that burning the holy scriptures of

another faith would never be his choice. Our Lord said from the cross where

he died, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing."

I would remind Pastor Jones that our Lord forgives what we find it

impossible to forgive and challenges us to move beyond fear, suspicion and

hatred to "love one another."

I want to assure the followers of Islam here and around the world that the

planned actions of the Dove Center do not represent the true values and

beliefs of the followers of Jesus Christ, who tells us that the greatest

commandment is love.

Blessings,

The Rt. Rev. Leo Frade

Bishop

Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida

Comments:  It is good to see that some of our bishops are speaking to the events of our time.  But +Leo has always been one to look after his people.  From the Marial boat lift until now, he has spoken words and lived out a compassionate presence of Christ that all can look to.  This kind of leadership is what the role of bishop demands.  He is now one of the most senior of the HOB.

  While bishop of Honduras he was tireless in his fundraising and raising of conscience to the plight of the poorest nation in Central America.  Now as the leader in Miami's polyglot world, he continues to call Christians to pay attention to the gospel, not the anger or vengence that many would fall prey to following 9/11. 

Waking up to Sarah Palin

I caught just a bit of Sarah Palin’s speech from the Lincoln Memorial this morning while I was trying to wake up to NPR news. I heard her claim that the way to return America to greatness was to honor our military personnel. I admit to being only partially awake, but such a statement was enough to wake me. Now, I admit I am not a fan of Sarah Palin. At the same time I am not willing to bash her because she is a woman. But whoever writes her copy missed the boat on this one.


I am of the generation that watched the Vietnam War divide a nation and cripple our self esteem. I had high school classmate killed there, childhood playmates changed by that war and worked with a generation of clergy many of whom dodged the draft by going to seminary. I never once in all those years thought less of those who fought for my country. I have honored them even when I thought the wars that they were fighting were wrong.

 The Vietnam War began the sobering wake-up call to the US that perhaps we were not as righteous a nation that we thought it was. For me, it was a putting away of childish post-WWII triumphalism in regards to our nation’s place in the world. But the Boomer generation often took out its disappointment with Vietnam on those who served there rather than on those who sent them.

I have always honored those who serve in the military. I respect the desire of young people who want to serve their country by putting their lives on the line so I can worship and speak freely. What I do not honor are those who use our youth as cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex or for questionable “American assets.”

 After spending almost 10 years as rector of a parish in the DC area in which 75% of the parish were either military or veterans, I know the good that our military personnel can do and be in society. But to honor them as a way to address the real and present problems in American society is mere foolishness. And I am angry at the men who wrote Sarah Palin’s copy. That kind of American pie rhetoric which is often served up as patriotism pales in her hands. It makes her look like an idiot and I don’t believe she really is.

The financial crisis that Obama is supposed to have straightened out in less than two years in office was the result of decades of financial deregulated mismanagement. It won’t work out in a mere 18 months. And an American populace that cannot understand that cannot understand the real significance of our young people who are serving their country in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a significant number of Americans who somehow believe that this nation is above the normal ebb and flow of history—that we don’t deserve to feel the consequences of mismanagement, or poor leadership. We can have rallies on the Mall and make it better rather than buckling down and doing the hard work of figuring out where we have failed in being good neighbors to one another and the world, where we have thrown money at problems that have never ceased, and where we have mocked the US Constitution by claiming that property is more important than our people.

Waking up to Sarah Palin is enough to set my day awry. Now I need to spend some time with Coffee, not tea, and God to get my soul centered.

Will our children have faith?

A friend sent me an email worried about her childhood church that had fallen on hard times. I sent off a response that many, many churches have fallen upon hard times. I would guess that in the past 5 years we have seen the closing of more churches in the main line churches than at any single time in American Church history. We have also seen large and vital churches just 15 years ago fall into the realm of either part-time or what is known “in the business” as “struggling congregations.” Even those huge independent churches with their fire-breathing clergy are beginning to dwindle in attendance.


In the Northeast we would often blame it on the change in demographics. Here in the South we often blame it on the “conservative-liberal” contentiousness that has infected the Church. But like Diana Butler Bass and Phyllis Tickle, I think that there are other forces as work. Tickle in her The Great Emergence ties the decline in mainline churches including the Roman Catholic, as a sign of a sea change that is happening theologically, liturgically and historically. She shows how these changes happen about every 500 years in matters of faith. Although I think she stretches the history a bit; I do believe she has a good case.

What I do see is that belief in most religions of the world is finding it difficult to continue concepts that have kept them alive for millennia. Christianity is no exception. Whether it is because faith is being assaulted with scientific fact that belies the myths of those religions, or whether it is because the world has become tired of the organizations that have supported exclusionary tenets, I am not sure. But I am finding that the two most over-arching faith systems in the world, faith and science, are finally coming to terms with each other and consequently leaving both science and old faith parameters in the dust. It is also why I am so supportive of having a faith-filled marine biologist as presiding bishop of our Church.

Religion is not the opiate of the people; it is the quest for meaning in life. Faith in that which is beyond us is what makes life full and hopeful. Faith is rooted most often in the stories of our lives but is expanded to include all humanity. While I served as a Lutheran pastor, I was made aware of just how important cultural expressions of the holy are. God was perceived as just as organized and collected as German thought processes. It made me think of how I have come to know God in an Anglican form that is equally foreign to my Latino or my Asian friends. In the face of growing globalism, how do I express my faith in the Divine—a sense of the Holy-- to those who have been formed in a technological age?

My knowledge of the Holy-God-the Divine is rooted in a Hebraic experience of faith that was molded by Greek mythology and philosophy, medieval superstition, Reformation rationalism, Enlightenment absolutism and Darwinian evolution. My faith is as orthodox as the BCP 1979 and I believe deeply in the love of Jesus Christ. But I wonder what the future of my faith will be. The hope in the Holy is not JUST for Christians. It is for all humankind. This does not mean that I put my faith in humanism. No, my relationship with the Holy is real and meaningful. It is the continuous call from God to live ‘a life worthy of my calling.’

Faith for the future must be willing to introduce folks to a relationship with that which cannot be expressed. It must be willing to share a faith that not a game of Monopoly where Salvation is a “get out of jail free” card. Church for the future must be willing to share its uncertainty in order for the members to embrace the constant call to holiness. For certainty is a stumbling block to a relationship with a god that cannot be imprisoned by words. And when we must have certainty, we fail in our relationship with God. “ Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1)

The faith we share is what will call us to Church. That Church will look different from my ethnic-bound Anglican world. There will need to be space in that new Church for those who are ethnically bound, but there will be space for those do not conform to Anglican roots. There will be those who can open their metaphors for the Holy to a technological understandings of hope. That is where the faithful will be. Their music may not be Palestrina or even Foley; their chant may not be four-part harmony. Incense may not be used. But I will know I am in Church because God and the faith-filled will be there.

Ursuline memories

Thirty-eight years ago today I entered the convent. Most people who know me look at me and say “YOU were a nun?” Not exactly, I entered and stayed through my noviciate until I realized that the religious life was not my vocation and left. But I am so thankful for those years and those women who helped me to know Christ and God’s love.


I came to know Christ through one of those sisters when religious were just coming out of their enclosures in the ‘60’s. I was teaching in an extremely poor section of Dallas in a junior high school that was deeply involved with the school district’s attempts at integrating Blacks, Hispanic and Whites. If there was anything that radicalized me, it was those years in that school.

I was also a professional musician. I supplemented my income with playing with a civic symphony in the area. At the beginning of a new season, a nun with full habit and carrying a French horn showed up at rehearsal. We became good friends. Often I provided transportation to rehearsals and it was not uncommon to have a drink together afterwards. Of course conversation turned to religion and faith. I was not an unbeliever, but I had never met someone for whom faith was so clear. As problems in my own teaching situation began to rise, I asked her to pray for me. She asked me if I prayed. I said,” no, that was her job.” She made sure that I knew that wasn’t how it worked and helped me begin to pray.

That introduction to prayer and the gradual invitation to prayer with the community was the beginning of a relationship with the Holy that has guided my life ever since. I entered three years later on the Feast of the Assumption.

The community that I joined was a well-established teaching order whose Postulancy was in New Orleans. It was an incredible culture change from my less that 7% Catholic environment in Ft. Worth. New Orleans was intensely Roman Catholic with the same kind of ethnic diversity of many of the major cities in the Midwest. I was unfamiliar with the kind of “Irish parish”, “Italian parish”, “French parish” mentality that permeated Roman Catholic society. Ursuline, my community, was deeply established as old French in a city that traded on old French for its identity. Such institutions as Mardi Gras, even many of the religious practices were centered in our convent. For the first time in my life, I belonged among some of the shakers and movers of society who did the shaking and moving by praying. It was humbling.

I was also learning about solitude. For such an extrovert as I, this was a totally new experience. The Ursulines guaranteed their sisters at least an hour for mental prayer a day. They also expected you to be a part of the liturgical day, praying the daily Morning, Evening and Night as a community. There is something about a whole chapel of women singing the psalms that eases the loneliness of life. Community life was not difficult for me. I loved having meals with these well-educated women whose table talk concerned the events of the day, theology, liturgy, things that I was interested in. I am sure that there were many of the sisters who found ME difficult because I was an awkward colt and a “pushy broad” to boot. But I was always treated with respect.

We were moved from New Orleans to outside of St. Louis for our novitiate. There I learned to rely on Christ alone. We were on the banks of the Mississippi seemingly cut off from everything and everyone. As I delved deeper into my own vocation I was quite undetermined about what God was calling me to. I knew that my life was to be centered in the Church. My life had been turned over to the Holy much earlier before I entered. But HOW was I supposed to the serve the Church was still vague. Then the first women’s ordinations in the Episcopal Church were publicized and my world shifted. It wasn’t immediate and it wasn’t clear for some time. But I knew that there was a possibility that priesthood was where it led.

My three years in the convent are still dear to me. I have lost some contact with that community of women but there are still individuals I contact when I have the chance. Following Katrina, I visited my novice mistress while they were decamped in Dallas. She had been in the hospital at the time the levees broke and had harrowing tales of being carried out on a stretcher. Her community didn’t know where she was for some days, I think. The influence that these women, women who had gone against society’s convention of marriage, women who were educated and could think for themselves were far more important to my formation as a woman than the feminists I met in Cambridge or Berkeley. They were women who deeply understood God in their lives. Not all thought the way I did. Not all lived out their vows the way I did. I learned to live and love them because they were my sisters even though some of them were not always “nice.” It was a microcosm of what life today has become. It was a microcosm of what life in the Church is.

And so today I give thanks to God for the Order of St. Ursula of the Roman Union. May they continue to share their lives with those who have no knowledge of God. I pray that God will prosper their witness to the world and among the lives of women who will lead and shape tomorrow.

The Episcopal Church Welcomes You

I am off to the Believing Out Loud conference in Austin this afternoon with Integrity, the LGBT organization in TEC. I have never really considered myself a part of “The Movement” because I have never really seen myself as part “The Life.” (Whatever that means.)

Having people sort you out as to what you are sexually is so tiresome. Like so many people my age, that part of my life has been gone so long that it seems weird that people get so exercised because I am lesbian. I have never been a girly-girl. I do take great pride of being the best half-back in my all –boy neighborhood when I was growing up. I do prefer watching the Cowboys play to Better Homes and Gardens channel. And as I told my bishop “I don’t pass for straight well.”


All that said. I would say that sex—that is, the act of having sexual excitement/pleasure, occupies such a miniscule particle of my life that to find that as a reason why I am allowed or not allowed to do things in the name of Jesus is ludicrous. And for the most of my life this has been true. Granted, at one point when I was young, I was as hormonally determined as any youth, but as an adult….? Get real!

So what does it mean for me to go to an Integrity conference? It does mean being with other LGBT folk. It means being with others who think like I do about the issue of full-inclusion in Christ’s Church. But most of them live their lives quite differently from me. It means seeing friends I have known throughout my career and it means meeting friends I have met only on-line.

It also means that I still have faith in this crazy Church of ours that we can be about sharing Christ with others who seem different or odd or “queer”, to coin a phrase. It says that the God I have faith in calls me each day to expanding my horizons and pushing this mortal envelope to wonderful and even outrageous dimensions. And I thank God everyday that God does that. It keeps me from becoming stagnant or dried up and one of those seniors who complains all the time.

I still do not know where the Church is going. And that disturbs me. This Emergent Age is leaving me without the normal signposts of familiarity. But as long as there are people who are willing to share their love for God, I want to be there. I can be about the vocation that God has called me to---to confirm the joy that God makes present in one another. How that is going to be configured, remains to be seen. So I go to new things, experience stuff I have never experienced (no bungy-jumping or hang-gliding, thank you)  to open me to new loves and prepare to learn to walk all over again. Alleluia, he is risen!

Where Were You on July 29, 1974?

A question has arisen on HOB/D as to where people were on the day of the first ordinations of women. It is interesting that some posting there were not even born yet. Most of my Episcopal friends can remember the event, but after all I am 60+. Like the day when JFK was shot, or MLK was shot, those ordained women of a certain age remember this day as a milestone in their journey. Our lives have not been the same because of that day.

I remember not the day itself but I remember the day after when the Philadelphia ordinations were reported in the news paper. I was a novice in a Roman Catholic convent outside of St. Louis. You can imagine what the conversation in the community room was that Sunday afternoon! Needless to say the opinions ranged from total rejection to total and unequivocal support. But it was the discussion of what the priesthood was that continued for months following that was important. And I believe that it is that conversation that still continues in Roman Catholicism, TEC and all churches because of July 29, 1974.

What was interesting was that one of our community had been interviewed by the local newspaper revealing that she felt called to the priesthood. Some of the sisters considered it “bad form” to speak of such things when it was not possible in the RCC. They did not question her vocation, they just thought being visible was wrong. For others in the group, it made us challenge our own vocations. What did it mean to be a religious? What did it mean to serve the Church? What did it mean to serve God? What did it mean for women to think of themselves as having parity with men? What was the priesthood anyway? What did it mean to be a sacramental presence in the community of the faithful? These women, most of the professed, had served as teachers or principals of schools in parishes where they had had to work with male priests. They knew these men were not holier than they. They knew they were better educated than most parish priests. And most of them had far better teaching, administrative and pastoral skills and left the priests in their parishes in the dust. But I never saw disrespect for the clergy. And like wives of men who are not especially talented, they mostly functioned as helpmeets to them.

Those were heady days. I know that the Philadelphia ordinations began me thinking of what my vocation really was. I knew I was called by God, but all the baptized were called by God. My vocation was not a calling to teach or even be a missionary: the first understanding of my vocation. But each time I attended Eucharist, I knew that my life centered on that act. I would watch each action; meditate on each word spoken at the altar. It was there my day began and in the darkness of the chapel each day it ended in the single flame of the altar light.

I left the convent in 1975. I loved the community and still do. I loved the women who belonged to it. But I did not belong there. The regimen was not difficult; the rules were not abusive. I loved being a part of the liturgical movement of life that religious life portrayed. But religious life is a sub-culture and I did not belong to it. I belonged to parish life. I belonged to the altar that stood among the lives of people who came from their daily lives each week thirsting for a touch with the Holy.

The Philadelphia Ordinations began a process in which the Church opened the door to ask “What is a priest?” Vatican II had done some of that in the early 1960’s, but the ’74 ordinations didn’t ask questions. They made real what had been mere speculation. There was to be no more study, they said. Those who accepted that women were equal to men accepted it. Those who could not, didn’t.

A female colleague recently said that she wished that the Philadelphia group hadn’t done what they did because it makes it impossible to say to current dissadents "well, we obeyed the canons so now you must too". I know that is a wonderful “what if.” But I truly believe that the ’77 ordinations would not have happened without the “clerical disobedience” that happened 36 years ago. Like the LGBT issues that have been debated for 40 years or more, I believe we would never have adopted women’s ordination at GC1976. And without Women’s Ordination, the LGBT issues would never have been addressed. Law never really addresses changes until there is revolution. The consecrations of +Gene Robinson and +Mary Glasspool are to be seen in that light.

What does surprise me is the fear of someone of the caliber of the Archbishop of Canterbury of women bishops. The loss of the adamant those who cannot abide the authority of women in the C of E is not a loss any more than the loss of the Ikerites, Schofieldites, or Duncanites. Men who are incapable of dreaming of a Church in which there is no ‘slave or free, male or female, Greek or Jew’ (and might I add, ‘queer or straight’) cannot serve the Church of the Third Millennium. Inequality cannot be a sign of God’s Good News.

But one thing continues to worry me. What is to be the future image of ordained ministry in the Church? One of the concerns I have is that many who present themselves for ordained ministry to the Church continue to image the priesthood as the leader of large congregations. They have come to understand the priesthood as a privileged class of leaders rather than servants of the Church. They have taken on the trappings of a “profession” rather than a ministry. Granted, even when I attended seminary, the image of the “professional” was paramount —the professional counselor, the academic and scholar, the corporate and capable administrator was what everyone strove for. The thorough grounding in the liturgy was offered but did not always create the community that Christianity offers. Consequently many of the baby-boomers who now run our Church have no idea of the kind of Christian community that they are called to serve and create. We often make the role of bishop the kind of climb to the top analogous of CEO’s rather than a unique ministry of the Church to foster collegiality and Christian community.

If the emerging church or what is going to serve humanity as the locus for its quest for the Holy, we must be willing to look clearly at what the role of the priesthood is. If we do not, we will continue to try to provide leaders for those who do not wish to be led. We will need to figure out what we believe it means to have God Incarnate in our midst and how we are going to sign that presence for ourselves and for others. This kind of discussion must be in our vestry meetings and in our living rooms, over our GnT’s or our Martinis, at coffee hour and in Sunday school classes. And MOST of all, in our confirmation classes.

 I give thanks to all those women who served the Church for the sake of us all--those who formulated and acted on the question that is still with us.  So where were you on July 29th, 1974 and how has it changed your life?  And what does it mean for the future?