By Donald Schell
The first time I saw a woman in a clerical collar, I had just completed my first year of seminary – summer of 1969. I recall that moment in the restaurant, glancing up to see a group of three or four people waiting for a table and noticing a man in a collar and then this woman.
I flinched and looked away and then, as if compelled, glanced up again. My stomach clenched. Those body responses won’t allow me to deny that my being, body and soul, so far as I knew either, responded with instant fear and disgust. I don’t remember feeling angry, just threatened and forced to acknowledge an impending loss.
I had just completed a year of Princeton Seminary as a Presbyterian. I was transferring to General Seminary to begin studies for Episcopal priesthood. At twenty two I thought I’d found the answer I was looking for in a church that combined honest inquiry and what I judged to be catholic practice.
I knew ‘Protestants’ ordained women, and this woman had to be one of ‘them’ because my new tribe didn’t ordain women. . .yet. But seeing her, I felt myself witnessing handwriting on the wall.
A couple of years later, my confessor and spiritual director, Br. Paul Wessinger, SSJE, a priest whose catholic credentials I trusted completely, said to me, ‘Donald, I don’t see that it will unchurch the church. Maybe the Spirit is up to something here. We’d better prepare ourselves to learn.’ I thank God for Paul’s timely words. (And I know he meant to include himself in the learning.)
Today I thank God for the women clergy who have proven some of my wisest and best colleagues. And I remember Br. Paul’s word of wisdom with deep gratitude. He opened something for me, an invitation to watch what was happening and listen to my experience with a more open heart. He helped me welcome the Spirit and accept the gift of new colleagues.
“When the Spirit of truth comes, S/He will guide you into all truth.”
So, I confidently say, in this the Spirit was up to something much, much bigger than my small, tidy interpretation of catholicity or history, and it’s useful to remember being so wholeheartedly wrong.
I take some pride in being a person who likes to learn, actually loves to learn. In that pride, Jesus’ promise in John’s Gospel that the Spirit will guide us into all truth feels exhilarating. Sometimes it’s harder to remember that pain and fear are also part of learning. Why is that so? Because learning demands unlearning. Each new and richer piece of provisional knowledge (‘now we know in part’) costs letting go of a previous, cherished, and possibly provisionally useful bit of provisional ‘knowledge.’ The way of learning is a way of Not Knowing, venturing, as St. Paul tells us, beyond any knowledge that passes away, and into love. Ouch.
While I’m at it, let me add another embarrassing confession to recalling my horror at seeing a woman in a collar. This one comes from a year or so later. For a class in apologetics at General Seminary, a classmate was polling his fellow seminarians opinions about the legitimacy of gay men (remember we weren’t ordaining women yet) among the clergy. Blithely and confidently I wrote that I saw no obstacle to a gay man being ordained as long as he either chose to get married (obviously, I meant ‘to a woman’) or was celibate – ouch again.
I knew some of my fellow seminarians at General were gay, but only a vague idea of who they were, and it didn’t occur to me that the guy taking this poll was working something through for himself. And at the time I would have been surprised to learn that my friend and fellow student Gene Robinson was struggling with questions like those in the questionnaire.
“The Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth.”
How many Anglicans around the world have stories like these? How many such stories are still unfolding?
Like the first Christians have to make peace with a Spirit who broke free of circumcision and kosher laws to do a new thing, we’ve had to let go of church and the faith (as we thought we knew them) to embark on a journey of uncertainty. Traveling in the Spirit’s company, we know less than we once thought. The steadier knowledge is that we ARE learning (sometimes at least) to welcome the disconcerting, disorienting blast of the Spirit’s mighty wind (or gentle breeze coming when we least expect it and from the ‘wrong’ direction).
Looking at the sweep of that Holy Wind over the last seventy years, I have to think the Spirit either trusts us astonishingly or is very, very impatient with us. We’ve been challenged to a lot of change. We’re in at least a third generations of unlearning in order to learn, of not knowing, for the sake of love. Consider this chronology:
1944 ordination of Li Tim Oi, first woman priest in the Anglican communion, a scandal that Archbishop William Temple tried to hide or undo, but Hong Kong was too far from Canterbury.
1950’s the weekly ‘parish Eucharist’ and ‘coffee hour’ hints at something deeper in the suburban expansion of the church across America.
1967 Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper launches twelve years of Trial Use and at least two decades of Anglican churches around the world discovering unity (or not) in shape and form of locally distinct liturgies.
1970 General Convention permits admitting unconfirmed children and adults to communion, a step toward the reforms the drafters of new liturgies were working for – restoring Baptism as full and complete incorporation into the Body of Christ
1974 Retired bishops ordain eleven women to the priesthood in Philadelphia (ahead of General Convention canonical authorization).
1976 General Convention authorizes ordination of women
1976 The Proposed Book of Common Prayer declares the Eucharist “the principle act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major feast” (borrowing this language from the Presbyterian Book of Order).
1977 Paul Moore ordains out lesbian deacon Ellen Barrett a priest.
1978 Lambeth Conference accepts ordination of women as a province-by-province option – for a moment acknowledging that change and discovery happen in different ways in different places and on the Spirit’s unpredictable timetable.
1981 St. Gregory’s Church, San Francisco formalizes an explicit invitation of ALL to communion, “Jesus welcomes everyone to his Table, so we offer communion to everyone…”
1989 Massachusetts ordains Barbara Harris their Bishop Suffragan, first woman bishop in the Anglican Communion.
1989 Penny Jamieson ordained bishop of Dunedin (New Zealand), first woman diocesan bishop in the Anglican Communion.
2004 Gene Robinson is ordained the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion.
2010 Mary Glasspool is ordained the first openly lesbian bishop in the Anglican Communion.
I don’t expect all our readers would make the same chronology. We might argue about some of the pieces, and I’ve deliberately left off most of the push-back, the moments of protest and attempting to undo what it looks like the Spirit’s doing in all this. Here’s a simple and important example of pushback:
1971 House of Bishops asks that children be instructed in the ‘meaning of the sacrament’ before first communion.
In that time when my gut tied in a knot at the Spirit’s work raising up women for leadership and I accidentally and naively marginalized a seminary classmate, I stumbled on Henry David Thoreau’s lovely saying, ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’ And I started to get (still learning this I know) that the Spirit that blows where it will is the wildest thing of all.
What would my younger self have thought when, twelve years after I was ordained an Episcopal priest, I had the privilege of being invited by the Presbytery where I’d grown up, to join Presbyterian colleagues ordaining my mother or when, twenty years after that, Bishop Otis Charles and Felipe Paris asked me to preside at their relationship blessing?
“The Spirit will lead you into all truth,” so our path will always be unlearning in order to see the bigger truth. But the chronology (like other startling discoveries the church has made over the past two millennia) keeps hinting at two things: that we are seeing the fulfillment of the prophet’s promise, ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all humanity,’ and that, as Gregory of Nyssa said so plainly sixteen centuries ago, ‘The Body of Christ is all humanity.”
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.