Do Not Forget -
Sep. 20th, 2017 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amidthestarsLast week I went to an Anglican ordination. I had a friend who was being ordained a deacon, and in the same mass was the ordination of three female priests. I've wanted to write about it ever since, mostly because I'm not sure how else to process the whole thing. This will probably be messy. It's a messy bunch of thoughts.
Last week was a trip, from start to finish. I worked a bunch of crazy hours, and then a friend from New England drove up on his motorcycle to visit me for a few days before continuing on to see some family in Utah. It was... a lot. Nice, definitely, but strange. My introvert heart trembled for three days straight, terrified that I was a terrible hostess. Because - I can cook. I can make sure there is warm soup waiting when I know you've been biking in the rain. I can introduce you to my favourite people. I can invite them over and make fresh apple crisp and offer you seven different kinds of tea. I can create nice little spaces, make you up a comfortable bed, make sure you have fresh towels and extra blankets and the wifi password, but, you know. I can't talk.
And of course, we really don't know each other that well. And the one thing we have in common is something that is difficult to talk about, so we mostly talk about other things. Canadianisms. The city. The weather. We do our best. When we do finally talk about monasticism, on the last evening of his stay, I am mostly annoyed. I get an hour of advice I didn't ask for and some not-as-subtle-as-he-thought-they-were hints that I am "too caught up in the world." Thanks.
The ordination, though.
Last month I visited a good friend in Toronto - a former professor, who over the years has been an amazingly compassionate mentor to me and my weirdo heart. I hadn't seen her in years. Towards the end of our conversation, I told her about how I've been spending my Sundays with the Anglicans and how I arrived at the decision to do so. (Have I written about that before? It started when I heard a woman preach for the first time.) She immediately leapt to the conclusion that this meant that I wanted to be ordained. She said, "Well, this is perfect. It makes perfect sense. It combines everything that matters to you." And I will admit that she is not wrong about that - that it would, really, combine everything that matters to me. But I am so, so, so far from being in a place where I could even consider something like that, for so many reasons. I am so far from feeling like I might ever even want to.
But.
Over and over again, I come back to the fact that it is just means so. very. much. to experience a church in which men and women are both looked to as leaders - where they are understood to be equally wise, equally capable of guiding their people with love and sensitivity. Where they listen to one another, where their voices are both offered as sources of knowledge and authority. I wish I could articulate how that feels, how profoundly different it is, in ways I could not have expected or imagined. I wish I could explain how much it changes about how I have always understood God, what it is revealing to me about how I've been shaped - in ways I didn't realize - by the absence of this in the tradition in which I was raised.
And so it was... wild, completely and utterly wild... to hear the Bishop (who is also a woman) examine the three female candidates for the priesthood, to watch her vest them, to hear her say to them, "Receive this Bible and this chalice and paten as signs of the authority given to you to preach the word of God and to administer his holy sacraments. Do not forget the trust committed to you as a priest in the church of God," and to know, for the first time, that regardless of whether I want it or am called to it or any of those things, it is within the realm of actual possibility that those words could someday also be spoken to me.
Last week was a trip, from start to finish. I worked a bunch of crazy hours, and then a friend from New England drove up on his motorcycle to visit me for a few days before continuing on to see some family in Utah. It was... a lot. Nice, definitely, but strange. My introvert heart trembled for three days straight, terrified that I was a terrible hostess. Because - I can cook. I can make sure there is warm soup waiting when I know you've been biking in the rain. I can introduce you to my favourite people. I can invite them over and make fresh apple crisp and offer you seven different kinds of tea. I can create nice little spaces, make you up a comfortable bed, make sure you have fresh towels and extra blankets and the wifi password, but, you know. I can't talk.
And of course, we really don't know each other that well. And the one thing we have in common is something that is difficult to talk about, so we mostly talk about other things. Canadianisms. The city. The weather. We do our best. When we do finally talk about monasticism, on the last evening of his stay, I am mostly annoyed. I get an hour of advice I didn't ask for and some not-as-subtle-as-he-thought-they-were hints that I am "too caught up in the world." Thanks.
The ordination, though.
Last month I visited a good friend in Toronto - a former professor, who over the years has been an amazingly compassionate mentor to me and my weirdo heart. I hadn't seen her in years. Towards the end of our conversation, I told her about how I've been spending my Sundays with the Anglicans and how I arrived at the decision to do so. (Have I written about that before? It started when I heard a woman preach for the first time.) She immediately leapt to the conclusion that this meant that I wanted to be ordained. She said, "Well, this is perfect. It makes perfect sense. It combines everything that matters to you." And I will admit that she is not wrong about that - that it would, really, combine everything that matters to me. But I am so, so, so far from being in a place where I could even consider something like that, for so many reasons. I am so far from feeling like I might ever even want to.
But.
Over and over again, I come back to the fact that it is just means so. very. much. to experience a church in which men and women are both looked to as leaders - where they are understood to be equally wise, equally capable of guiding their people with love and sensitivity. Where they listen to one another, where their voices are both offered as sources of knowledge and authority. I wish I could articulate how that feels, how profoundly different it is, in ways I could not have expected or imagined. I wish I could explain how much it changes about how I have always understood God, what it is revealing to me about how I've been shaped - in ways I didn't realize - by the absence of this in the tradition in which I was raised.
And so it was... wild, completely and utterly wild... to hear the Bishop (who is also a woman) examine the three female candidates for the priesthood, to watch her vest them, to hear her say to them, "Receive this Bible and this chalice and paten as signs of the authority given to you to preach the word of God and to administer his holy sacraments. Do not forget the trust committed to you as a priest in the church of God," and to know, for the first time, that regardless of whether I want it or am called to it or any of those things, it is within the realm of actual possibility that those words could someday also be spoken to me.
