2019.04.07 A Flat Out Failed Wrinkle

Recently we watched the movie “A Wrinkle in Time.” I was looking forward to it. I had loved Madeleine L’Engle’s book by that name and was sure the movie would live up to her vision. After all, Ty Burr, cantankerous Boston Globe movie critic, even gave it a few nods, and Oprah Winfrey was in it. How could it lose?

To say I was disappointed is to put it mildly. I was furious. The movie was flat out terrible. Even if you knew nothing about L’Engle’s book or had no expectation, the movie failed to portray in an integrated way the forces of mystery, science, religion, spirituality, and the drama of three children in search of their missing father, an astrophysicist, whom they believed was lost in space.

On their journey the children meet three guides who represent Goodness, possibly the Christian idea of the Holy Trinity, and named accordingly: Mrs Whatsit Mrs Who and Mrs Which. The actors who play these three guides in the movie are token black, token middle east, and token vaporous-mystical. Despite spotlighting big name stars and making God imagery expansive, the film’s dialogue is flat and the plot contrived. Possibly trying to be too “p.c.”, it fails to convey the spiritual depths of the classic good vs. evil drama. The film even downplayed the climactic scene in which heroine Meg Murry, token black, tries desperately to save her younger brother from the forces of evil they call IT. This rescue scene was one Madeleine L’Engle often chose to read publicly, in dialogue with her husband, a professional actor.  L'Engle (1918-2007) wise story-teller imagining tesseracts.

I admit my expectations for this film might have been too grand and complicated by my affection for L’Engle, but this interpretation missed her vision: her desire to communicate the wonders of quantum science through a dramatic quest story with obvious theological imagery.

Theology and science shaped Madeleine L’Engle’s spirituality. I first met her in 1980 when I was in seminary and fretting about having been turned down in the ordination process toward priesthood. I felt ashamed and inadequate. Madeleine, my spiritual director, did not argue with my feelings but rather told me that the institutional church was not exactly innocent in its devaluing of the ministry of women. She also persuaded me not to give up my quest and issued me a new commandment: “Now, my dear, when you get ordained, and you will, do NOT turn into a little man!” It made me laugh and gave me courage to resist being shaped by patriarchal forces—the IT in my life.

I felt like Meg Murry. She was driven to save her brother and find her beloved father. She dared to travel through time and space in the fifth dimension because of a tesseract, a word meaning four-dimensional cube, from tessara + actis "ray", adopted by L'Engle to mean a wrinkle in time through which one could travel into outer space.  As far as I was concerned the Episcopal Church might well have been a tesseract, a realm scary and mysterious with potential to destroy all my hopes and dreams. Besides her brain, her heart, and her love for her father, Meg uses her skills in math and science, her spiritual guides, and her wisdom to outwit IT, a force that insists that everyone is exactly the same. Meg knows that alike and equal are not the same. She persists. I have no mathematical skills, but I knew that women and men were alike but not the same. and definitely not equal—yet. And I did persist, nearly succumbing to the powers of IT and pretzeling myself into shapes I thought would please, rather than being myself. To come to my true self, I sinned and prayed, probably in equal measure, and enjoyed prodigal dollops of divine grace.

L’Engle also persisted. She submitted Wrinkle for publication twenty-some times over several years until finally the first publisher she’d submitted it to accepted it for publication in 1962.
Rejection hurts but it won’t kill you. Its plangency (don’t you love that word?) might even have provided me courage enough not to become a little man, as L’Engle had commanded.

P.S. My husband with whom I saw the movie found it boring. “So you have a copy of the book?”  he asked. I did. He read it and got every wrinkle of it—small but meaningful redemption.

2016.07.24 What Do You Do With An Idea?

My son John is a librarian at an elementary school. He reads lots of kids' books and recommends them to me, telling me that his spirituality is always enhanced by the children’s books he reads.

The late great storyteller Madeleine L’Engle would agree. She has written many books, some of them on the shelves as children’s books. Madeleine said many times that there is no such thing as children’s literature. There is simply good literature.

Good literature includes picture books in which word and visual image come together to move the hearts of children and adults.

One such book is What Do You Do With An Idea? by Kobi Yamada, illustrated by Mae Besom. It’s a charming tale about a small boy who gets an idea. He loves his idea even though it feels strange as if it isn’t really his. He doesn’t want to share his idea for fear others will make fun of  it—and him. But his idea simply won’t die. It follows him around, hounds him you might say. In time he grows to love it, nourish it, embrace it as one might a great love, play with it, and follow it. Then you see what becomes of his idea—and you are transformed.

I’m someone who loves ideas, especially new ones, ones that almost force me to think differently, do things differently—change. My best ideas burrow under my skin—affix themselves. They challenge my assumptions and refresh me. I love ideas that fill me with laughing delight and won’t go away. I share them with people who want to try new things, to consider new ways of thinking and understanding. "Let’s" is my favorite word.

My very best beloved ideas I share with God—not to get an elevated opinion but to submit them to my inner spiritual barometer test. It measures my deepest feelings, ranging from enlivening to stifling. That’s how the Holy Spirit helps me discern whether an idea is godly, a little godly, devilish, or just plain me showing off.  There’s nothing fail-safe about this process but for me it’s how I pray.

For instance, I’ve assumed that a good sermon was generally, though not always, delivered by one person, an ordained person, skilled, trained and practiced at preaching from Holy Scriptures. Clergy, rightly, do try to live up to such expectations. It’s a vow! But is there more? Is this all that God expects for the holy Word in a sermon?

An idea churned inside me— not a totally new idea, but one I hadn’t revisited for a long time and one possibly new to my context. It used to be called dialogue sermon. Boring  title.

Let’s try group-preach. Barometer measured a little godly.

So with God’s help I tried it out and wrote about it on my blog post of 7/17/2016. The response was bright and exciting. I believe we gave the Holy Spirit a grand workout. Let’s try this again, God—when the time seems right and the text lends itself to it.

What do you do with an idea? Love it, test it, run with it, let it change you.

2012.03.08 International Women's Day & Madeleine L'Engle

I honor the late Madeleine L’Engle, author and theologian, on this International Women’s Day. She was international in travel and cosmic in her ideas.

Madeleine L’Engle, when I was trying to get ordained priest in the Episcopal Church USA back in the late ‘70s, gave me a commandment I’ve never forgotten and still keep. She stood tall in height and put all her soul stature into this word: “Now, my dear, when you get ordained, and you will, do not become a little man.” Amen, I thought.

I’ve written about keeping Madeleine’s commandment before, but this year her classic “A Wrinkle in Time” turns 50 and I’d like to pay tribute to one of my mentors. I need a hero.

It took me a record time to get ordained at a time when the church had just voted women were “fit” to be priests. After I finally made it in 1988, Madeleine’s words rang in my ears. At one time in my 20s I thought I might like to be like a man just for power-in-the-world. But that passed quickly and gratefully for the sake of bearing wonderful children who filled my heart then—and now.

I’d read L’Engle’s book “A Wrinkle in Time” more than once myself, and later to my children. It took almost as long to get published as it took me to be ordained. Madeleine submitted it to 24 publishing houses before Farrar, Straus and Giroux took a chance on it that paid off. “Wrinkle” has over 10 million copies in print and won the Newbery in 1963.

All those rejections and she already had six books to her authorial name! I have two, the first of which Madeleine, with a provocative prompt, helped me jumpstart at a writer’s workshop. I have more rejections than I can count. Madeleine never lost faith in herself, her story or her voice. I hope I don’t either.

Our connections known and unknown continue to delight me in wonder.

Like me Madeleine was graduated from Smith College, she in 1941, I in 1960, she cum laude, I phi beta kappa. We both wrote out our ideas and feelings in journals from a young age and both loved the Bible. Madeleine wrote a great blurb for my book Spiritual Lemons.

An advanced theological thinker, Madeleine was adamant that there really was no such thing as a book for children, that children had deep thoughts and questions and spiritual longing the same as adults. I can attest to that as one of those children who badgered God, and her parents, with about every mysterious question possible—and never stopped.

We both were born and grew up in New York City. We both had religious imaginations early on and our earliest views were shaped by sky scrapers beyond whose majesty we sought the heavens. She was an Episcopalian and I became one. For me that was about finding a church that had sacramental worship and more hope for being inclusive.

When Madeleine was my spiritual director she talked a lot about the silliness of religious divisions, the pretension of clerics, and the necessity of a deity fit for the cosmos. No corseted divinity, she’d say. And of course there is universal salvation. Of course, I’d agree without hesitation.

And, although Madeleine might not have called herself a feminist, I did. One of “Wrinkle’s” worst offenses, according to some critics was that the book had religious (Christian) themes (far too sophisticated for children) AND a female protagonist who isn’t sweet or pretty and loves science and curious quests. “Wrinkle” is full of insights from quantum physics, intergalactic space, and fractals—mysteries of science and of theological cosmology.

I wasn’t that good at science but I was good at being a girl, and the protagonist of my yet unpublished memoir is a woman. It’s a quest story full of mystery—grace and earthiness all together.

Meg Murry in “Wrinkle” is insecure, plain, bossy, stubborn, and compassionate. I’m four out of those five. Meg sets off on a quest into space, time traveling through the universe, to save her father who is captive on a strange planet. I once thought I could save my father from a planet called alcoholism.

Madeleine L’Engle shared many ideas with me and gave me a portion of her spirit. I am nowhere near her in talent, faith or fame. I don’t aspire to that. I’d just like one more book.

Madeleine died in 2007 and just yesterday I heard her voice on NPR reading from a section of “Wrinkle.” It gave me a boost.

Thank you Madeleine L’Engle.

2012.02.05 Keeping Madeleine's Commandment

Commandments don’t end I’ve discovered. They are such powerful words of wisdom that you are compelled to stay aware of them in order to pay attention as their nuances unfold.

When Madeleine L’Engle told me not to become a little man after I got ordained priest I only half knew what she meant. As I grow, read, age, and wrinkle, I discover that the surface attentions like earrings at the altar or red shoes in church while celebrating Mass, even at Pentecost for the HS, are the easy parts.

I remember my feelings of shame when the parish where I was Priest Associate for several years in the ‘90s prayed every Sunday for “our priests, Father Erik and Lyn.” Road rage is about being edged out or held back, whether it is rational or not. I launched immediately into prayer rage.

When you start to mess with major symbols like language you run into more that resistance. You get laughed at as happened to me at a clergy day two years ago when the Chairwoman of the Episcopal House of Deputies dismissed my questioned concern about exclusive language as “hardly the point.”

Let’s get on with important ministry, saving the world, feeding the hungry, etc, etc. Inclusive language is a surface and trivial issue. I agree only that it is not a new issue, however it is a deeply unresolved issue. I admit I’m still beating that drum because it's not dead yet.Language after all is our most powerful symbol, no? And we use words as much as actions to speak of our religious faith.

What is more to the point than the deification of masculinity through pronouns? Don’t
misunderstand me I love men, even married a couple and have beloved sons, stepsons and grandsons, but that is not the point. The point is how we speak of God.

Forgive me if I get preachy and commandment-tempted myself: As long as we worship an exclusively male God, a deity dressed in patriarchal garb, we will be a Church afraid to love.

BTW Jesus was a great man. Christ resurrected however, is gender-free— and the more divine for it.

2011.10.30 Keeping Madeleine's Commandment...Continued

The next hurdle I faced in my obedience efforts not to become a little man after I got ordained was what I call the earring crisis.

I started out eager, panicky, and utterly cloying in the first parish I served after I was ordained a deacon transitioning to priesthood. I was all prepped to serve God and the rector obediently—also Madeleine’s commandment.

It didn’t start off well. The rector had NOT told the parish I was coming on board. Or rather he told them by addressing the congregation and asking them if they knew what an ordained deacon was and what role a deacon played in the ministry of the Church. Everyone looked blank.

So he introduced me by name, invited me to stand, and held me up like a poster child for the diaconate. Then he started a round of welcoming applause. The congregation joined in, because how could they not?

I stood there in my shiny new white alb, my face as red as my new Christmas-tree-bulb red deacon stole draped over my left shoulder and down over my left hip (just the opposite of Miss America’s sash!) And me with no ramp to parade!

I don’t know if his passive aggressive way of communicating was about being a man or not but I decided he modeled a way NOT to communicate.

At the coffee hour a statuesque woman came up to me, put her hand on my arm and asked “Did you know we didn’t know you were coming?” I told her no I didn’t know, and she patted my arm in a deliciously matronizing way, smiled and said, “It’s OK we’re all here.” I felt tears puddling up but didn’t let them escape. She became my deacon, my woman minister, and my “mommy” in that parish from then on, a model of how to be gracious and also direct—a woman perhaps.

The next week an epiphany happened. In the parish’s cobwebbed suggestion box there appeared for the first time since forever a handwritten suggestion: THE PRIEST SHALL NOT WEAR DANGLY EARRINGS.

I gave it to the male rector. “This is for you,” I said. We laughed. I was too scared and servant-ish to be more confrontive and direct with him about his wiles, as was my goal. That would take time. After all I was a woman!

I wore dangling earring most Sundays at the altar—a little flaunting and a little pride in proclaiming my femininity.

Or you could say it was a way to keep Madeleine’s commandment.

2011.10.02 Madeleine's Commandment

In the late 70s and early 80’s when I was struggling to get ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, which was not yet ready for breasts and ample bellies in their pulpits and at their altars, I was fortunate enough to have as my spiritual director the author and theologian Madeleine L’Engle.

Madeleine, now dead and missed, was a commanding presence in voice and height and sheer bulk of wisdom. She towered over me in all ways. I was bordering on meek then, having been rejected a couple of times for ordination and being sure there was something wrong, if not toxic, about me and my gender.

Madeleine was reassuring and kind. She bolstered my soul and gave me hope. But she was no softy. She gave me regular opinionated lectures on things like divorce, a church “sin” I was contemplating. Never, she told me, unless for unremitting homicidal behavior or unremitting suicidal behavior. Well, that left me a broad interpretive swatch.

I remember feeling awed in her presence—also buoyed, but not spoiled.

One day, probably sick of my laments, she said, “Now my dear, when you get ordained, and you will, do NOT become a little man.”

I got it and I didn’t, become a little man that is. I laughed and forgot about it until I got ordained. To follow Madeleine’s commandment has not been easy though I’ve been ordained now for almost 25 years.

The first decision I made not to become a little man was to decide not to be called Mother Lyn. I had enough kids already. Many men still call themselves and/or invite or let people call them Father.

To be called Mother I thought would be like becoming a little man following the tradition of paternalism in the Church making congregants, whether consciously or not, think of themselves and even behave like children, dependent and beholden to Father or Mother knows best. (Petri dish for passive aggressive adolescent subertfuge, if nothing else. )

I told people to call me Lyn. Even “Pastor” suggested a shepherd and her flock of bleating stupid sheep. Not a good model. Besides, images of shepherdesses frolicking on the green or Little Bo Peep just weren’t my style. (God/Jesus as shepherd isn’t an image that much appeals to me either. Baaa)


When parents wanted their children to use a title I’d discuss my perspective of mutuality (my needs are as important as your needs even if I have more authority). If they insisted I conceded to Rev. Lyn. But the kids who wanted to do what everyone else did and who liked the respect usually won the day.

Stay tuned for more on how I tried not to become a little man, in remembrance and loving thanks to a grand mentor, Madeleine L’Engle.

2011.02.02 A Costly Wound to Clean Up

Today, according to the Church’s liturgical calendar, we remember the Feast of the Presentation today.

Briefly it’s when Jesus goes public. His parents bring him to the Temple to be presented, declared holy to the Lord God, and get circumcised into the covenant—the first of many wounds to his innocent flesh.

I think of this day as the feast of vulnerability, a time to be aware of the limitations of our common humanity.

When I was being rejected, unjustly I thought, in the Episcopal church for ordination many years back a wise woman told me something I never forgot. The now late Madeleine L’Engle, author and faithful Christian who died a few years ago, said to me. “When you get ordained, and you will, do not become a little man!”

Do it differently, I took that to mean.

It does not escape my, yes feminist non-nazi type, notice that it is women who will pay the price now for becoming part of the patriarchal ways of cheating the system as if it doesn't matter much because of the value of "good" patronage for "sound" political gains!!  

Two immediate examples: Dianne Wilkerson and Patrice Tierney. Of course I am generalizing to make a point and severity of misconduct varies, but when the men decide at last that we all are equal, with respect to crime and punishment, under the law, it may be the women who end up in jail. 

Of course it is possible that the public will conclude that it was because Patrice Tierney was a woman that her tax fraud crime happened, too soft, helping her brother, her family, etc, etc. But I think it's a good chance for Congressman John Tierney as a good man and husband to do a role switch: to stand behind his woman while she is handcuffed and led off for her body search and prison garb.

That noted, it is still time to clean house. I'm proud of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick for doing so in the Parole Board.  Public safety and public health are transcendent goals.

Personally I am sad that people think it’s okay to cheat, to be immoral. It hurts all of us.

But if the good God spirit has a say in this, these women and others who pay the consequences of a long corrupt system may serve also as noble and humble examples in a system where true justice, not classist/racist/sexist manipulations, will prevail.

Overbrimming Cup:Yale Divinity School, October 2010

This decade is my reunion decade. I’m not a reunion person, preferring I guess to leave the sanctity of the original experience in sanctity, but now I’m gathering together the many fragments of my life for my memoir—and reunions re-member.

I did my high school 50th in 2006. Turned out I liked the same people I’d liked 50 years earlier. And I got to spend a whole day of uninterrupted conversation with my oldest, dearest, most intimate friend Annie before she died the next year leaving me wanting more.

Did college 50th in May, 2010. Missed some friends and re-loved others. I was still enchanted with the things that had brought me there in the first place: the beauty of the campus, the continuity of the institutional commitment to women’ education, and the alluring mystique of women together— learning without fear. I felt proud of my women’s college.

My seminary reunion at Yale Divinity School (YDS) October, 2010, was my 28th, not even an official reunion year. It was also my first reunion there. But it turned out to be the most exhilarating of all my reunions—and the most exhausting.

I wrote to a friend earlier today: “Just got back myself from 3 days of reunion at my div. school. My cup runs over.  Exhilarating and exhausting.  Is there such a thing as TMS (too much stimulation)?  Not if it's real Spirit juice I’d say.  It just keeps going on giving life. The 80-90 year olds were the most inspirational.  “Celebrating 8 decades of women at Yale Divinity School” was the reunion’s focus. All my memories fell into the deep bowl of history where they felt nurtured not swamped. One at a time we women have done it starting from the first four woman enrolled in 1932 with 204 men (YDS founded in 1871) to 2010 when the school is 50/50 male/female. I am grateful for my big fat broad ecumenical education—different from the strictures of a denominational seminary whose graces are the bestowal of ecclesial identity plus. And........ we got a baseball cap marked with Yale Divinity School. Also one more carry bag for my collection. Faith and excellent worship, preaching, intellectual papers on the latest theological developments, and the arts. Did miss Eucharist but they do that in their regular chapel worship. I saw the rota. I’m flying.”

My friend wrote back that she had wished she’d gone to my reunion instead of hers where the men were all old and bald and the women frumpy and full of shit.

The pioneer women were brave and they can still laugh about it. Margaret Farley, RSM, first full time woman on the faculty and first tenured professor in Ethics, gave the key note address. She reminded us that there had been amazing advances and still women do not have a lasting home in ministry. Perhaps the journey is the home, she suggested, as women keep forging new roads to full inclusion that will help other women find homes when they come knocking.

Many women it’s true have laid down their lives for the love of the right and to make sure other women benefit. A Jesus-y thing to do. It’s a great and lengthy love story that goes on. Every great love, Margaret reminded us, is tried by love and not destroyed. The point of the cross of Christ is that relationship can hold— no matter what.

It’s amazing how the truth of something you have known and know can again illumine and stun.

My own memory of Margaret Farley from an ethics class back in the ‘70s is small but I never forgot it. She was talking about faith and saying not to assume or presume. “After all,” she’d said, “Peter thought he had faith and found out he didn’t. And Judas thought he didn’t have faith and found out he did.” (I was flipping back and forth being Judas and Peter.)

Bits of humor, wisdom, and challenge to remember our love story at YDS and take it forward.

In the 1950s women had one bathroom across campus. They called it “The Women’s Room” after Marilyn French’s book title. It was YDS’s first unofficial women’s center.

The Dean in 1950 lamented to the 10 new women students what a serious thing it was that they (all 10 of them) were here, because they kept out all those men. Your pictures were the deciders the dean told them. We picked the ten who looked as if they could stay the course. (Good thing they weren’t posture pictures or centerfolds!)

Fueled by the fervor of the ‘60s, women flooded into the seminaries. Recruiting wasn’t allowed. Joan Forsberg, 1953 graduate was then dean of students and affectionately remembered by many as a steadfast encourager, really savior, of women’s vocations, said “I’m not recruiting. The Holy Spirit is just blowing them in the doors.” (By the time I blew in (1978) there were 185 women to 418 men.)

Believe in your gifts with humility but without apology!

Education in some denominations is suspect. One woman told us she wanted the “halo effect” of a Yale education and now makes it her ministry to use her privilege to help women see that education has value and doesn’t threaten spirituality or charismatic holiness. (Being at YDS opened my mind, also opened my heart and soul to the Holy.)

A 2007 graduate, with her generation’s charming uptilt of voice, told how they brought the Vagina Monologues to YDS, only getting backlash because they performed it in the chapel. (I did a monologue script with my collar on and brought 2 astounded young women to our parish. Who knew vaginas could do evangelism.)

To balance the personal and the professional remains a challenge for most women, and many men now too. (The surety that I couldn’t balance these two was a chief reason for my being turned down in the ordination process in the Episcopal church. “Dual vocation” they’d called it. Now I lobby the church to recognize bivocational ministry ie. serve as a priest in a parish and in another setting too. So far bishops don’t favor this but as always economics and failing parish endowments will drive the part-time agenda home to roost.)

“I came to YDS a devout Roman Catholic and left a pagan,” one woman said. The late Professor Letty Russell a much revered feminist, author and advocate for GLBT inclusion told her, “You don’t have to be in the church to do ministry.” (Letty once told me that inclusive language was more about God than it was about humanity.)

Wives who had helped their husbands get through school were honored, remembered, and applauded.

Beloved mentor the late William Sloane Coffin, some time chaplain at Yale, told women, "Faith is reckless. First you leap, then you grow wings.” (I did that.)

Nancy Jo Kemper, ’67, recipient of the William Sloane Coffin award for peace and justice, is famous for her response to the KY.law that allowed guns (loaded I presume) to be brought into churches, “Jesus would puke!”

The presence of female students in the early days didn’t stop professors from addressing their classes, “Gentlemen.”

Don’t listen to the noise of dismissal and silencing or shut down difficult conversations or confrontations in the name of reconciliation!

Encourage a different perception of religion. Go beyond, like Jesus did.

The Alumni Award for Distinction in Congregational Ministry went to Lillian Daniels, ’93, who was told by her committee she had “no discernible gifts for parish ministry.” (A certain trinitarian committee of Three overthrew that judgment as the same Three overthrew the dual vocation judgment on my behalf.)

“You can’t help others be comfortable with you being powerful!” (It took me years to get that and still I can demure and recede from my authority.)

In a NYC city Methodist church a parishioner said to the woman pastor when the congregation had hired another pastor, “Pastor, we’re getting a woman!” (Reminds me of the parishioner who said as I was standing there, “I better ask the priest”—the priest being male.)

One women chose interim ministry to expose congregations to women leaders so they might call a woman pastor. Desensitization works.

A woman got an A in Old Testament, scandalizing the school. The professor surprised himself. “I don’t usually give my A’s to women. What will they do with them?”

A humble award recipient Nai-Wang Kwok ’66 thanked YDS for its report card with the A-, saying he’d done some things right and there was more to go.

A 70s wife remembered the “irregular” ordinations of women in 1974 and ‘75 and called them “astonishing” and a new vision. “The Altar Guild was the ultimate and you had to be invited to be on it by a male clergy,” she remembered.

What made this reunion so special for me was of course the history and the remembrances and seeing how far women had come. Yet one can celebrate awards and hear great memories at lots of reunion gatherings. At seminary reunions, however, all energy, study, and song is devoted to Divinity. Worship punctuates the round of events, and it’s not just token worship. There is praise for the assembly, yes, but the praise that shines most brightly shines on God. Halleluia. (In Hebrew that means shine your praises on God.)

I am grateful to have gone to a school that is not denominational. Diversity is what makes growth and creativity. Too much homogeneity can stunt growth, suck the soul right out of faith.

In 1971 The Berkeley Divinity School (BDS) an Episcopal seminary merged with Yale Divinity School. When I was a student there BDS had a building a dean and offered some prayer book services. It was a non-demanding presence for Episcopalians who felt like orphans and/or needed support from the "mother" church.

Now there seems to be an effort to make the BDS presence more visible, give it its own curriculum, require more worship attendance of Episcopal students.

At one of the worship services I noticed a little “army” of Episcopal women clergy, sitting together, all collared up looking quite stiff. They all crossed themselves at the same time. It looked odd, even ominous to me. It smelled of regression, a kind of elitism. They stood out like sore thumbs, and their presence didn’t look like a proud act of witness or resistance. They were there for the BDS graduate society luncheon that followed.

I thought of the bright white clerical collar I once lusted after, the collar that signified belonging, authority, vocation, inclusion. At first I wore it a lot; then it got stiff; now it has a ring around it. How do you join with the people, advocate for the ministry of all the baptized when you stick out like a sore thumb?

I remembered my spiritual director Madeleine L’Engle in the 80s said to me, “Now, my dear, when you get ordained do not turn into a little man.” When she said that she meant be a woman priest in my own style, not imitate the current model, march to my own, and on good days, the beat of Sophia’s drum.

Luke Timothy Johnson, New Testament professor when I was a student, consoled me as I lamented having been turned down for ordination. “Lyn,” he’d said jerking his thumb toward the office down the hall and lowering his voice, “look at the model.” The “model” was an Episcopal priest, a dear professor who lived with his dog and his pipe, a man who we all swore slept in his mile high collar.

Dr. Marcia Riggs ’53 had just preached on the gospel story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15. This unnamed woman had confronted Jesus, called him up short when he displayed exclusive attitudes about the dispensation of healing miracles. A woman who took risks, a woman not of the Jewish heritage, a woman who told Jesus off, who refused to allow him to limit the mission of God’s gospel. A woman model for us today.

I went to the BDS luncheon and felt as if I didn’t belong, being one of the few clergy out of uniform. The collar that had meant I belonged now by its absence meant, or felt as if it meant, I didn’t belong. What counts for belonging?

I wondered about separatism and thought it painful. I am proud of my tradition and its breadth of spirituality. I would hate to see it make of itself an end in itself. I would love to see BDS grieve its former identity, accept the new creation the merger had effected, give its money to YDS, and encourage Episcopal students to celebrate the rich diversity that will grow their souls and yes enrich the beauties of their own tradition as well.
* * * *
I had gone to YDS in the ‘70s because I could commute. At the time I had wondered if an Episcopal school would have been more formational in the tradition I’d chosen and loved. Would I be Anglicanized enough? Would I fit in? I struggled many years to get ordained a woman Episcopal priest. I still rejoice in my vocation and love my tradition and church.

AND.............

I would choose again to go to YDS and would recommend it to anyone wanting a theological education, whether they aspired to ordination or not. I would recommend it for its academic excellence but also for the experience of belonging it offers today in a church that is softening denominational boundaries and being de-institutionalized for its own good—and for the sake of its own spiritual belonging in the evolution of God’s mission of peace, justice and love for all.