What does it matter when someone at a geographic distance, that you haven’t seen in 30 years and only glimpsed at a reunion, and with whom you have no personal connection but whose work you admire and whose ministry touched you once for a very short time, gets hurt unjustly?
Margaret Farley, RSM (Sister of Mercy, an order in which I am an Associate member) was one of my favorite professors when I was in seminary at Yale Divinity School in the early 80s. She taught Ethics. The church required aspiring clergy to take Ethics. I thought I was ethical. What did I know?
I remember Margaret’s generous spirit, her scholarship, considerable and accessible, and her wry grin. She is a faithful woman who has been subjected to three years of intensive interrogation from her church hierarchy and has had to defend her perspectives and scholarship over and over, only to be told her work is condemned because it runs counter to official Roman Catholic moral teaching.
Margaret’s view of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was always broad and deep. Now she is being persecuted, not by her Order but by the Vatican whose Gospel values to me seem shallow and narrow, an institution quite closed in on itself by fear, and rife with its own corruptions. Implosive I’d say.
Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, a book Margaret has worked on over years and a compendium of much of her thinking on the radical topic of LOVE has made it to the condemned list of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith (CDF) because it contradicts Catholic moral teachings on matters of, what else, sex—the usual culprits, divorce and remarriage, homosexual sex, and, my favorite, masturbation, an activity the magisterium finds “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” Margaret suggest such an activity may improve marital relations, may enhance and equilibrate differences.
So how do you screen for masturbatory activity? Who would know but God? What precisely makes it unethical? (I remember my first time. I experienced bodily power I never knew I had; it helped me love the body someone else had abused and I had shamed and it helped my marriage.)
JUST LOVE is a wily and provocative title. It can mean just love as if love alone made the world go round and was all you needed; or it can mean that all love must be just. Knowing Margaret, even without reading this book, I’d vote for the latter interpretation. I’d bet that couples, friends, peers and colleagues, or most people who say they love someone or a group, a pet, nature’s beauties, or a cherished idea, don’t think of justice as an ethical boundary that must surround their affections.
We think of justice more as a social category than a personal intimate one, but justice is the framework that supports love, both erotic and platonic, and allows it to grow.
The official Notification that Just Love may not be used in any Catholic institutions even for ecumenical discussion is deliciously ironic. Farley is a professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School, not a Catholic institution, and even more the recent censure has sent this book’s sales soaring.
Academic Catholic colleagues are weighing in with vigor in defense of Margaret's scholarly rights and in admiration of her person. I wish some Anglo-Catholic bishops would speak out. I suppose they are worried about damaging ecumenical relations, but this is about solidarity not politics.
Mercy’s leadership supports their sister and is helping her through this process while they are simultaneously defending themselves after vatican crackdowns for doctrinal offenses and serious feminist leanings ( more on sex and women) that threaten the same hierarchy, itself profoundly disordered by its own sexual scandals and coverups. Its a mess. And why is everything conflictual always about money or sex?
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister minces no words. “Where has all this energy for empirical destruction come from in a church now projecting its own serious problems with sexual issues onto everything that moves?”
You can read all about it online, with the help of Google/God of course. Start with the Sisters of Mercy website, Margaret Farley, Yale Divinity School, even Huffington Post, and click along the links.
Why does it matter to me? It matters because I am a woman, an Associate of Mercy, a former student of Margaret Farley, a member of the body of Christ wounded. It matters because anything that hurts one of us hurts all of us, no matter who or where we are.
Most of all it matters because it hurts God, the divine spiritual presence whose graciousness wraps us round with a love at once intimate and impotent, a love that waits upon human cooperation to create “JUST LOVE,” both political and personal. Freedom, God’s loving gift, is valueless and serves no higher purpose, without justice to give it breath.
What I remember most of all the wisdom Margaret Farley imparted is something she told us about Peter and Judas, the polarized hero/villain team of the Christian drama. She noted this paradox: Peter—the favored one, the rock of the Church, the “pope,” leader and most faithful of all— in the end discovered he had little faith, little enough to betray all of it thrice.
While Judas, the identified betrayer— condemned, cast off, placed outside the inner sacred circle of the faithful forever— discovered in the end that he had true faith, enough to die for its sake.
How timely!
Showing posts with label Margaret Farley RSM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Margaret Farley RSM. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Friday, October 15, 2010
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.
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.
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