In the testaments of the Holy Bible, in my seminary studies, in my ministries as a priest/pastoral counselor, chaplain, and spiritual director, my “racism” came into glaring focus. So did my wondering about large categories like race and gender. Is there no category called race or gender that is not now called racISM or sexISM? I mean it is the addition of ISM that suggests that the concept before the ISM wields exclusive, or too much, power—psychologically, spiritually and institutionally.
Over time I’ve grown to understand my own “racism” as intersectional—layered with many other -isms, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, feminism, socialism, fundamentalism, materialism, intellectualism, consumerism. Such complexity describes my lived experience of my “racism”, making it bearable, forgivable, and, dare I say, manageable.
Carol Lee, my best preteen friend and the black girl I betrayed because I was racist, no longer haunts my soul or pricks my conscience, thanks to Bible stories, the presence of God within me, and the little bird in PD Eastman’s book, “Are You My Mother?” who at last realizes that all his questions, all his earnest questing for his lost mother, all his heroically strenuous efforts have come to naught. He kneels on his tiny exhausted wee bird legs and becomes a prayer.
I am my prayer to you, says the psalmist in Psalm 109 (Greenberg translation).
How does one become one’s own prayer? It is not by working obsessively, seeking answers to your prayer, although such efforts are good for your mental muscles and may even be helpful to other people. It is rather to slow down enough to uncross your eyes so as to see beyond your own desire, to slide off the throne of your ruling desire, your immediate worry, to release your held breath, to open your clenched fists, to let your willing tears flow freely, thereby giving God’s Spirit some stretching space in your soul.
Scene LXI. Prayer Rose
I discovered this on many many silent retreats in which prayer was the only bloody thing I did. Well, I cheated, but not much. I became a living, walking, breathing prayer. At night in the chapel at Mercy Center in Madison, Connecticut, I knelt alone and gazed at the elongated oil portrait, painted by artist Mary Daly, RSM, of a rose—long stem, thorns, bursting petals against a faintly visible green cross—hanging behind the tabernacle. This to me became the sacred heart of Christ, not bloodied or dead, but beckoning.
I wanted to walk into this rose. The tabernacle below, containing the sacrament consecrated as Christ’s body and blood, was locked. Locked. I stared. I became a prayer. I climbed the “stalk” of that rose, feeling pricked and torn by thorns, finally to enter the sacred rose-heart of Christ—bruised but breathing. The next day when there was light I drew my own rose and wrote: "I am a rose/You are too/We two rose."
To make such a climb—powerless, longing, praying—was what it was like to feel called to priesthood in my own religious tradition while trapped in one of those -isms, the sex one, and to be locked out, as I, because of the White-only rules at our beach club, had locked Carol Lee out for her -ism, the race one. Locked out.
Scene LXII. Breaking Up the Old Boys’ Club. Women Breach Male Collegiality in the Episcopal Church
In 1974, and again in 1975, groups of Episcopal women deacons organized, inspired by their calling to priesthood. They got political. Some willing bishops broke ranks to ordain these women outside of Church canonical regulations. Prayer, communicating with one another, and their shared desires led them to disobedience—and success.
These women, on whose shoulders I stood as I pursued my own call to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, acted together to break a small but not insignificant sound barrier in patriarchal Episcopal Church politics. It would take a long time for the Church to swallow the whole law whole, to unlock its heart, to disrupt the “order” of things, and admit women as priests—and eventually as bishops. Here are some of the original 1974 group, the Philadelphia Eleven, lifting up the consecrated body of Christ-in-bread.
Scene LXIII. The Syrophoenician (Canaanite) Woman
This small ancient story (Mark 7, Matthew 15) is one of my favorite ones in all scripture. Biblical women to me are not without flesh. Their stories count and help shape my soul. The woman in this small story counted as much to me as the actual women who paved the way to ordination for us all. It took me eleven years of knocking on doors and prayer-begging to be ordained priest. It would have been easier if I were a man, easier if I’d not been divorced and single, therefore dangerous, you know what I mean, harder perhaps if I’d been Black, or burdened by any other -isms, and easier if I had not overexercised and flaunted my natural chutzpah.
I identified with this Syrophoenician woman, because she too was an outsider, a noisy threat, a Greek, a Gentile, banging on doors, annoying the Rabbi who was on a mission to secure the promised land for his people, the Jews. She was an interruption and a disruption of ordered canonical processes, like all of us women seeking priesthood were. She was even viewed by Jesus himself as unacceptable by standards we could call NationalISM. He said: “I came for my people Israel!” Locked out she was. He turned her away three times. She kept on asking for healing for her daughter. Jesus I suppose felt a bit bullied yet heard in her cry, her prayer, the reminder of the depth and breadth and inclusivity of God’s own healing mission—not for Jews alone.
I, like her, and like the other women seeking ordination who were trying to overcome ancient biases, never gave up. Never.
