2022.03.06 Ashes, Ashes of Truth, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 3.6.22

Ashes announce the first day of the season of Lent. Ash Wednesday is a holy day for Christians, beginning the time when Jesus was driven into the wilderness to, well, consult his soul and his God about his own choices. On this day priests, or laity if no priest is available, smear ashes onto each upturned forehead to remind us that we are mortal and beloved as such. The imposition of ashes is the ritual that  springs us into Lent, a season that has nothing to do with things borrowed or lent! It does have to do with one’s own willingness and ability to, let’s say, think things over—not as a life review, but as a way to spend more time in quiet and to ask yourself: Is there anything or anyone in my life that gently tugs at me, visiting my quiet contemplative time with worry, or wonder, or regret, or simple uncertainty—or any ongoing temptation to sin, understood as anything that separates us from the goodness in ourselves, God, or our neighbor.  

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For the last two years I have had regular, often daily, conversations with an old friend and Episcopal priest, the Rev. Lee McGee-Street. Lee was my, and many other women’s mentor, in and through the ardors of the ordination process in the Episcopal Church in the late 1970s and 80s. Although we women were finally voted “ordainable” as priests in 1976, it took years for the “law” to settle into the minds and hearts of a people formed in patriarchal language and hierarchical politics. The process felt like wiggling a fat’n happy overweight man into a corset meant for a petite ballerina. 

Lee McGee, then an Episcopal deacon from Washington D.C., had been one of those courageous women (eleven in Philadelphia in 1974, and four in D.C. in 1975) who bucked the traditional system to get ordained priest, with the "Washington Four" before the official vote was taken. These ordinations were labelled “irregular”. They were not illegal, because a bishop carried out the sacramental rite. Still, these women had to endure another ceremonial liturgy to get “regularized” so that they could function as priests with sacramental authority: to bless, consecrate and absolve. 

The ordaining male bishops suffered no consequences of course. (Amazing what you can do after you retire, your pension is secure—and you’re a man.) Nevertheless, every institution has it rules and regulations to create a sense of order. The Church is no different. 

Lee, herself, had first been against the idea of pushing the Church into taking action on gender justice, but she soon changed her mind. She had a rich career as a chaplain, counselor, parish priest, and professor of pastoral studies at Yale Divinity School. She was very present to me and other women as we floundered into and through the journey to priesthood in Connecticut, encouraging us to persist, informing us about the dynamics of the double standard, and later helping us to understand how hard it was for male clergy, who had controlled the sacramental life of the Church for centuries, to lose that primacy and to suffer a “breach of collegiality”—aka old boys’ club. One meant loss of power, the other loss of intimacy. The Church today is not the only institution still learning to live with the idea of shared power. 

Dick and I had left Connecticut for Massachusetts in 1997, and in 2020 returned, just as the COVID pandemic was taking hold, to live in a retirement community in Simsbury. Lee and I resumed our connection and had daily telephone conversations, rich with humor and debates about church politics, and feminism. We were moving from our mentor/mentee relationship to good old friendship.  

In these last two weeks, I continued to call and leave messages, yet received no callbacks. This was not usual. I knew that, Lee as she aged, became housebound with painful arthritis, had regular caregivers, experienced some depression, was grieving the death of two husbands, and lived with a form of macular degeneration that had left her legally blind since her late twenties. I also knew that she was one of the more resilient women I’d ever known. She never talked—except I imagine to her therapist of years, her several beloved guide dogs, and perhaps God—about her disabilities. It was never easy to, well, be empathic or feel Lee’s own pain with her. She was always “fine,” and she always turned the conversation away from herself to me. Each time we talked, I pressed her a bit about how she was—really. She consistently assured me, “I’m all right.” I wondered. I doubted her “all-rightness” and felt helpless.

On Tuesday, March 1, I saw a message on an online site for Episcopal clergywomen that Lee, at 78,  had died on February 20, 2022. My heart crimped with grief, and also some anger. Why could she not have told me she was in that much decline?  I was slow to remember that this was how Lee had managed her difficult life all along. She helped others, period. My grief would have some ambivalence; no grief is ever pure. Nevertheless, Lee and I had been, and would always be, connected enough through God, our seminary, and our passion for the causes of women in the Episcopal Church, to make my grief whole and holy. 

Thank you, Lee McGee, and bless you always. 

So what has this remembrance  to do with Ashes and Lent? 

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I suppose I will never get over the allure of ashes, black smudges on the forehead in the shape of a cross. It is a powerful ritual to acknowledge the beginning of Lent, yes, and also to remember how small, silly, and yet how beloved we all are in God’s eye.

When I worked in the 1980’s as a chaplain at Hartford Hospital, a big bustling city hospital, and later at an addictions treatment hospital, I used to bring a small vial of blessed ashes to work on Ash Wednesday. I was astounded at how many people, staff and patients, wanted me to smear their forehead with ashes. They chased me down. When each one stood before me, some much taller than I, I tiptoed or they bent. I said to each: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Oh, how I wanted to add a little phrase of reassurance, something silly like, like don’t worry, God always loves you and will resurrect your soul forever. Oh, how fearful so many of us are of dying and being gone—just gone. 

On Ash Wednesday I felt, and feel, like a small child again, hoping someone will just pick me up and hug me forever close. All I can do is grieve for my friend, Lee, and ask another friend to smear my own forehead with black ashes and remind me. 

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. 

There is something astonishingly unifying about this visible ritual—an outward gesture of our common humanity, the tattoo that marks our common nature. Without exception.    

2018.11.11 Risky Grace: An Amazing Story of True-Grit Grace, Part II

The W.A.S.P. pedigree in the 1950s had served as almost a degree, or decree, of admittance into elite white Protestant society. It also became a required credential by which debutantes and their proposed escorts would be, in Scarsdale and many other cities and towns, screened for The Holly Ball for debutantes, inaugurated in 1953, the year George Kempsell was installed as rector of St. James the Less.

As I write this I remember with a shiver how my mother practically forced me to be a debutante. It was the worst kind of social snobbism imaginable. I was deeply embarrassed at eighteen and remain so. Nevertheless I was announced and escorted on my father’s arm—coming out into what? Society, but whose society? 

George Kempsell had ignited a simmering cauldron of wealth, white privilege, fear, and the age old habit of taking righteous shelter in privatism: the autonomy of a private club to make its own rules. Kempsell’s appeal to a higher authority held little sway against the  dominant social class ideology. Although some supported his position, a position about which he and the parish, ironically, received much public attention, even nationally, forces combined to create a “perfect storm” anyway: Kempsell had the power and the duty to excommunicate those who did not repent in response to his charge of bigotry, and they had the power to withdraw their money and leave the parish. The impasse was unresolvable, and the damage was done. The stigma of bigotry and prejudice associated with Scarsdale left scars, perhaps not entirely deserved, and Kempsell was forced out. The stormy scandal only stayed hot for a time, but it made its mark. Some few in the club today still harbor bitterness about the Kempsell scandal.

Kempsell went from giving celebrity-like speeches, sent by the Episcopal Diocese, to receiving death threats, being removed from his home by the FBI, and being silenced. He bought a guard dog. He was a broken man, though not defeated. He tendered his resignation in January, 1963, the month and year my oldest daughter was born and I received a Masters degree, both of which, slaked my thirst for pursuing a church career path of my own—for now.

The Scarsdale parish raised money to facilitate the Kempsell family’s move to Dallas, Texas, to a parish that proved inhospitable to his progressive ideas for different reasons. Finally, Kempsell went to a small rural church in Arvada, Colorado, where he stayed true to his prophetic ideals, provided pastoral care, and was beloved by many. I found no repentance stats for the accused. Here is the only small photo I found of Kempsell—baptizing an infant, I think in the Scarsdale parish.

Would I have repented? Probably not. I was a grudging grouchy debutante, yes, but I was surely glad no fiery preacher had blasted my parents’ country club and held my feet to the fire.  Risky grace would require too much of me—right now.

Dick Simeone also did not think women’s ordination as priests was right. Many male Episcopal priests feared the loss of their clerical collegiality and authority, or more precisely, the sharing of such a long-held patriarchal privilege. He valued his patriarchal status, even though he felt some discomfort. Things happen when one faces formative influences that don’t sync with one’s true character.  

Dick first met me when he interviewed for the position of rector at my home parish.  I was on the parish search committee, and was also a female aspirant to the priesthood. I asked him directly about his position on the matter. He gave a long, complicated, homiletic answer, amply justifying the theological and ecclesial rationale for women priests, then grinned: “I’m in favor of women priests.”  Good thing. I, by now more ready for risky grace, would have fiercely protested his election as our rector.  

Kempsell, possibly under the influence of Ruth, his beloved wife of over thirty years, had also admitted: “I was wrong about women's ordination.” Although thin and frail, he traveled to New York and stood for his niece at her ordination.

Kempsell died on August 31, 1980, on the thirteenth birthday of my oldest son, just one year and five months after the death of my youngest sister, two and a half weeks after my own forty-second birthday, in the midst of the painful time of separation before inevitable divorce, and eight months after Dick assumed the rectorship of my home parish. I’d clung feverishly to my desire to be a priest, even after I’d been turned down twice. Would I risk it again? When Dick came he brought his powerful confidence in me with him and told me Kempsell’s story. I knew, without knowing, that I would risk trying it again. If Kempsell could risk fighting for his vision in Scarsdale, I could risk fighting for mine in Connecticut.

Kempsell’s memorial service at the Episcopal Cathedral in Denver was packed, so full that people were standing in the aisles—testimony to this small dynamic man’s courage, his insistence that everyone be treated equally, regardless of race, creed, color, or gender. 

I was ordained priest in 1988 at the parish church where Dick was rector, my husband of two years, and the preacher for the day. The small church was full and adorned with roses—scents of a woman. The ordaining bishop had a serious head cold. Both roses and sneezes were fitting tributes to lots of determination and challenge on my part and the somewhat grudging willingness of an institution to comply. I pronounced the final blessing in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—imbalanced gendered language, but for that day, okay.
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The Kempsell story happened in the 1960s when civil rights was heating up and racial fears steaming. Lurking beneath racism in America, even then, was classism, waiting in the wings to assert its dominance. Now, over fifty years after Scarsdale and the Civil Rights movement, classism is virulent enough to make sure that the elimination of other -isms, such as racism and sexism, remains unattainable. The election and ascendancy of our current president is not the cause but rather the result of this lingering prejudice—a move away from the values of our democracy, not to mention the values of Jesus the Christ or George Kempsell.

We, in Church and State, need more George Kempsells—people with courage or grit enough to stand up to excesses of populism, aka mob power, traditionalism, another -ism grown rigid, and recalcitrant defining classism.

Kempsell stood for equality. He was fond of saying, “There’s no such thing as a second-class Christian.”  True, and thank you, George Kempsell.

(Much of the detail for this post I got from a blog post by Thomas Quirk who grew up in Scarsdale from 1953-1961 and is now a high school teacher in Lexington, Massachusetts. I am grateful for his research and his caring.)

2014.08.03 What Is A "First?"

I was the first child my parents ever had. Actually that’s not quite true. There were three before me who never made it. I set no precedents, yet I felt first-ish, and so, I'm sure, did my parents. As a "first" I was a cause célèbre and a bête noir.

“There is nothing new under the sun.” So says Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes). So how can there by any true firsts under the sun—or the moon?

There can't of course, yet we earthlings need to categorize, rank, and order things, and whoever says we don’t do that is probably a liar, because we all do it. Even so, it is good to remember that, spiritually, you are never first or last or new. You are only precious.

The first group of women, in collaboration with a few good men, to defy Episcopal church canon law in 1974 and be ordained priests, were historic "firsts." They were icons to some and iconoclasts to others.

To honor these women, I offer this “first”: the Rev. Elizabeth Alfred, the first woman priest to celebrate Holy Communion on her 100th birthday, January, 10, 2014, in Melbourne, Australia.

According to Muriel Porter, reporting for the diocese of Melbourne, Alfred was the first woman ordained priest in Melbourne December 13, 1992, when Archbishop Keith Rayner ordained 12 women in a long-awaited historic ceremony. She was 78, well beyond retirement age, but Archbishop Rayner had promised this significant pioneer that age would not prevent her ordination—when it finally became possible. She waited in the wings for some time.
       1944, ordained deaconess at 30
       1944-1986, in-waiting, 30-72
       1986, ordained deacon at the first diaconal ordination of women in 1986, age 72
       1986-1992, in-waiting as deacon, age 72-78
       1992, ordained priest with twelve other women, at 78
       2014, celebrated her birthday Eucharist, at 100

Alfred's centenary birthday Eucharist was, most appropriately, back at St James’, Dandenong, where she had ministered as a deaconess, and where she did much of her waiting and dreaming of presiding on her 100th birthday. The church was packed. The preacher, former St James’ vicar the Rev'd Alan Baker, pondered whether this was another "first": has any other woman ministered in the same place as deaconess, deacon, and priest?

Family members, friends, parishioners and clergy colleagues, some of whom had traveled considerable distances, burst into sustained spontaneous applause as Alfred entered the church, vested in a chasuble. Frail after some weeks of illness that she had feared might abort her long-held dream of presiding on her 100th birthday, she needed the assistance of a wheeled walker to get to the altar. Parish clergy helped and stood by.

But when this centenarian "first" spoke – to absolve, consecrate and bless – her voice was clear and strong. There was no doubt who was presiding at this special Eucharist.

At the end of the service, after numbers of people had offered greetings, congratulations, and gifts,  Alfred spoke briefly. During her recent illness, she said, she had been upheld by the prayers of all her friends, and “the knowledge that Jesus was always beside me”.  And, she added, “at least I didn’t have to come today in a wheelchair!” (But you know she would have if necessary.)

There are no firsts in God's eyes; all souls are equal. But I bet if there are angels, they applauded and trumpeted alleluias anyway. They know we earthlings need to remember "firsts" so we can keep going—on earth as it is in heaven.