Honoring Trailblazers in Episcopal Ministry

The reason for this fundraiser is to pay for publication costs of a third edition of my historical book, Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, about the history of the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church which first happened on the Feast of Saints Mary and Martha on July 29, 1974, through the autobiographical lens of my own calling to the priesthood.

I am one of the Philadelphia Eleven. the first women in the United States to break the stained glass ceiling against women priests in the Episcopal Church. We were already ordained as deacons and had years of experience in ministry enhanced by our lives as professors, therapists, diplomats, a lawyer who served as part of the White House council and then became a chief judge appointed by two presidents~ and one astronaut, Jeannette Piccard, who was recognized by NASA as the first woman in space when she piloted the hot air balloon which she and her Swiss scientist husband Jean Piccard had built, and then flew into the stratosphere in it in 1934. She had felt called to be a priest since she was 11 years old, and she became one at the age of 79. She lived to serve as a parish priest for seven years before her call into Paradise. Having waited the longest for fulfillment, she was first among us to be ordained to the priesthood. Jeannette and I were the bookends of the Eleven in that she was the oldest at 79 and I was the youngest at 27. For awhile we lived the furthest west, she on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and I on the west side. Then the Washington Four became priests in 1975, and one of them lived in Alaska and served a congregation there at the edge of the western world.

Right after our ordinations to the priesthood at the integrated Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, when Jeannette Piccard was asked by a reporter which historical event of her being "first" was more meaningful to her~ the 1934 flight into the stratosphere or her 1974 ordination to the priesthood~ she said, "Today, I flew higher."

Three male bishops risked abuse from their brother bishops for daring to ordain us women to the priesthood. They were indeed abused. And I was not the only one among the fifteen women (including the Washington Four who were ordained priests in Washington D.C. in 1975) and the three bishops (plus the bishop who ordained the Washington priests) who received death threats, rejection from friends and family members, and even physical attacks. Two male priests were subjected to medieval style ecclesiastical court trials for having invited three of us to celebrate the Holy Eucharist, a priestly function, in their churches.

The Roman Catholic women's movement began within a few weeks of our priestly ordinations.

I tell some of our stories in the book, Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, first published by Paulist Press in 1978, with a revised edition by a west coast publisher in 1988. The Philadelphia Ordinations were included as the most significant religious event of 1974 in the series, The Timetables of History. In 2024 an award-winning documentary film was made by Time Travel Productions in Boston, marking the 50th anniversary of the event, but it began over a hundred years earlier when the first women deacons were ordained to serve the poorest of the poor in slums, both in the United States and then in England.

In 1976, the triennial legislative body of the Episcopal Church called the General Convention created a new canon law in stating that all three Holy Orders of ordained ministry~ bishops, priests and deacons~ were open to qualified men and women. There had never been a law forbidding women priests and bishops. Their exclusion was merely a matter of custom, with no theological or any other kind of reasonable prohibition against women priests and bishops. Women had been ordained as deacons since 1855 in the United States and 1856 in England. The word "deacon" means "servant" in Greek, and the idea of women in a subsidiary role of service without authority to perform the so-called ABCs of priestly ministry was non-threatening to a patriarchal religious tradition. (The ABCs reserved for priests are to give Absolution or Blessings, and to Consecrate the bread and wine for Holy Communion). An inclusive rewording of the canon law on Holy Orders ended the discriminatory custom, though there were Episcopal clergy, laity and churches who could not or would not overcome the psychological and emotional resistance seated in their patriarchal exclusivity, which they tried to justify by weak theological arguments. This was reinforced by authoritative Roman Catholic theologians who claimed that "women could not be priests because they do not resemble Christ." Really? Did that mean that not only should all priests be men, but also Jews and residents of Israel? Or was it merely in ontological ways that all priests should resemble Christ. Who knew? Several groups split off from the Episcopal Church over modernizing changes in The Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of woman as priests and bishops as well as deacons. Several conservative groups separated from the Episcopal Church and renamed themselves. It was decades before women were recognized as priests and bishops uniformly throughout the United States and Canada, and most other countries.

In 1989 the Episcopal Church elected and consecrated its first woman bishop, the Right Reverend Barbara Clementine Harris, to be the suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts. She had been the head lay person (senior warden) at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia and was eager to facilitate the ordinations, coordinating extra security in addition to the Philadelphia Police who were there to protect everyone. Barbara also was the crucifer (that is, the cross bearer) in the liturgical procession. The church was so packed that it was standing room only, and we could not process down the church aisle as is the custom but had to enter from the transept, the crossing up front between the congregation in the nave and the choir up a few steps toward the altar. This was for safety, due to the death threats that had been called in to the church. There had been bomb threats specifically. A stink bomb was found and removed by police early in the morning. But Barbara Harris held the cross high so we could keep our eyes on it and follow her up into the choir area as we stepped into history. Then 15 years later, she followed us into history when she herself had become a deacon and priest and then was consecrated and ordained the first woman and one of the few African Americans to become bishops. The governor of Massachusetts came to her consecration, if I'm remembering correctly, or at least sent greetings. Li Tim-Oi, the first-ever woman to become an Anglican priest in 1944 during extraordinary war times was still alive and the rector and pastor of her own church in Toronto, and she came. During Bishop Harris's ordination service there was a moment of silence which erupted into robust cheers and applause, but I couldn't see why because of the white wall of tall men in white albs who standing in front of my row of chairs. I asked my sister priest Alison Cheek who stood beside me, "What happened?" She said, "Barbara Harris and Li Tim-Oi just embraced in the liturgical kiss of peace!" I climbed up onto my chair to see, like the short spectator Zacchaeus in Luke 19 who wanted to see Jesus who had come to Jericho but was hidden by the crowd, so Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree to see the special visitor. I didn't even know that Li Tim-Oi was still alive. In my mind all great historical figures lived and died in the past. I was completely amazed and wonder-struck. For me, that was the absolute high point of my life. It felt like Part Two of the Philadelphia Ordinations. Without taking my eyes off them I asked if someone nearby would loan me a pen, and I wrote about it, standing on my sycamore chair. I wrote all over the bare spaces in the program about what the Holy Spirit was doing in that service. It was a prayer poem called, "It's Pentecost Again." Barbara Harris (who until she was eight years old had been raised by her grandmother who had been a slave as a child)~ Barbara Harris embraced Li Tim-Oi (who had been imprisoned in a Maoist era concentration camp in a time when any hint of religious expression was against the law). And here they were in Boston, embracing as descendants of the embodied history of human faith and suffering in Africa and the embodied history of human faith and suffering in China. Here in the United States of America in the light of their freedom in Christ, these two women of color blessed and hugged each other.

There's more to that story too, but you can find it in the book when the third edition is done. You will also find the story of the first woman to become the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. In the United Kingdom or Canada she would be called the Archbishop of the United States, but our forebears changed British words and phrases in both church and state to show our independence from the Mother Church and the Mother Country. So we have a Congress instead of a Parliament, a president instead of a monarch, and a Presiding Bishop instead of an Archbishop. She is the Right Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori. She had been a navel officer in charge of ships' inspections when she was a professor of marine biology and oceanography at Oregon State University in Corvallis. She also flew her own small airplane around her Diocese of Nevada on her bishop's visitations to all the parishes in the diocese. And sometimes she climbed mountains with her husband who had been her mathematics professor.

Our greatest debt of gratitude goes to the many generations of women in the diaconate who felt deeply called to the priesthood but died before they could fulfill their calling, like the Roman Catholic Carmelite nun, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who yearned to be a priest but died unfulfilled. Episcopal women in the diaconate were the only women in ministry who were required to remain celibate, and to wear garb which resembled nuns' habits, though they were not nuns. They were clergywomen who were profoundly discriminated against, whom my own bishop said were the hardest working and the most faithful servants of God in the Church.

I am writing a third edition to tell the story onward, to mark the progress of women as ordained deacons, priests and bishops throughout the worldwide Anglican Communion of which the Episcopal Church is a part. Readers have said that we "pioneers" were the front guard for the thousands who followed us, but every woman who has felt the inner imperative to serve God as a priest has an adventure story to tell, one that cannot be separated from a love story for humankind and the whole of creation as she follows the call of the Holy Spirit to have courage and respond.

The most courageous of all of us was the first woman in the world to become an Anglican priest. She was a Chinese deacon name Li Tim-Oi, and in 1944 during the war waged by Japan against China, all of the Anglican male clergy were called back to England for their safety. Before Bishop Ronald Hall left, he met with Li Tim-Oi and after years of their discussing her calling to the priesthood, he ordained her to the priesthood. She was the only priest left to serve the Chinese Anglicans in Hong Kong and South China for the duration of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Dressed as a peasant she rode her bicycle between enemy lines, sometimes through gunfire, to be with the people, administer the sacraments, and help them build their own schools and clinics. What happened to her is an adventure above all others, which you can read about in the third edition of Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey.

What happened to the Philadelphia Eleven and the Washington Four who were ordained to the priesthood in 1975 is another adventure, or series of adventures with sequential cliffhangers. In the years before misogynistic bigotry abated sufficiently for the chorus of joy and celebration when our ordinations were finally accepted, we each were faithful to our calling in unique, sometimes harrowing, sometimes sublime and miraculous ways.

Throughout the book, Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, the stories unfold as spiritual journeys illuminated by the Love of God in Christ, for which our collective gratitude ceaselessly flows. We were faithful and in great company, as the people before us and with us inspired and strengthened us to keep moving in the direction of light, and of justice and peace for Mother Earth and her children. This spiritual companionship extended and still does extend far beyond members of the Episcopal Church. My father's personal physician was an eighty year old Jewish man who had wanted to meet me after reading the book, so he could thank me in person for inspiring him and his wife to reflect on their lost dreams, and to take them up again and fulfill them in joy.

In the years during which the Church did not recognize my priestly ordination I prayed to know how to define and do my job. It came to me that I was not a priest bound to a particular church but a priest for all people. I was a priest at large, blessed with a certain degree of freedom, and in that freedom I had the opportunity to explore meaningful liturgies with non-Episcopalians such as one distributed by The Forward Movement. It was a blessing ceremony for divorced people committing themselves to continue to work together as loving parents of their children. They pledged this in the presence of their families and friends who promised to support them, and I blessed the commitments they made to their children. Most of the special services I have been asked to perform were for interfaith marriages or communities. I remember a beautiful wedding in a forest in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in which the blessing included wrapping silver and red ribbons around the couple to symbolize wisdom and compassion.

I am still a priest at large, intentionally centered at Wisdom House, the interfaith spirituality center I started in 1975. Here in both sacramental and pastoral ministry I have practiced soul care~ soul mending of the spiritually and emotionally wounded, and soul tending for the maintenance of spiritual health. I am grateful for the tremendous learning experience it's given me, and the wonderful people who have been my spiritual companions along the way.

Since my cherished husband's unexpected death at the age of 37 in 1985, I have lived at the foot of Mt. Hood in Western Oregon where I was born and we were married. Here is where I've learned the power of Nature to help heal and shape our souls, to teach us, suffused as it is with Holy Wisdom and Divine Love. That's a story I tell in my book, At the Foot of the Mountain: Nature and the Art of Soul Healing (iUniverse 2000) which picks up where Womanpriest ends.

Now onward to begin writing the third edition. I will be self-publishing the book. It will be a prose book enhanced with appropriate poetry and prayers. These days, publishers of poetry and spirituality books typically have fundraisers because of the book market being overloaded with writings. If you can contribute to its realization with a financial offering, my gratitude will be boundless.

Pictures below~ Cover for the third edition of Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey which I am in the process of creating.

Second picture~ Welcoming you to the garden of Wisdom House where I live at the foot of Mt. Hood in western Oregon.

Third picture~ Time Magazine picture and article about the Philadelphia Ordinations, August 12, 1974. Bishop Daniel Corrigan who ordained me to the priesthood along with three others is standing at the altar behind me, with Bishop Antonio Ramos on the right. He was not an ordaining bishop but had come from Costa Rica to support his brother bishops and some of the Eleven who had been his seminary classmates. I am standing below them waiting my turn to administer the chalice. Below me left to right are Merrill Bittner, Emily Hewitt and Marie Moorefield Fleischer who are administering Holy Communion.

Fourth picture~ Holy Eucharist at the Church of the Advocate on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Philadelphia Ordinations, July 1999. Here at the very beginning, we are reading stanzas of the poem "Passover Remembered" which I was commissioned to write for the tenth anniversary issue of The Witness Magazine. From left to right: Lee McGee (Street) of the Washington Four, Sue Hiatt, Katrina Welles Swanson, Marie Moorefield Fleischer, Merrill Bittner, Carter Heyward, Alison Cheek, Nancy Wittig, the Hon. Emily Clark Hewitt and Alla Renée Bozarth (formerly Bozarth-Campbell). Next to me there is an empty chair honoring Jeannette Piccard, both of us from the Diocese of Minnesota. Only Washington Four Diane Tickell from Alaska was further west of us, and it was too far to come to Philadelphia again. On the chair, Jeannette's signature red stole with appliquéd brightly colored hot air balloons was draped, letting us feel her presence in the Great Communion in all its vividness. Betty Powell (formerly Rosenberg) of the Washington Four was present in the congregation and the rest of us felt her beside us. Eldest of us at the time, Betty Schiess had come, but felt the hot air of Philadelphia and wisely turned around to go back home to upstate New York. I do not think that Washington Four Alison Palmer was present, but I know that she is among those interviewed and written about by Darlene O'Dell in The Story of the Philadelphia Eleven, released in 2014 for the 40th anniversary of the Philadelphia Ordinations. Alison was a diplomat with the State Department for many years. In 2013, Dr. O'Dell spent time in person or by telephone interviewing members of the Philadelphia Eleven and the Washington Four then still living. Her account, based on an extraordinarily sensitive and respectful hearing of our stories, is an heirloom treasure for us to hold in our hands and in perspective as a source of meaning and strength for the rest of our lives. She helps us to remember who we were and who we still are.

The last picture was taken without my knowing. At the end of 1986 I went to the Holy Land to close the first year of my intense grief following my husband Phil's sudden death on December 9, 1985. I left some of his ashes and some of my father's (who had died in 1982)

on the Mount of Beatitudes and in the Sea of Galilee. Then I returned to Jerusalem. My group leader took us to the Upper Room where the Last Supper of Christ with his close friends is commemorated. We prayed and sang, but when the group went on I stayed behind to pray alone. My prayer was this dance of release. I didn't know that one of the group members had come back to check on me. She peeked in from the doorway and took this picture. Months later she sent it to me.

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