The Rose & Thorn
Series on the 50th Anniversary of the Ordination of Women
It was my first day as the Assistant Curate at St. Jude’s Anglican Church, and I was in my new office quietly crying. There had been some stormy tears at home leading up to my first day too, but I was especially upset to be crying at work and anxious to get my tears wiped, to blink back the redness from my eyes, and to carry on with the day in the professional and calm manner which I wanted for myself.
It had started with an email telling me two days before my start date that my first assignment as a newly ordained leader in the church was to assist with Vacation Bible School. I knew that it was silly and immature to be upset about this. I was twenty-five years old, and as every young priest ordained into the Anglican Church knows, with our youth comes an almost supernatural belief from our parishioners that we’ll be great with young people. I am fine with kids, but I was sad to be told that I should show up in camp clothes, that the new clerical shirts I had bought would have to wait in the closet (as ill fitting as they were… finding a clerical shirt that fits a woman’s body is no easy task) and that I wouldn’t be leaping right into the kinds of ministries that I associated with now being ordained.
I worked out my disappointment on my own time and showed up to the church with every intention of being a team player and putting my best foot forward with my new church community. One of my first tasks was to set up some arts and crafts, which involved finding a pair of scissors. I was told by Wendy, my supervisor for the week, to look in the gym area where parishioners were packaging the fall newsletter for delivery. I went in with a big smile, ready to meet my new congregants, only to be snapped at by one of the volunteers who told me that she needed the scissors and I wasn’t to take them. When I explained who I was and what I needed them for, she apologized profusely, her cheeks pink. She had mistaken me for a member of the youth group.
Those were the rarified years when I desperately wanted to look older than I was, and I certainly wanted to present as a professional authority figure who the people of the church took seriously. I was riddled with doubts about parish ministry, about myself as a priest, and about whether my many insecurities were as obvious on the outside as they felt on the inside. To be mistaken as a teenager rather than to be welcomed as a new priest of the church undermined every shred of self-confidence that I had managed to patch together.
That was when I took a few moments in my office to cry quietly. From there I attempted to continue with the façade of being someone who knows what I am doing.
I recently spoke on a panel of women reflecting on our experiences in ministry as our church celebrates the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Anglican Church of Canada. We represented a spectrum of experience. Some of our panelists had grown up in a church that told them women couldn’t be priests and were ordained in the early years of change. Some of the women had been ordained in the past few years. I was ordained almost twenty-three years ago, close to the midway point of our church’s history of ordaining women. Our bishop, moderating the panel, asked each of us to identify a rose and a thorn in our ministry — a moment of beauty, a moment of pain.
It was this story that came to mind immediately as my thorn. As I shared my experience and listened to others’ as well, the floodgates opened in my mind as I remembered other moments. My husband Dan and I were married the year before I was ordained, and he was ordained as an Anglican priest about two years before I was. I had watched his entry into ministry with some amount of envy and hope. I saw the spaces he glided into, the authority granted to him, the deference paid, and I grasped desperately after those points of validation for myself. I took as a punch to the gut every time that I experienced the opposite instead. We would go for supper at the home of one of my parishioners, and he would be the one asked to pray at the table and then mined for advice on how to start a new ministry at the church. He would be engaged on his ideas, and I would receive comments about my wardrobe. Dan represented everything people thought they knew about what a priest should look like. Even when wearing my clerical collar, people would miss the visual cue that I was a person in church leadership.
And yet, I realized as I shared my ‘thorn’ story with the panel that this experience was also my rose.
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In the celebration and reflection inspired by our church’s anniversary celebrations, I keep coming back to a question, asked by my friend and colleague The Reverend Canon Dr. Margaret Murray, about whether the priesthood is different now because of women. There was a conversation circling around newspapers and morning radio shows last week about women doctors that sheds light on Margaret’s query, as well as connecting my rose with my thorn.
A recent study reveals statistically better outcomes for patients with female doctors than with male doctors. The percentage difference might seem minimal, until we consider that we are talking about living or dying. If we consider that one in 71 people will be alive rather than dead because of treatment that they received, then asking why women have better outcomes when practicing medicine becomes critically important.
Jillian Horton wrote an insightful article about these statistics in a Globe & Mail article published last week. She refrains from easy or trite answers. She recognizes that women aren’t naturally more equipped with the skills needed to be a good doctor. They don’t have a sixth sense about anticipating complications. There is nothing magical or gender essentialist going on here. What the study found is that women statistically spend more time with their patients, that more time results in more listening, and that more listening results in better care. Even this insight, however, demands deeper consideration. Horton writes:
“How might women subconsciously correct for — and protect against — such bias? More friendliness and affability. More caution. More adherence to guidelines. More team engagement. More overall attentiveness….
…the tacit calculus of navigating gender bias is part of being a woman in medicine — and in life.
It is, most definitely, not the case that every female physician is better than a male doctor. I think the key insight is that the average woman in medicine isn’t able to get by being quite as average, whereas deviation from a basic level of performance, or even from behavioural norms themselves, is a little more likely be ignored — or even openly accepted — in men.”[1]
I think back to that rocky start in ministry and those tears I hid in my office to shed. I contrast that with all that we know now about how ill served the church has always been by putting clergy on a pedestal and ascribing to ordinary men an authority and a wisdom that has not only resulted in isolation and a sense of profound disconnect to the clergy person but has also contributed to abuses in the church being tolerated or rendered invisible. I think of how insufferable I was at times as a twenty-five-year-old priest, fresh out of seminary, sure that I had all of the answers to fixing the church, and how grateful I am that no more fuel was added to that fire of arrogance by also being treated with unearned deference.
In every ministry context that I have served, I have stampeded in with a hot-headed need to prove myself and an assumption that I am going to set the world on fire with my arsenal of great ideas. And in every ministry context, I have been greeted with a healthy handful of people who are not sure that I should be there and who, for a variety of reasons, do not see me as an authority figure. I won’t pretend that hasn’t hurt my feelings, but it has also shaped me into a better priest. My arrogance has been tempered by humility. My good ideas have been vetted through the need to build relationships before acting on those ideas, and those relationships have meant that my ideas become our ideas, and we discern our shape of ministry together.
The church is in a time of seismic change. Patterns around community, belonging, financial giving and the spending of precious leisure time are all in dramatic rearrangement. Like Horton, I would never suggest that there is something essential about women that makes us better priests than men. I know that tallying up a compare-and-contrast spreadsheet on the worth of women priests versus men is not what Margaret had in mind in asking her question. What I would posit, however, is that no priest can today afford to come into ministry without humility and without the assumption that trust needs to be earned. Relationships must be our primary place of investment, and authority can’t be demanded or assumed but only has legitimacy when it comes from the slow, hard work of investing ourselves in the life of faith alongside the whole Body of Christ.
I did manage to dry my eyes on that August day so many years ago. I helped with Vacation Bible School, and the young woman who was assigned to help with my class, Hilary, became a dear friend. I had ample opportunity to do priestly things at St. Jude’s, and I received support and friendship and mentoring and generous good-will across every step of learning. God’s healing is real, and I went on to have a sincerely warm and pastoral relationship with the woman who snapped at me about the scissors. I like to think that we both learned something out of that encounter.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-having-a-female-doctor-leads-to-better-health-outcomes-why-arent-we/
