Dear Good Samaritans,

I want to share a poem that I came across this week—Call by The Rev. Alla Bozarth:

There is a new sound
of roaring voices
in the deep
and light-shattered
rushes in the heavens.

The mountains are coming alive,
the fire-kindled mountains,
moving again to reshape the earth.

It is we sleeping women,
waking up in a darkened world,
cutting the chains from off our bodies
with our teeth, stretching our lives
over the slow earth—

Seeing, moving, breathing in
the vigor that commands us
to make all things new.

It has been said that while the women sleep,
the earth shall sleep—
But listen! We are waking up and rising,
and soon our sisters will know their strength.

The earth-moving day is here.
We women wake to move in fire.
The earth shall be remade.

On Monday the Episcopal Church marked a significant milestone. 50 years ago, on July 29th, aptly the Feast of Sts. Mary and Martha of Bethany, we remembered the Philadelphia Eleven, those eleven brave women who put their ministry and even lives on the line to be the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church.

While there was no canonical prohibition from ordaining women to the priesthood, it had always been the “convention” that priests were men. Like so many things that continue merely “because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” theologians, especially feminist theologians of the 20th century, started to poke holes in this convention. Legislation was introduced to General Convention that would specifcally allow women to be ordained to the priesthood. After such changes were voted down in a series of General Conventions, women decided that they could no longer wait an indeterminate amount of time to live into their God-given calling as women priests. As Suzanne Hiatt, one of the eleven, said, “[their] vocation was not to continue to ask for permission to be a priest, but to be a priest.”

On July 29, 1974, in the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig were ordained as priests by three retired, yet canonically capable bishops: Daniel Corrigan, retired bishop suffragan of Colorado; Robert L. DeWitt, recently resigned Bishop of Pennsylvania; and Edward R. Welles II, retired bishop of West Missouri.

The sermon for the day began: “The hour cometh and now is when the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth,” and was followed by, “as blacks refused to participate in their own oppression by going to the back of the bus in 1955 in Montgomery, women are refusing to cooperate in their own oppression by remaining on the periphery of full participation in the Church.”

All Episcopalians, and all Christians in general, should be grateful for these eleven women. They put themselves forward to follow the will of God while being continually sidelined by the male powers-that-be. This kind of conviction and courage is never easy. They faced hate mail and disdain from those in and outside of the church. But, the collect for the Feast of Mary and Martha of Bethany says, “[O God] give us the will to love you, open our hearts to hear you, and strengthen our hands to serve you in others…” These women lived into this prayer going on to work in parishes, hospitals, seminaries, and other places that needed the presence of God.

Alla Bozarth, another of the eleven and the author of the poem at the beginning, speaks to the necessity of having women, strong, capable, and brave, involved in remaking the world into the reign of God. To use some of Bozarth’s words: “The earth-moving day is here. Women wake to move in fire. The earth is being remade.” The Philadelphia Eleven were a part of that work. Thank God for their example. Thank God for women.

Peace,

Fr. Chris