Learning to Sit Still

By Arrington Chambliss

I grew up in the 1970's and 80's in a small, white, Southern family, worshipping in a working/middle class Episcopal congregation. I knew many strong Southern women, including my mother. They ran the show in their homes, as volunteers, as teachers, and as mothers. Few of them led in churches, public office, or corporations. I was eight when the first women were ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1974; I have no recollection of it. Originally, the biggest questions and quandaries for me were over race, class and segregation. Gender issues had yet to grab my attention.

Perhaps because of my upbringing in the South, I cannot separate my journey as a woman from my journey as a white woman, or as a middle-class woman. Why were my parents scared for me to go to East Winston-Salem, N.C.? Was it because it was poor, or black, or both? Why were there no African Americans at St. Timothy's Church? Why was my private high school all-white? Why were all the people on TV and in the newspaper white as well? It was not that I did not meet poor white people, I did. It was the ratios and separation that struck me. I was asking questions, and no one could answer them.

As I hit adulthood, I saw that I wasn't taken as seriously as my male colleagues. Previously, my rights as a woman seemed like water, always there and barely noticeable. I came to realize that those rights weren't like water, they were hard-earned. I began examining my own “herstory” against the backdrop of the history I was told (or perhaps, not told) in school. It was then that the story of the ordination of those eleven Episcopalian women in Philadelphia finally mattered to me as a female of my species. Little did I know that these women would come to matter to me on a personal level as well. These forerunners bushwhacked the path I would soon walk towards priesthood.

I believe that there is something important that feminine leadership has to bring to the church at this point related to integration, wholeness and balance. Balance and awareness precede action. They create the possibility for our big work with God to be modeled from the inside out. . .

I believe that there is something important that feminine leadership has to bring to the church at this point related to integration, wholeness and balance. Balance and awareness precede action. They create the possibility for our big work with God to be modeled from the inside out – from church offices to the communities with whom we work, from our prayer lives to our lives of courageous witness.

I feel this call personally and am challenged by it. Now in my mid-thirties and an ordained person, I face the same pulls to imbalance that I encountered a decade ago when I was working in the National Community Service movement and facing burnout along with my colleagues. I struggle against my own patterns of driven-ness, caretaking and an inability to sit still. Some of this pull to be driven and busy is part of the broader U.S. culture, especially here in the Northeast. The care profession ethic, the church included, rewards tireless action. While our vocation by its nature calls us to sacrifice, we need to drop below the reactive responses of conditioned minds and listen more deeply. When my leadership at St. Andrew's Church is centered in reflection, contemplative prayer and rest, I notice that my insights and sensibilities are more grounded and open to hearing God's voice. The questions that I ask about my work and the world become clearer, more focused. They go to the root rather than the symptoms. 

Several years ago, I founded an organization called No Ordinary Time to address the need for both reflection and action in peace and justice work. Our ministry provides the ground where organizers, artists, and faith-based leaders, the people whom Cornel West calls the “contemporary prophets,” can integrate their social change work with a community of faith and practice. Here, healing can go hand in hand with strategizing, stillness can accompany movement building. I now work in a parish, but continue to serve as a board member for No Ordinary Time.

Recently, I spoke with one of No Ordinary Time's Peace and Justice Fellows who is trying to create a healing center in Rwanda, his home country, for genocide survivors. He believes that if there had been more healing and educational work done connected to the impact of German colonialism, the genocide might not have happened. 

I got pretty sick at my first job out of college, mostly from overwork. To heal I started meditating, exercising, reading sacred texts such as the Bible, chewing my food and asking the fundamental question of “Who am I?” I began understanding, on a deeper level, what it means to be human in a world that is growing at breakneck speed. I saw that personal and social transformation are fundamentally linked. Unless we do the internal work to understand ourselves, we will not fully understand the world. In Gandhi's words: “I could not understand India until I understood myself.”

This world sees the church's mistakes more easily than its prophecy. This world calls us to listen deeply to its cries and to dig deep into our tradition to offer a new expression of its gifts. We must offer our understanding of healing, slowing down and contemplation. 

My older sisters and brothers who fought and believed their calls to spiritual leadership, despite the rules and the odds, created my path. Thirty years after the ordination of the first female Episcopal priests, our world requires another round of spiritual leadership despite the rules and odds. This world is increasingly multinational with unprecedented access to information. This world sees the church's mistakes more easily than its prophecy. This world calls us to listen deeply to its cries and to dig deep into our tradition to offer a new expression of its gifts. We must offer our understanding of healing, slowing down and contemplation. We must offer our understanding of hope and conviction in things unseen. We must believe in a vision of the world that seems impossible.

After 9-11, many of us were heart-broken, cracked open by the shock of the events that we believed never could happen on our soil. And we paused. And this was an opportunity, one that I thought would inspire a change in heart and mind. I thought that we might consider our interconnectedness with people living across the world and drop into a deeper reflection about the U.S.' role in empire building and violence. However, it seemed that it was too difficult to sit with what we noticed when we paused. We quickly moved to fear and searching for a foreign enemy. Yet, in order for us to create churches that offer the healing and transformation that this world needs, this is exactly what we must do. We must take risks like the Philadelphia 11 did and let go of our comfort, success and isolation to live in the world as Jesus set out for us to do.

The Rev. Arrington Chambliss is assistant rector at the Episcopal Church of St. Andrew in Marblehead, Mass. She is the founder of No Ordinary Time, an organization dedicated to integrating faith and practice in social activism. She may be reached by email at racbliss@aol.com .