Growing Up with Carter

By Stephanie Spellers

[Ed. Note: Carter Heyward is the Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. She is one of the “Philadelphia 11,” who in July 1974 became the first women priests in the Episcopal Church. These women were termed “irregular” ordinands since they defied church hierarchy and canons at the time. In 1976, General Convention voted to approve women's ordination.]

I grew up with Carter Heyward.

She couldn't know I was watching and reading, sitting in my dorm room in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, while she and others toiled and created in the crucible that was Episcopal Divinity School in the 1980s.

Across the miles, linked by words and dreams, I drank in the wisdom, imagined a liberated community, and had flickers of faith in a very different God. And I set a tentative foot on a road that has led me to seek ordained leadership in the same church, to fight a new generation's battles and to envision a new generation's church.

But it started with the witness of sisters who blazed the trail. For me, it started with Carter.

In the Beginning

I entered Wake Forest University in 1989, barely three years after the respected institution finally broke from the Southern Baptist Convention. I knew the school's background, but it didn't concern me much. For 18 years growing up in Kentucky and then Tennessee, I had managed to dodge Bible-thumpers hell-bent on saving my eternal soul. I knew their tricks, and I assumed if God wanted to get me, the Omnipotent and Omniscient One would come up with better tactics. Until then, I'd remain a free agent.

Though my peers called me The Anti-Christ, I wasn't trying to be ornery. All I knew was that, if there was a God, that divine creator had made us for wholeness, and that wholeness could only be achieved when we learned how to deeply, powerfully, peacefully love one another.

Though my peers called me The Anti-Christ, I wasn't trying to be ornery. All I knew was that, if there was a God, that divine creator had made us for wholeness, and that wholeness could only be achieved when we learned how to deeply, powerfully, peacefully love one another. Barriers and exclusivity had nothing to do with the divine plan. The real shame, I thought, was that “the Christians” couldn't figure that out.

I made plenty of noise, but in truth I was desperately alone on that limb. I quietly prayed that God would find me. I wondered if Jesus wasn't all bad but just woefully misunderstood. And I craved a community of people who saw the connection between radical justice and something sacred, transcendent and powerful. But there wasn't anybody who could tell me a different story about Christianity, the church, Jesus or God.

Or so I thought.

Serendipity

The same year I entered Wake Forest, Carter Heyward published Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God . It was not a coincidence. Within a year, my theology professor – a wild, “omnisexual,” German feminist named Ulrike Weithaus who was later banished to the Humanities Department – introduced us to Carter's work. For me, reading Touching Our Strength was like having someone flip the switch, flooding the attic of my consciousness with light.

I remember being excited and a little scared. Who was this priest, writing that, “As a western christian, I am interested in helping to lay to rest the pernicious dualisms between sex and God, sexuality and spirituality, body and spirit, and pleasure and goodness, which historically the church has used to dull the edges of human and divine experience”?

Who was this sister, reassuring me that “Faith is the tenacity to keep on believing in the power of mutuality/justice/friendship, despite the NO being spoken, all around and within us, to this radical and sacred possibility”?

Her words, conviction and faith burst through my walls. Here was a Christian who wasn't afraid to name the truth. Here was an ordained woman priest and a professor, daring to stake out her place within the church and beyond it, believing in its transformation even as she constructed alternative, christic communities for her own healing and the healing of the whole creation.

[S]he knew the secret: that our isolation and separateness are an illusion, that we are at our best, and experience God most fully, when we reach out and allow ourselves to be touched. That Christ lives everywhere we connect and grow toward wholeness.

And she wasn't alone. If anything, she knew the secret: that our isolation and separateness are an illusion, that we are at our best, and experience God most fully, when we reach out and allow ourselves to be touched. That Christ lives everywhere we connect and grow toward wholeness. That church is about liberation, transformation, celebration and healing.

Those insights have stayed with me over more than a decade: through my studies at Harvard Divinity School, through my baptism in the Lutheran Church in 1997, through my entry into the Episcopal Church in 2000 and the almost simultaneous discernment of my call to the priesthood.

That wisdom remains with me now, as I expectantly count the months to my ordination in the Diocese of Massachusetts, as I imagine the sort of priest I hope to be, and as I gird myself for the temptations that are sure to greet me in an institution with no desire to change.

Always “Irregular”

When I am ordained next year, I would wager that few people will notice I'm a woman. Black, yes. In my early 30s, probably. Shorter than anyone else by a head, possibly. But in the 30 years since the Philadelphia 11 crossed over in that “irregular” service, I suppose women's ordination – at least in places like the Diocese of Massachusetts – has become a non-issue.

Maybe it's the footsteps I walk in, but I would far prefer to still be thought of as “irregular.” When that collar gets notched at my neck and my presenters place that stole on my shoulders, I don't want to sign on to be just another cog in the wheel, whatever the temptations and rewards.

For all its talk of being welcoming and liberal, the Episcopal Church still prefers its marginalized or oppressed people to leave their identity at the door and become steeped in and assimilated to the dominant culture. Agreeable women. Quiet black folks. Disembodied gay and lesbian people. Well-spoken poor people.

Make no mistake, there are great rewards for those of us willing to deny our gender, sexuality, class background and cultural and racial identity. For all its talk of being welcoming and liberal, the Episcopal Church still prefers its marginalized or oppressed people to leave their identity at the door and become steeped in and assimilated to the dominant culture. Agreeable women. Quiet black folks. Disembodied gay and lesbian people. Well-spoken poor people.

But the whole idea of “passing” is a hoax. We know that, time and again, women with more than a decade of priestly experience get passed up for rector by a white, straight man two years out of seminary because he “just felt right” to the congregation. We know how quickly a woman who says she would like to have children gets shafted in the selection process. We know how many women serve as interims and in part-time positions, not because it is a calling but because it was the only job they could find.

Women may be well represented in our seminaries and ordination processes and even at our clergy conferences. But even with 30 years to adjust, the hope that we're going to be treated just like any other priest is a pipe dream. And maybe it's good that we lose that hope. We are far more useful to God's reign if we claim our identity as “irregular” priests, and bring critical, edgy, hopeful, loving perspectives to bear on the church.

If women's ordination just means now women are inside and there are that many more people to huddle at the center, protecting the status quo, closing our eyes to everyone standing on the margins, then maybe we shouldn't have bothered.

Growing up as a woman and as a Christian with voices like Carter's surrounding me, I find I have no illusions about someday finishing with the work of liberation. My salvation doesn't come when my group is “safe.” It comes when the reign of God breaks in and draws us all beyond our fears, out of our isolated shells, and deep into radical, transforming, Spirit-filled connection.

That work will take a lifetime and more. I'm just thankful that I get to play a small part, and that it started in that lonely North Carolina dorm room, when a book opened and a sister reached out to touch me.

Stephanie Spellers is a recent graduate of the Episcopal Divinity School and the author of an upcoming book on how Episcopalians can face their traditional fear of change in order to welcome people on the margins. She is a candidate for holy orders in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and attends St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Mass. Stephanie may be reached by email at stephanie.spellers@verizon.net .