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The Rev.
Barbara Schlachter
A birthing story of women's
ordination in the Episcopal Church
I have chosen to use the
"assignment" of writing a history to
do some personal reflection. I am writing this because it feels as
though something has been completed in
my life that wants some
official finishing.
Forty years ago this month
I went to Union Theological
Seminary as part of a YWCA/YMCA Leadership
Training School,
which lasted six weeks. I went there as a representative of my college
"Y" at Ohio Wesleyan University.
It was between my junior
and senior years of college, and it
changed my life's direction. There were a
dozen of us in a pro-gram that was probably designed to accommodate more.
More women, than
men, we were from all over the United States, and
two of us became Episcopal priests in
the course of things. Carlyle Gill is the other one. We were blessed with
theology professors who taught at Yale and Drew and others who were on the
cutting edge of ministry.
Suffice it to say, it
opened my head and my heart to a new
way of understanding Church. I had fairly
well left a fundamentalist understanding of theology from my Evangelical and
Unit-ed Brethren days, but a future in the church had never been a
thought. Bill Street Methodist worked
for me at OWU when I
went to church. But later at Union Seminary I
came into con-tact with incredible people—open, loving, justice-making
people from many
different denominations. I also studied fascinating
theologians, including Reinhold
Niebuhr, who was responsible
more than any other single person for my
"re-direction." His
integration of history and theology
challenged me to re-think my
direction as a history teacher or professor.
Since I was located in New
York City for six weeks for
the "Y" program, I had ample opportunity to
taste many parts of life in New York. Some of these
were churches. One of my EUB friends and I visited several Episcopal
churches. While I loved the music and liturgy at St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue,
it was the experience of worshipping at Church of the Intercession in Harlem
that helped me know that I was meant to be an Episcopalian. The experience
of receiving the common cup with such a diverse congregation as a way of
understanding our oneness in Christ convinced me that this was the way to be
church.
The other significant part of my journey was
having the liturgy explained to our group by Fr. Richard Neuhaus, then a
Lutheran. I came to an understanding of the movement of the liturgy in such
a way as to know I was home. Interestingly enough, some of my earliest
memories include attending the Lu-theran Church with my mother, with my legs
sticking straight out over the pew, and hearing the Sanctus being sung. I am
sure this early exposure to liturgy also helped. I started attending St.
Peter's Episcopal Church in Delaware, Ohio, that fall, and I came to know
and love the 1928 Prayer Book.
Off I went to Union Seminary in the fall of
1967, in the Bachelor of Divinity program. I was not officially an
Episcopalian and it took several years before I decided that I would
actually join a church that would not ordain me. Over these years a cou-ple
of things happened. I met my husband, a cradle Episcopalian, and married
him. We continued to attend a variety of Episcopal Churches, including St.
Mary's, Manhattanville near the semi-nary, St. Edward the Martyr, near our
first home in East Harlem, and Church of the Epiphany in midtown, where I
found an affiliation through my hospital chaplaincy work. It was at Church
of the Epiphany I decided that I would take the plunge and become an
official Episcopalian. If the Episcopal Church was where I was called, I had
better take the first step of membership.
Called and confirmed
I was confirmed in June of 1970 by Horace
Donegan, who was told after the
service by one of my sponsors, Julia Sibley, my
mentor in the East Midtown Protestant
Chaplaincy, that I wanted
to be a priest. Patrician Bishop Donegan,
gave a slight shudder, as
if he was thinking, "Oh my God, what have I
done?"
Julia and I had gone to a
conference at Graymoor earlier that
spring with some sixty or so other Episcopal
women to talk about
our relationship with the church. Carter
Heyward, my seminary
classmate, and Pauli Murray were two of the
other women in at-tendance. It was there that I was able to first talk about
this vocational call in a group of women, without it being considered
radical. Discussions at Union didn't
count—there were so many
denominations and so few women.
Then Mel and I went off to
Oxford, England, for his mid-dier year
of study. I worked in a psychiatric hospital as a social
therapist in a Maxwell Jones-style
therapeutic community. It was
one of the jobs I have loved the most.
Three things stand out
from that year in England of some
relevance to this story. I told few
people that I was also a student
of theology, for fear of being demeaned.
Women were not doing
that sort of thing in Oxford then! We had
house eucharists with
the chaplain of St. John's College where I
could be a bit more
myself, but the testosterone in the Church of
England called for
more courage than I could generally handle.
The other thing is a
moment that I will never forget as long
as I live, and I still can feel the same
shiver up my spine as I did
that night. Arnie Klukas, another American,
was also studying
at Oxford, and had been at our house for
dinner one night. As
he was leaving, in the doorway, no less, the
threshold, he said,
"Oh, by the way, did you hear that the
General Convention just
decided to open the deaconate to women?" No, we hadn't heard,
but the somatic reaction I had meant
that it would be something
I would be praying about and checking into
when I returned back
to the states. That was almost another year later.
We went back to Union in the fall of 1971, and
Dr. Hugh McKandless, rector of the Church of the Epiphany, when I start-ed
talking about discernment, said that that part was already over, and it was
time for me to enter the process. I did and was ac-cepted, but because I was
just a postulant when I graduated with my MDiv., I was not ordained when my
husband was.
We both graduated in 1972 and Mel was ordained
as a dea-con in the Diocese of Nebraska by Bishop Varley, who told him that
he would not have a job for him because of me. He was ordained a priest in
New York by Paul Moore, acting on behalf of Bishop Varley.
Mel was a man without a diocese and I was a
woman with a diocese but no collar. Together we were employable as a team
for one full job at St. Andrew's in Yonkers. It was a hard year for us,
because of several things. The biggest one, though, was that Mel had started
seminary two years after I had and was ordained; I was still a
lady-in-waiting. He was deacon and then priest, and I was.. .exactly what?
We didn't like what it said about our mar-riage—we felt called to an
egalitarian relationship and both were called to priesthood. Deacons years
As hard as this year was, it would have been
harder if Mel had waited to be ordained with me. I was ordained a deacon
June 9, 1973 and was very hopeful that the Episcopal Church would vote for
the ordination of women at its September Convention in Louisville.
To help this process along, Betty Mosley,
wife of Union's president the Rt. Rev. Brooke Mosley, had had Carter
Heyward, Carol Anderson and me come to New Orleans to talk with the wives of
the bishops at their spring meeting in 1973. Just recently I have learned
how much grief Brooke received because of our presence, yet it was Betty and
Elvira Charles and other wives who had raised the money for us to be there.
After we spoke women said things like,
"I understand much better now," "You know, I
think the reason I married my husband was
because I wanted to
be a priest and couldn't," and one woman,
Katy Mead, claimed
her own call to priesthood at that time.
We figured that there was
a lot of pillow talk that went on,
but after 33 years, I have learned of one
"shower talk." One Bishop says that the next morning after we spoke he was
getting out of
the shower and felt a strong hand on one shoulder and then
a strong hand on the other shoulder
and his wife's voice saying,
"You're not going anywhere until we have a
talk." That was the
beginning, he admits, of his advocacy for
women in the priest-hood.
So off we went to
Louisville, some dozen or so of us in
collars, one with a nursing child. We were
there through our
work with the Episcopal Women's Caucus which
we had formed in
late October in 1971 at Virginia Theological Seminary. A
meeting similar to the Graymoor
meeting had happened there,
with women with clout from the church in
attendance along with
those of us who were in seminary. It was a
small, elite and power-ful group.
The House of Bishops was
meeting at the same time and
they had just heard from Kilmer Myers some
theology related
to why women could not be priests. We could
not be initiators;
only men could initiate. Women's role was
Theotokos, God-bear-ers. Well, our response was to initiate an organization
that is still
going strong, the Episcopal Women's Caucus. I was part of the
continuation committee, and with the guidance of our "bishop"
Suzanne Hiatt, we started to plan
strategy for the General Convention in the fall of 1973.
I am afraid we were too
naive about how the politics of the
church really works, and we were not given
the votes necessary.
Now I was a deacon with no prospects of being
a priest in the
near future. It was a good thing that Mel was a priest already,
because it would have put some strong
stress on our marriage if he
had been ordained a priest after the church
declared women could
not be. Many of our clergy-couple friends
could not withstand
this stress and ended up divorcing.
Dobbs Ferry
We came back from that
convention to our new home at the
Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where I had just
taken a teaching
position. I remember thinking of all the sadnesses of
that time—Paul Moore's wife Jenny died
during convention, W.
H. Auden died during that same time period,
our mother cat's
sole baby was dead on our return, and I could
not be a priest—
yet, maybe never.
I went into a period of
depression. I had never really felt
stymied by my gender. Now I was told that I
could not do what
I had been educated to do, what I believed
God called me to do,
because of my anatomy. It took awhile before
I could sit through
a church service without crying, sometimes
sobbing. Thank God
I found myself being reached out to by a wise
older priest who
was a pastoral counselor to whom I went to
counseling for several
years—through the next convention.
I was also fortunate that
there was a wonderful Episcopal
Church in Dobbs Ferry The rector. Jack
Neitert, had asked me to
speak shortly after my ordination to the
deaconate and gulped a
bit when he heard I was actually moving to
Dobbs Ferry. I was in
the pew for many months until the junior
warden told him that if
he continued to do the bread for each rail of
communicants and
then do the chalice for each rail of
communicants when there was
a perfectly good deacon sitting in the
congregation, he was leaving.
I started serving as
deacon, and after awhile Jack and others began to understand more about my
call and the injustice
of denial. When Jack left to take a position
in another diocese,
the vestry was very supportive. They had me
preach Easter and
Christmas, and for some services I did
deacons masses. For other
services, especially ones done by my husband
and other local clergy, they told them, "We want Barbara to do everything
she can as a
deacon. You say the three paragraphs she cannot."
My healing began about
four months after the Louisville
Convention failed to vote for women as
priests. We had continued to meet as a local chapter of the Episcopal
Women's Caucus
in the Diocese of New York, and it was decided that we would
present ourselves for ordination along
with the men that Carter
and I had been ordained to the deaconate with
in June. They
were being ordained to the priesthood on December 15 in the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We
told Paul Moore of our
plans, and he told Canon Eddy West, who had
us rehearse so that
whatever happened, it would be decent and in
order.
So Julia Sibley, Carol
Anderson, Carter Heyward, Emily
Hewitt, and I were presented along with the
men. Ralph Cordes,
the beloved Junior Warden, and Jack, now a
good friend, were
my presenters. Our names were listed in the
service booklet, and
everything proceeded for us just as for the
men. However, we
knew that after we had knelt for the Veni
Creator Spiritus, Paul
Moore would tell us, "My sisters, my hands
are tied, I cannot
ordain you," and we and all our supporters
would walk out. He
did and we did, and some others found
themselves unable to stay.
One of them was then Canon Walter Dennis, who
was acting as
the Bishop's chaplain. He put down the crozier on the floor and
walked out with us. We went to another
part of the Cathedral
Close and had a party, full of laughter and
tears. That was the
passing of the peace, and from then on I
began to heal and to have
hope.
The next June I was at an
Episcopal Student Ministry in
Higher Education (ESMHE) meeting in Kansas
City. Mel had
been doing college chaplaincy and we enjoyed these annual gatherings with
the chaplains. At this one Bob Dewitt, Suzanne Hiatt's
Bishop, was present, as was Katrina
Swanson, one of the other women who was a deacon
called to priesthood. The men (they were mostly men) wanted us to tell our
story one night, which we did. Afterward, Bob took Katrina and me aside and
said, "You know, we are going to ordain you." Right, we had heard that
be-fore. Just be patient. I wish he had told me that it would be still that
summer that this would actually happen.
Shortly after the ESMHE meeting Mel and I went
to Europe for a month for a final fling before starting a family. We had a
great time with our good friends from Oxford days with whom we had shared a
house.
Then it was one of those things that you hear
about: I walked into our apartment and the phone was ringing. It was Carter
Heyward asking if I was going to be ordained with her and ten other women
the day after next. I was stunned. I had no idea that in the weeks of our
absence women had been meeting with each other and with the bishops who
eventually did the ordaining. I felt totally out of the loop and could not
deal with this possibility in the time I had.
So I attended the service but was not one of the
women; it was one of the hardest days of my life, the hardest to that point.
I was happy that this was happening but I thought I should have been up
there, too, but it didn't feel quite right. I have no idea what Neal Secor
said to me, but he won a place of gratitude in my heart forever at the
reception, when his words put me in his arms with great tears and sobs. Life
marched on, and by the time the celebration of the first anniversary of the
ordination of the Philadelphia 11 had occurred, I was nine months pregnant
and in vestments, and we all had a good laugh at the recessional, "Come
Labor On."
Strategies
I had become part of the group that was
strategizing for General Convention in 1976. We had an organizing meeting at
Bergamo Conference Center in Dayton, Ohio, in the fall of 1974 and we
divided into three groups. One group was to support the fifteen women who
had been "irregularly" ordained and to work for their regularization, and
one group was to work on issues for women that would continue after the
ordination of women had passed—like theological language for God. The third
group was the one I worked on, and that was to strategize for the full
inclusion of women into the priesthood. George Regas and Pat Park became
chairs of this third initiative.
The summer before the Convention in '76
was a hot one in several ways. We were celebrating the nation's
bicentennial, and our daughter Erika learned to walk on Independence Day
that year. Shortly after that we went off to Kanuga where I was the
liturgist for a Christian Education Conference with John Westerhof, still a
United Church of Christ minister, as keynoter. Tempers were explosive around
the issue of women's ordination. One other woman deacon and I were there and
we did as much of a eucharist as we could, and then
Charles Cesaretti, at that time on the staff at the Church Center, took
over, saying how much it pained him that this was necessary.
Then off we went to Minneapolis. Much has been
said in recent days how John Coburn, President of the House of Depu-ties,
asked everyone present to be silent as he announced the vote on whether or
not women would be allowed to be ordained to the priesthood. He knew that
some of us would be jubilant and some of us would be distressed, and out of
respect for one another, to stifle ourselves until we could leave the
convention hall. It was a tense silence as the vote was announced. And we
were quiet, but nothing could stop the joy that took over our faces and our
bodies.
In January the canons went into effect and
women began to be ordained on a daily basis all over the country. My day was
January 20, the same day that Jimmy Carter was inaugurated. "The Herald
Statesman", our county paper, ran a front page the next day that had a large
picture of me with a headline "Village
Woman Ordained," and below it, a smaller picture that said,
"Jimmy Carter Inaugurated." Presidents
had been inaugurated
before, but Westchester County had never had
a woman ordained
before.
Ordination
My ordination was at
Zion Church in Dobbs Ferry, NY
with Bishop
DeWitt preaching and Stewart Wetmore officiating. It
was attended by people I did not even
know, as well as many who
had walked with me for many years. I felt as
though we were all
dancing through the Red Sea—all of us knowing
that in this celebration of women being able to stand at the altar and
proclaim the
presence of Christ that a new kind of liberation had been
achieved. I was pleasantly surprised
that I did not need to sign
the Oath of Conformity, which I had done two
plus years earlier
at the Cathedral. Apparently that counted. So
my ordination
was the longest in history: "ordination interruptus," I like to call
it.
It was a joyous night, and
for me one of the highlights was a
story told to me afterward. Erika, who was
not quite a year and
a half, had been quick to leave the altar
rail after her blessing. She
ran up the aisle waving to all her friends and then coming back
up to the altar where she proceeded to
go up and down around
the altar until Bishop Wetmore picked her up.
People were struck
with the image of the mother distributing the
bread and the bish-op holding the baby right behind her. It was the visual
of the new day
that was being heralded.
Employment
I had started seminary in
1967 and it was now 1977. It was
quite a journey between that summer of 1966
and then. Here we
are thirty years after that, and I am feeling
another milestone has
occurred.
But first a bit of those
thirty years' history. I was fortunate in having a great friend in J. Norman
Hall, rector of St.
he had me interview for the position of
assistant rector, which I began in the summer of 1977, after I finished the
school year at the Masters School. I learned a great deal from Norman and
found it an ideal parish in which to begin ordained ministry.
However, five years and one new baby later, it
was time for me to go off and be rector on my own. It was 1982 and not many
parishes were interested in the following combination: a woman, who had two
children six and two, and an ordained husband. It was the latter that
concerned people the most; they could not imagine that Mel was content to
follow me. And the more I almost got this job and that job, I began to
realize that what they were expecting from a rector was more than I wanted
to give at that point. I wanted to spend some time with my children.
So Mel and I, after saying we would never work
together again, began to think that maybe God was calling us to share not
only marriage and parenting but a church job, too. We became co-rectors of
St. Margaret's in Staatsburgh-on-Hudson for a very sweet four years. Herbert
O'Driscoll preached at our service of the Celebration of a New Ministry
calling attention to the re-making of the covenant between men and women.
It became apparent, however, that Staatsburgh
was probably not the place we wanted our children to complete their growing
up, and we decided to go to a community back in Ohio, closer to my parents,
and similar to the one Mel had grown up in Nebraska. We became Co-rectors of
Trinity Church in Troy where we remained for fifteen years.
Serving together with one salary gave us several
opportunities. Mel had taken education to be a pastoral counselor years
be-fore, and I followed suit so that when Erika was ready for college we had
a way to pay for that.
It also meant that I had opportunities to be a
more pre-ent mother most of the time, and to travel and do work for the
national church, of which I did a good deal. I served on the Church
Deployment Board, filled a vacancy on the Executive Council, was on the
Board and served as president of NNECA (National Network of Episcopal Clergy
Associations). As part of my NNECA responsibilities I served on the Wellness
Initiatives Committee of the Church Pension Fund, which developed among
other plans, CREDO. I also served as deputy to General Convention from New
York and from Ohio, and started a conference for clergywomen from Province V
and VI that has been going for fifteen years now. Finding ways for women
clergy to support each other has always been part of my vocation.
It meant that I never stopped being concerned
about how the Church was treating its women clergy. When I was asked to
serve on the Committee on the Status of Women and then to chair it during
the three years leading up to the 30th anniversary celebration of the
ordination of women, it was a perfect fit for me.
There's another part of the story to go back and
pick up. When Jake went to college in August of 1998, we celebrated our 30th
wedding anniversary and returned home to begin our life as empty nesters.
However, within a week I had found a lump in my breast, and then began a
period of nine months in which I underwent treatment for breast cancer "with
mets to the spine." It was not a good diagnosis and no one was talking
prognosis. I had my hands and heart full, however, with other things, too.
My father died of prostate cancer the same morning I was told that I had
metastasized breast cancer, and at supper that night we learned that our
daughter's oldest friend, daughter of my college friend, had been murdered
at Bard College.
That next weekend, Erika and I held each other
in the pew and wept at Anna's funeral. Phyllis, Anna's mother, had died
six-teen years before. Now Anna was gone, and I was facing a life and death
struggle. Mel was co-officiant for her service, and the next day he preached
at my father's funeral. The day after that was my mother's birthday and the
day after that was my first chemo treatment. It was day one of treatment
that would last for nine months.
I had guides and mentors, and one of the pieces
of work I did included the realization that I had done some tough work
before in helping open the church for the ordination of women. I could
survive a struggle. Treatment that went for nine months I re-framed as a
pregnancy, and I had done two of those. At the end of nine months, I would
give birth to the new me.
And somehow, I am still here, whether
misdiagnosis or miracle. I am grateful for my life and learned a great deal
about the largeness of God during this time.
Moving to Iowa
I was not ready to leave Ohio, where I had such
great sup-port from the medical community and friends in the church,
neighborhood and elsewhere, but God had other plans, for Mel, at least. In
April of 2002 he became rector of Trinity Church in Iowa City, and I
finished the program year and joined him in July. It was the first time I
had ever been a trailing spouse and I found I did not like the experience.
God had plans for me, too, however, which was to
be the first Angel of the Episcopal Women's Caucus, to the Diocese of Fort
Worth. I had a challenging fifty-nine days there and then it looked as
though there would be no more place to do ministry.
But once again God proved she is ingenious and I
ended up filling a gap between an interim rector and the arrival of the new
rector at Christ Church in Cedar Rapids, where I fell in love with the
people, and vice versa. I became Associate Rector, a half-time position, in
November of 2003. Bill Pugliese and I have a good working relationship,
although at times it is hard to realize I am not in charge here! I am also
doing half-time pastoral counseling in an office in the lower level of
Trinity. I like to joke that Mel is upstairs doing the spiritual work and I
am downstairs doing the gut work.
This ministry arrangement
enabled me to chair the Committee on the Status of Women for the last three
years without
feeling that other commitments were suffering. I went into the
General Convention feeling that we had
worked well and done
significant things during the triennium.
General Convention
would be the culmination of our efforts. We
had arranged to put
a "Woman's Wall Timeline" around the nave of
Trinity Church in
Columbus, where my friend Dick Burnett, who
had succeeded me
in White Plains, was now the Rector. I wrote a litany for the
dedication that turned out to be more
prophetic than I had even
allowed myself to dream when I prayed for the
women whose
names would be added during the General Convention!
While Elizabeth Downie,
President of the Episcopal Women's Caucus, and Mel and I had measured the
nave the summer
before, we joked about how the bishops would elect the new Pre-siding Bishop
there, and I know my hope was that they would
elect someone who valued the ministry of
women as equals. It
never occurred to me in my wildest dreams
that a woman would
be elected. When Katharine Jefferts Schori
was nominated, I
thought of this as a token nomination. Even
when Alan Scarfe
said he thought she was the best candidate, I
never let myself
dream she would be elected.
When George Werner,
President of the House of Deputies,
alluded to John Coburn's way of handling the
controversial vote
30 years before, I still didn't get it. Okay,
let's have silent prayer
and then be quiet out of respect. But when he
said, "The next
presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is the Rt. Rev. Kath—"
I made a sound that sounded like a strangled breath, and around
me there was a great sucking sound, as
the Holy Spirit filled our
lungs and our minds with this news. And then
I sobbed, and
sobbed and sobbed.
I realized I had
underestimated God and Her plans for the
Church, and I realized that Katharine was a
new type of woman
leader. Pat Merchant made an eloquent
statement in the House of Deputies, and I realized
that neither she nor I nor the other women who had been part of things so
long ago could have been elected to such a position. We bore the pain and
the scars in our bones; we had a cellular memory of discrimination and
suffering that made us like Moses. We had been the ones to say to Pharaoh,
"Let my people go." We had been the ones to lead the victory through the Red
Sea and to lead this new people in the wilderness, but we could not take
them to the Promised Land. We were on the mountain watching Joshua lead them
on the rest of the way. This brilliant and competent woman, who had been
ordained less than half the time we had, carried no such memories; she would
be able to do the work of the next phase.
When she was elected, Marc Andrus, the bishop on
the Committee on the Status of Women, put her name on the time-line. Did the
timeline make a difference? Who knows? I had a profound sense of having been
used by the Spirit of God through-out this whole convention. I thought it
was my idea to have the timeline, to call attention to the 30-year
anniversary, to do a one-woman show on Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet, the day
after Katharine was elected and I did the play, a reception that was already
in place became a time of great celebration for her election. I felt
considerably awed to have played a part in some way in something of such
magnitude.
So, it has been forty years. I sat at table
group no. 40 at General Convention because of this anniversary and ended up
sitting with a group that seemed called to sit together. It has been that
way, always. Things that I thought maybe I was making up or shaping have
ended up being validated in so many ways, causing me to realize that I was
playing a small role in something truly huge. It has been my privilege, for
these forty years. |
