This weekend I finally got to see a documentary about the "Philadelphia Eleven" that's been years in the making, and got to see it in the best possible setting - at a church led by a friend, a female priest, and followed by a panel discussion with five priests, one ordained each decade since 1974. That was yesterday. Then we had a discussion of the movie at my church, a church with a woman rector and associate rector, today. Just how momentous the change ushered in by the Philadelpha Eleven is is hard to describe. One might start with some statistics from the film's end: almost 7000 women have nowbeen ordained, and 30% of bishops and 40% of priests in the Episcopal Church today are women. But that gives you no sense of what it was and is like to be one of those women at different stages of this unfolding, or to have been ministered to by them.
The two discussions helped fill that out for me. This change has not been easy, although it has become easier. Each of the voices I heard, each soulful in her own profound way, made clear what a gift the inclusion of these remarkable people in the priesthood represents - and how bereft the church before that was (and, in many churches, still is). Fifty years is a change within the span of a single lifetime but in the history of the church, it's a moment. Yet, my friend suggested, the true opening of the priesthood to all is really as epochal as the Reformation. We are only just beginning to understand where the Holy Spirit is taking us through it. These discussions have made clear that this sea change is already bringing about transformed understandings of vocation, gender, family, church - and God. How wonderful to be living in such a time!
I can give a sense of the sea change of these fifty years with two phrases used by priests who spoke in these discussions, one ordained in the 1980s and one a quarter century later. The former grew up Episcopal but of course knew as a girl she couldn't be a priest. Yet at some point - a few years after the Philadelphia Eleven - she realized that "the things I wanted to do are things that priests do." The latter, deciding after an earlier career to go to seminary and become a hospital chaplain, was asked by someone "why aren't you a priest?"
