God Is Not a Boy’s Name. Lyn Brakeman

The Rev. Reginald Winthrop Pugh III was short, frail for his name, with large glasses and a pointy nose sloped like a carrot on a snowman. He was a gay priest. (Everyone knew and no one told.) Which one of my children would he have me assassinate? Ding!

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      “Who will supervise your children while you study and while you take on the duties of a priest, assuming of course that you make it through this process?” asked another primly suited laywoman inquired with raised eyebrow, trying to look as if her question was genuine and she expected a real answer. I told her my mother would help out and wondered if this were a screening for priests or mothers. Ding!

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      The Rev. Charles Youngsterman had been around the church a very long time, his fingers in about every aspect of its life. “My dear, I liked your essay on vocation and vision. However, you have written about a model of priesthood you call supplemental. We don’t have that here. In Connecticut we ordain rectors for parishes.”

      “Oh, I want to be a rector, definitely. But I thought we were writing a vision. Couldn’t there be some priests not in full-time paid parish ministry who could help parish clergy out from time to time but work outside the church proper in pastoral ministries?” Ding!

      (Much later I discovered that my model had precedent. Worker priests had at one time been ordained in the Roman Catholic Church and sent into the field to do pastoral care with workers on the docks in Marseilles. The movement worked well until bishops called the priests “home” to parishes, under the watchful eye of their diocesan bosses. Too much extra-parochial priestly activity could get out of control. I didn’t realize it then, but I was describing the eventual shape of my own priesthood.)

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      Mrs. W. was a social worker with a kind face, fine smile, and fret wrinkles smudged into her skin, hair graying, light dancing in her eyes, a little foxy, a little sugary, a little steely, like a granny. Appearances soothe. I decided she was my ally. Until she spoke.

      “Are you happy?”

      What kind of question was that? I choked. “Yes, very.”

      “I was just wondering if ordination would make you happy? You’re well qualified and will make a fine priest—in ten years after your children no longer need a mother.” Ding!

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      The day got heavier and hotter as I trekked along with the bell. The last interview was with the committee chairman, another gay male priest I’ll call the Rev. Etherington Sweetwater because he was sweet in a pursed-lip kind of way. “You know, Lyn, I just keep seeing this dear little seven-year-old, or is he still six, boy, hungry and his mother not home. I can see him as he stretches, unable to open the refrigerator.” He sighed, his eyes half closed, smiling as he delivered the death sentence. The last bell of the day sounded like a blaring gong in my ear. Ding!

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      In the closing plenary session, I asked, “What if you go to seminary anyway, if you’re not a postulant?” A hush fell on the room. Then the Rev. 2.24 declared, “That, unless you don’t care about ordination, would be an act of defiance against church authority. You’ll hear from the bishop. Any more questions?” Aspirants dismissed. Without a word of goodbye or good luck to each other, we aspirants, looking scalped, departed.

      In a blurry rage I drove home to my parish and gave rector Steve hell for not preparing me. He suggested I pray, and I hope I didn’t tell him to go to hell. Then I went home and made John open the refrigerator for me.

      “Why, Mom?”

      “Just open it and I’ll give you the biggest hug you’ve ever had, and a treat.”

      After two dreadful weeks of waiting, the bishop, who had the definitive say over every step of this process, summoned me to his office, where he told me from behind a three-mile-wide desk, “I’m so sorry, Lyn. I know this will come as a great disappointment to you, but Committee One has not recommended you become a postulant, an assessment with which I concur. They said it would be a dual vocation.”

      I must have looked blank. He continued. “They meant that you couldn’t be a mother and a priest.”

      I smiled and stared at him. He was the pastoral bishop our diocesan clergy had craved and elected, a charming raconteur with a hearty laugh and a twitch that caused him every few minutes to jerk his head to one side. Poor man, he looks uncomfortable. He belongs back in a parish. I screened him without scruple until he twitched and a droplet of perspiration flew from his upper lip.

      “Dual vocation? What about clergy fathers?” I blurted.

      “They’re different,” he said.

      “They have wives,” I said. Mothers too. Then I cried. He handed me a tissue, a gesture for which I hated him. I don’t remember the rest, except that he added something about a “hunch” he had that this wasn’t the right time. Was a hunch like a twitch? This interview was over. Ding!

      Damned if I didn’t thank him when I left.

      Only one of us four aspiring women was accepted—and she provisionally. They sent her for more courses in ethics and worried that she’d been in therapy for fifteen years. “What could you expect for a woman in this sexist church and society?” she later quipped. That woman, the Rev. Joan Horwitt, was the first woman ordained (1979) in Connecticut. Of the other two female aspirants, one went home to re-discern her vocation, having been told that the diocese didn’t ordain permanent deacons so she would have to be a priest; the other woman went to seminary and then to another diocese whose bishop, friendly to women’s ordination, ordained her.

      Then there was me. Doubt and shame peppered with indignation enshrouded me. I’d imagined the church would be, well, nicer. I ruthlessly self-screened, feeling like the biblical Job, who carried on for thirty-seven chapters about how God let the innocent righteous suffer, until God Himself, probably fed up, appeared and took Job for a long lovely walk through all creation. Was God showing off, or simply letting Job in on enough of the divine mind to give him a new vision? Neither Job nor God smoothed my doubts; instead they deprived them of their power to possess me completely. I left on our family vacation. I didn’t feel motherly that year, so my family mothered me: they left me alone on the beach.

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      I’m toeing soft sand. The large solar globe glares. Alone on the beach in a chair with a towel and my Bible, I flip it open. And there it is: the book of Judith. I shake my head no. This book, God, is apocryphal, like an extra in the theater, interesting but not canonical—like me. But my attention is pulled to Judith’s prayer: “O Lord God of my ancestor Simeon, to whom you gave the sword to take revenge on those strangers who had torn off a virgin’s clothing, to defile her, and exposed her thighs to put her to shame . . . you said ‘It shall not be done’—yet they did it.”

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