A Woman

Footsteps outside. No member of the congregation came on Mondays to disturb meat the church. I had no secretary. Our choir director didn’t come this early to interrupt my quiet with complaints. I was the lone staff at the church, a woman minister in rural Arizona, 1990.

A knock. This must be a stranger or he’d have a key. I got up to answer the locked door. I wanted to open our doors and welcome whoever was there, but I had to use caution.

I opened the heavy door to a small man in grimy clothes who looked like a weathered character in a western movie. He stood in the parking lot a few feet from the doorway.  “Where’s the preacher? I got these troubles . . . need money.”

“I’m the minister here,” I said, feeling pleased to help out a man of the Wild West. “I can give you some ….”

“You ain’t no minister! I wanna see the real minister!” he shouted as if confronted by the evil eye. “You’re a woman, for Christ’s sake!”

I tried to look clerical. “Well, yes, but I’m the minister of this church, and ….”

“I know why this church is going to hell, lady. It’s because of people like you! You ain’t even got a Bible!”

I had no answer for that, and the tired visitor backed away, distancing himself from a sorceress.

There it was again: a woman minister perceived as a menace to everything normal and reliable. Why was I in ministry, where many felt I didn’t belong? I loved devotional music, the study of ethics, and the idea of creating absorbing sermons from a close reading of sacred literature. People who seemed to have a spiritual center appealed tome, and I wanted to learn how they got that way.

My questions multiplied like our desert rabbits: where could I find the courage to stand up to criticism? Did I have the benign qualities of a minister? I’m a tall, schoolteacher type, with brown eyes behind glasses. Could I summon enough faith to lean on the grace of God when my credibility was being challenged?

As an 18-year-old in college I’d hurried on Sunday mornings to a chapel service held in an ancient Romanesque building. The chaplain preached about the ethical life informed by Christian ideas. I sat captivated. Often I’d provide flowers for the altar, picking them from a small garden behind our dormitory. That’s what I knew to be my role, to serve without anyone’s notice. God forbid I should speak up in a church.

I left that girl back in the chapel, and years later, after I divorced, I decided to leave high-school teaching and go to Berkeley to study religion. I’d miss my students, but giving up teaching, now dominated by effort to raise test scores, was an easy decision. The hard part was telling John, the gentlemanly fellow who’d been living with me for the last year.

I was leaving to go to graduate school, I told him. We’d finished dinner. He put down a wine bottle and butter dish with an unnecessary clatter. “Women ministers aren’t normal. I mean, they seem like .. ..”

Aren’t normal? “Don’t worry. I’ve never been one to knock over icons,” I said, offended by the noise John made with the clean-up. “Besides, I’ll probably hate it and miss you terribly.”

Knowing I wouldn’t hate leaving him or hate my new direction, I turned to open the dishwasher and noticed the bird-feeder outside the window. Illuminated by kitchen light, it moved in the night breeze, a tiny tray waiting for songbirds. An image of anticipation I’ve never forgotten.

After I was ordained, I served as assistant to a dignified minister. In that subordinate role I chose to wear a cheerful child’s rosary —the ideal accessory on a clerical robe, announcing holy, feminine, fun — instead of appearing like a pompous bishop bent on keeping you in your place. Finally, the time came when I knew I’d have to open a new door and take charge of a congregation, testing my capacities to represent comfort and hope as a real minister.

I twirled my rosary like a stripper (speaking metaphorically), and searched for a church that would accept a woman as leader, a place that offered little money and few benefits, so obscure that men would turn it down.

Arizona responded, and I found myself sitting in a quiet church office beneath skies where hawks circled and rabbits crept out from behind the rocks after the raptors moved away. When challenged by the fearful or the inflexible, I remembered, “You’re a woman for Christ’s sake.”

Hail, Mary.