This morning I went for a walk in the cemetery, which is filled with statues and sculptures of angels.
Then I had a conversation with someone in which the Annunciation came up.
And for a day now, I've been thinking about this exquisite poem, which I found here, thanks to Mary Beth. While ordination for women is a given in my denomination, I spend a lot of time with women for whom it is not.
Woman's Body
by Frances Croake Frank
Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
'This is my body, this is my blood?'
Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hill-top,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
'This is my body, this is my blood?'
Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
Brocaded robes belying barrenness,
Ordain that she not say it to him now.
I know you are talkiing about ordination, but a thought occurred to me differently. Women are always there--at the beginning and at the end. We sit and wait for birth and death. We are the caretakers and mothers of the living and dying. It's a privileged, if unacknowledged, place.
ReplyDeleteKaren, when I was deciding whether or not to go to seminary, I made this big old Venn diagram of what's involved in being a priest or pastor and what my own gifts (and limitations!) are, and I looked at it all and concluded that those roles pretty much = being a mother. Then I sat back completely baffled, wondering how men had managed to reserve them to themselves for so long!
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