Lent Day 8: Yes, but....

Augustine of Hippo, philosopher, theologian, and famously honest pray-er allegedly prayed, 

"O Lord, make me chaste--but not yet."

Sometimes we want to say "yes," but something holds us back. 

I've written about my experience of being called to ministry in a little essay in this terrific book, as well as in this recent sermon. What I haven't written about, is the fourteen year gap between my call and my ordination.

I describe the beginning of that fourteen year journey in the sermon:

And then it hit me, like a bolt of lightning to the chest. That was what I wanted, or that was what God wanted of me, or something like that: ordination. To be a minister, to be a pastor. And I was so elated that I threw my arms up into the air...

...[But] as quickly as the elation came, it was replaced with a kind of resignation bordering on despair, because I did not see a path.

I was born and raised in the Roman Catholic Church. I attended Catholic schools for sixteen successive years (first grade through college), and then obtained my first Master's degree from one. I was deeply immersed in the life of my church. It gave me joy, it fed my soul, it offered a place where I could share my gifts... to an extent.

But now I felt God was calling me to do something that my church would not permit, would not even entertain. (Still true--five years after my lightning bolt to the chest, the beloved Pope John Paul II declared the issue of women's ordination closed, and seemed to indicate that theologians should neither write nor speak of it. Recently Pope Francis issued a book of Canon Law that outlines the penalties of excommunication for those who ordain women, as well as for the women who are ordained.) 

I did not want to leave the church of my childhood. But the God to whom that church had introduced me seemed to be making her intentions clear. As another Catholic woman who experienced that same call has stated, "If you were born to do something, you resist it at your own peril.”

In fact, I couldn't even contemplate leaving the church I loved. At the time lived in the greater Boston area, and attended the university parish at Boston College. I sang in the choir. Once, during my grad school tenure, I had been invited to preach at a campus mass in another chapel. But there seemed to be no direction to take my sense of call, until I moved away from Boston and landed in the Southern Tier of New York.

For a year I visited Catholic churches. Displaced from a church home where women's gifts had been lifted up, I saw no such thing in the places I visited. In Boston I had, perhaps, lived in a bubble that suggested change was just around the corner. Now, the realities of life outside the big, liberal (in some ways) city had opened my eyes to the reality that change was not, in fact, coming any time soon.

I was in the wilderness. But I was also a young mother, who was finishing a degree long-distance, and who longed for some kind of church home.

I started attending an Episcopal Church. After a couple of years I joined it, and had my daughter baptized there. 

And I grieved, even as I began to have a glimmer of hope that I might finally be able to answer my call. I worked for the church for two years as a Christian Educator, and then took another position at a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation, where, finally, I experienced a call as powerful as the one I'd felt in 1989. During church one day I watched as Deacons and Elders were ordained and installed. For the first time, I listened to the ordination vows, and one lodged firmly in my heart: 

Do you trust in Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord and all and Head of the Church, and through him believe on one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

"Lord of all and Head of the Church." I had been excluded from answering my call by a church that seemed to believe a living human male was head of the church, and could, thus, determine single-handedly who could answer that call. Now I was in a church where Christ, as Head, could continue to guide us, because, as our UCC siblings constantly remind us, "God is still speaking." 

That day, that moment of being called again, set me on the path to saying "Yes" to God's urgent earlier call. I embarked on a path of discernment, accompanied by my congregation and the wider church. I went to seminary. And fourteen years following that first call, almost to the day, I was able to say the ordination vows myself. 

Today's Reminder of the Day from A Sanctified Art is:

Saying "yes" can
be holy, when
that yes moves
you closer to
God and closer
to your true self.

Sometimes we're called by God to something, and our answer is, like Augustine, "yes, but..." I don't regret my long and meandering path to ministry. I believe it brought me to exactly the place I was meant to be. I know it brought me closer to God and to my true self. There was pain along the way, to be sure.  I struggled and, at times, I truly grieved what was not to be. But God is infinitely wise and infinitely patient, and I am so grateful for who I am and where I am, by her grace. 

I'm so grateful for being able, at last, to say a resounding, joyful "yes."

May such a "yes" be possible for all of us, when it's God calling.

Stoles. Lots of 'em.