June 15

Today the Episcopal Church remembers Evelyn Underhill, the author and retreat leader who brought the mystical tradition to so many people beyond academic circles.  She was not ordained, but she taught and advised many clergy.  She had a spiritual authority that was extremely rare for a woman in a patriarchal church and culture.

I wonder whether she would have been ordained, had she lived in a time and place where women could be.  In our age of professionalization and credentialing, it would be easy to think she would have; easy to think that the Church missed out by not having her as a priest, and that she missed something vital by not being ordained.  But the monastic tradition has always gone in another direction, a direction that’s increasingly important for our churches.

The desert tradition advises against ordination, and the early monasteries often refused entry to clergy.  The problems with ordination are many.  Most obvious, perhaps, is the problem of status and hierarchy.  Ordination literally means “numbering,” ordering, setting in a sequence.  Ordination enters one into a hierarchy, from within which one is always looking up or down.  It’s hard to square that with the community of persons who seek God as companions, rather than shepherd and flock.  Benedict advised that priests had trouble becoming good monastics.  Tales abound of monks fleeing bishops to avoid ordination as deacons or priests.

But there are other problems.  Rowan Williams points out the word-centeredness of ordained ministry.  Clergy have “license . .  to talk - to instruct, explain, exhort, even control.”  And talk can be a screen or a distraction, a rationalization, an obstruction to encountering God.  Add to that the encouragement to “do ministry,” to “be relevant” that is so much a part of contemporary clergy life, and you have a real temptation to abandon the quest for knowledge of God and oneself in favor of words, gestures, even community and comfort - none bad in themselves, but not the final goal.  (And that applies to this blog, too!)

It’s a commonplace that the Church depends on lay ministry.  And it’s common that lay ministry is treated as less than, less demanding or important or unique in the variety of gifts.  And in traditions where “religious” assumed a canonical status “above” that of the laity, the gifts of the laity were obscured even more thoroughly.  But the desert tradition, the monastic tradition especially of women, holds out another possibility.  In the church of the future, we will be more ‘monastic’ - less focused on authorized sacramental leadership, less divided between congregation and clergy, more focused on the quest for God together.  Those who have been excluded from ordination, and those who have avoided or suspected it, will be ahead of the rest of us.  

If you feel called to ordained ministry, go for it.  But bear in mind the monastic caution: flee from words!  Flee from the world!  Share only what comes from your own encounter with God, and only when asked.  (Here am I, exhorting!  I stand condemned.)

If you don’t feel so called, congratulations!  One less distraction.  What is God calling you to do with your gifts and your connection with God?  We need them.  God needs them.  Thank you for sharing them with the world.