1985.
I was enjoying a sabbatical, six months in America as a Proctor Fellow at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
At the first meeting of the programme, the programme director warned us that 'there are some angry women out there'.
Out there being the Campus of the Episcopal Divinity School in Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I guess he was right.
But the women I met were neither angry nor anti-men, in fact they were ordained or training for ordination.
Of course this was all new to me.
Eventually it so happened that I found myself in the College Chapel for a Eucharist when in swept the all woman Altar Party, Carter Heywood, Sue Hiatt and a woman sub-deacon.
I was faced with a dilemma, it was a clash certainly but it was also a Clash dilemma, 'Should I stay or should I go?'
Well, not really that much of a dilemma, I stayed, the earth kept turning, the Episcopal Church, at least in America continued to flourish and I realised that I had participated in an important justice moment for myself and the Church in which I was an ordained minister, indeed a fellow Priest with those who celebrated that Eucharist, breaking both bread and word and spilling wine.
I know none of the participants in the forthcoming Ordinations to the Episcopacy at York next week.
But I guess that they have been selected for their experience, their pastoral gifts and their presumed fitness for the office into which they will be ordained i.e. Servants of the servants of God aka Bishops.
But I gather that all is not well in the Province of York?
Once the Bishop of Chester has had hands laid upon her, then those hands will it appears be no longer welcome on the head of the Bishop of Burnley?
And the Archbishop has it appeared consented to withdrawing from both Ordaining and Celebrating the Ordination Eucharist?
It is fast becoming an odd sort of Church, the Church of England.
It is a Church full of nooks and crannies, or crooks and nannies, a church where liturgy has been replaced by turgidity and the smaller and the less relevant it becomes, the more its finances edge to the verge of collapse, where the giving of the parishes, in what in the Newcastle Diocese I christened the 'Fertile Crescent', essentially pay for the stipends of the clergy in the inner city areas, and the senior clergy simply engage in busyness for busyness sake, like so many speed daters looking for romance.
But whatever motivates the new Bishop of Burnley in his insistence on some form of purity of the apostolic succession in which he hopes to remain unsullied by women, I am reminded of an ordination I attended where one of the newly ordained deacons refused to bow to the verger on the grounds that he was male.
And I am also reminded that the whole sorry state of racial, class and gender discrimination within the church which affects variously just about everyone stands as the most fundamental of obstacles with regard to the bringing into being of that community of persons we are called to be under God, which is a community of justice in which we are all equal.
Perhaps the Archbishop of York should give some thought to inviting the two new Bishops to join him in kneeling before the mercy seat and reminding himself and them that the Mercy Seat is the only place where God's forgiveness meets human sinfulness, where they would kneel and as it says in The Letter to the Hebrews, where, above them, would be 'the cherubim of glory'.
I was enjoying a sabbatical, six months in America as a Proctor Fellow at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
At the first meeting of the programme, the programme director warned us that 'there are some angry women out there'.
Out there being the Campus of the Episcopal Divinity School in Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I guess he was right.
But the women I met were neither angry nor anti-men, in fact they were ordained or training for ordination.
Of course this was all new to me.
Eventually it so happened that I found myself in the College Chapel for a Eucharist when in swept the all woman Altar Party, Carter Heywood, Sue Hiatt and a woman sub-deacon.
I was faced with a dilemma, it was a clash certainly but it was also a Clash dilemma, 'Should I stay or should I go?'
Well, not really that much of a dilemma, I stayed, the earth kept turning, the Episcopal Church, at least in America continued to flourish and I realised that I had participated in an important justice moment for myself and the Church in which I was an ordained minister, indeed a fellow Priest with those who celebrated that Eucharist, breaking both bread and word and spilling wine.
I know none of the participants in the forthcoming Ordinations to the Episcopacy at York next week.
But I guess that they have been selected for their experience, their pastoral gifts and their presumed fitness for the office into which they will be ordained i.e. Servants of the servants of God aka Bishops.
But I gather that all is not well in the Province of York?
Once the Bishop of Chester has had hands laid upon her, then those hands will it appears be no longer welcome on the head of the Bishop of Burnley?
And the Archbishop has it appeared consented to withdrawing from both Ordaining and Celebrating the Ordination Eucharist?
It is fast becoming an odd sort of Church, the Church of England.
It is a Church full of nooks and crannies, or crooks and nannies, a church where liturgy has been replaced by turgidity and the smaller and the less relevant it becomes, the more its finances edge to the verge of collapse, where the giving of the parishes, in what in the Newcastle Diocese I christened the 'Fertile Crescent', essentially pay for the stipends of the clergy in the inner city areas, and the senior clergy simply engage in busyness for busyness sake, like so many speed daters looking for romance.
But whatever motivates the new Bishop of Burnley in his insistence on some form of purity of the apostolic succession in which he hopes to remain unsullied by women, I am reminded of an ordination I attended where one of the newly ordained deacons refused to bow to the verger on the grounds that he was male.
And I am also reminded that the whole sorry state of racial, class and gender discrimination within the church which affects variously just about everyone stands as the most fundamental of obstacles with regard to the bringing into being of that community of persons we are called to be under God, which is a community of justice in which we are all equal.
Perhaps the Archbishop of York should give some thought to inviting the two new Bishops to join him in kneeling before the mercy seat and reminding himself and them that the Mercy Seat is the only place where God's forgiveness meets human sinfulness, where they would kneel and as it says in The Letter to the Hebrews, where, above them, would be 'the cherubim of glory'.
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