As You Draw Near to Us - Ordination Anniversary Celebration Barbara Billey, priestess

Barbara Billey and Michele Birch-Conery, mixed media

This is what Jesus tells Mary Magdalene in a visionary encounter with him. "Where the mind is, there is the treasure (Gospel of Mary Magdalene 7:4)." 

My call to priesthood was birthed in an unexpected way. This sacred invitation came in the summer of 2010 following a worship service at an Episcopal Benedictine Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan. I was at the end of a ten-day silent retreat at nearby GilChrist, a contemplative retreat centre where I had gone for many retreats over the previous five years. I was getting into my car for the drive home to Windsor, Canada when a kindly man, likely a pastor on retreat, approached me with a question, "Are you a priest?" I was shocked that he would see me this way and I told him I wasn't one. In my heart, I heard ‘But I want to be.’ With this awareness, I felt a deep stillness and calm. When I arrived home, the joyous madness began as I shared this new vision with my husband, family and friends. 

For me and for people who know and love me, the call to priesthood was inconceivable from its conception. My childhood play with friends did not include acting like a priest,  distributing cookie wafers for hosts or juice for wine. Although, I was educated in Roman Catholic (RC) schools, went to Mass every Sunday, and briefly, in my late teens, contemplated a consecrated life as a woman religious, I never dreamed of becoming a priest. How could I? I am a woman.

I wasn't interested in parish council, liturgical music or any other ministries of the Church; however, I sporadically was a minister of the Word and Eucharist. I was not an avid Bible reader who was drawn toward theology. I certainly was not a justice worker or activist. I was a psychotherapist with a passion for the soul life of persons and all forms of art, especially dance. I identified, as did many of my generation and younger, as "spiritual not religious." I went about my life being the best person I could be based on the values of love and care that my family and the Church had taught me.

In my youth and early adulthood, I enjoyed Mass at Blessed Sacrament Church where I was baptized and where I received all the Sacraments. The liturgy, especially the music and prayers, sometimes the homilies, inspired me. Probably like most RCs, my mind would wander. I was fulfilling my weekly obligation, because to not attend was considered a sin, even in the late 60s and early 70s of our post-Vatican Church.

My parents would drive my younger siblings and me from our middle-class, white neighborhood to where the Church was located in one of the poorer sections of the city. I really liked the priests, especially Fr. Joe who would rant about the latest bishop edict that didn't fit his notion of living Gospel values. My friend, Joanna was a music leader there. Fr. Joe was open to her subversive and frequent attempts to thread the Feminine Sacred through the music and liturgical movement. He rarely wore a chausable, most often baggy, cobalt blue sweat pants underneath an alb.  

Many good friends have been and currently are women religious and male priests. My passionate interest in the life of the soul and Buddhist practices held my attention more than my involvement in the Church. I was binary: Buddhist-Roman Catholic. In fact, there was a period of time in my 40s when I was so angry that women weren't included in positions of leadership that, in a radical act of defiance, I spent my Sundays walking in the cathedral of the forest near my home. At that time, I left corporate life as an Executive Director and for ten years, Pat St. Louis, a Sister of St. Joseph and I created a business called WellnessWorks. We facilitated retreats, programs or workshops that integrated spirituality, creativity and psychology.

You can imagine how a call to priesthood in the RC Church would have been a dramatic turn that upset the status quo of my comfortable life and of those who loved me. The push back from family and friends was unexpected. Although he did not object to me being a priest, my husband, Ken, in following his own truth, could not in good conscience attend my ordination. He thought I should work for reform from the inside of the Church. My mother told me I should not go ahead with ordination since my husband was not supportive. They were accustomed to my various changes, but this time I had gone too far. Some persons in my spiritual circles deemed my choice as a regression; the RC tradition was fraught with patriarchy and pedophilia. One person called it a cult. All they could see was the confinement of my free spirit by a roman collar around my neck. 

"Where the mind is, there is the treasure (7:4)." In the Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the mind, in Greek philosophy and culture, was considered to be the heart. Follow my heart, I did. I was ordained Saturday, July 25, 2015 soon after the feast day of Mary Magdalene.

If becoming ordained an RC woman priest wasn't enough, living out this calling has been another animal, an elephant. There are many mountains to climb and as far as I know elephants don't climb mountains.

One of the harshest realities of ordination has been the loss of friends who left the RC Church because of patriarchal structures and abuses of women, children and persons who are LBGTQIAS+. Even though our faith community offered a refreshing new interpretation of our tradition, sadly, they were adverse to such an extent as to not be able to reconsider. My hopes were also dashed when only a handful of the 130 people who attended my ordination chose to continue on as a faith community.

As I plod the mountain trails, I discover many learning curves. Some of the requirements of my vocation:

·   1. To be current on global and Vatican politics and to bear the heart-breaking inherent injustices of God's beloved creation;

·   2. To recreate liturgy and Word to be a contemporary expression of Divine Mystery in a model of priesthood that embraces Jesus' values for equality, justice and empowerment. One where feminist, liberation, and evolutionary theologies are core our liturgies and ministries;

T 3. To acquire a third graduate degree, a doctorate in ministry, in addition to completing a program of preparation;

·  4. To examine in myself and to let go of communication patterns that reek of patriarchy and domination in order to be a model and to not repeat the harm that has been done due to these practices by our patriarchal Church and other sociopolitical institutions;

·   5.  To live out a model of priesthood where we flatten out the hierarchy by sharing power and responsibility;

·   6.  To be a computer geek who sometimes feels hermetically sealed to electronic devices; to balance work and family relationships; and to listen to people who know a lot more than I do and;

·   7.  To shift plans in order to be responsive in the moment to emerging pastoral needs;

·   8.  To embrace and enact with others psyche-altering, untried models of collaboration and consensus ;

·   9.  To endure my and others limits of aging and resources (human and financial) and to take care of ourselves and each other;

·   10. To love and to accept persons who are very different from me, and to collaborate with them in creating innovation in our praying and being;

·   11.  To bear the hurt of family members who show no interest in this essential part of me that is a priest;

·   12.  To wash and iron my vestments and table of worship cloths; with my husband to cook meals and to care for our home (unlike the priests who have their myriad assistants, paid and unpaid);  

·   13.  To be publicly identified by a Church official in the diocese of London administration as "excommunicating myself" because Jesus did not ordain women (Jesus ordained no one);

·   14. To do all this for free; and

·   15. To withdraw from the 24/7ness of this vocation to pray, to rest and to play, and to be with the Holy One who sustains us all in our dreaming and doing. 

Had I known what I was getting into would I have said yes?

Yes, I would have. Why? Because the vistas and views of this elephant-climbing-up-the mountain ordination are stunning. At every turn and around each bend is LOVE. Holy Presence draws nearer to me, sends me mountain-climbers to guide the way that have a lot more climbing experience than me. 

First, there are Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and then centuries of Christians who were persecuted because of their faith. Then there are our foremothers in the women priest movement, women who dared to place their feet on the path to ordination, making the way clearer for those of us who follow. They continue to mentor and encourage us.

There are friends and family who stick by me, especially Ken who is helping where and how he is able to give space for the fuller realization of my vocation as a priest. There is the Sacrament of Holy Orders that holds all this in a spiral of grace. 

Finally, there are members of our local Heart of Compassion Faith Community who are at the heart and soul of our holy machinations and mischievous reclamations of our rightful place at the table of worship and in the wider world.  

You, Sacred Presence raise me up so I can climb mountains. You raise me up to be more than I can be.

And now as You, Sacred Presence draw nearer to us, a new vision of faith community is coming toward us, where we are compelled to creatively embody Jesus' vision of open-heartedness, equality and justice through encounters that empower us in praying and contemplation, in sharing power and responsibility, in welcoming the unwelcomed, and in extending compassionate care to those among us in need.

As You, Sacred Presence draw nearer to us, You dance and sing us into more mad joy. Women are birthing the kin-dom of God into being. In our covenant with You, Divine Mystery we feel ourselves as Your garland of beauty and we are Your delight (cf. 61:5).