Twenty-five Years Later, and Still Forthright

Contrasting colors side-by-side, juxtapositions, jarring differences: these have been my bread and butter in this blog. Sometimes a kind of first cousin– let’s call it coincidence –comes around, wanting a little attention, too.

With coincidence, there’s usually more of a gentle feeling – a kind of “Well, what do you know and isn’t this wonderful?”  Two old friends getting on the same plane or a high school student inheriting a textbook with an uncle’s name in it.

It’s in retrospect, often, that coincidences seem to multiply. In the present, unrelated things just happen in a jumble of lots of things. Later on, however, as we sort memories, we might spy through our binoculars a funny pair of events strolling together, barely noticing the rest of the crowd.  I’m doing precisely that, now.

Twenty-five years and about a month ago in Boston, Barbara Clementine Harris became the first female bishop ever—going back a mere 2,000 years– in the Anglican Communion. It happened in February, not in July, but there were a whole lot of fireworks around this election. On a smaller scale of fireworks (not smaller for us or for our children, actually) my husband-to-be and I met and started to date in the exact same month.

Although he was a loan officer in a big bank at the time, Rob was planning to exit that scene and start–resume, actually –training towards the priesthood, so he was paying close attention to Episcopal news…and this was big news all right. Barbara Harris was (and is) female and she was also (and still is) black. It was a kind of  double whammy for a church traditionally seen as aligned with The Establishment.

Swept up as I was both by falling in love and by working at a tough high school, I remember Barbara Harris being someone in the corner of my eye, out of my main view. Just beginning to get acquainted with the world of organized religion, I had a whole lot else to try to figure out. And so she became a groundbreaking bishop and after some years retired, and I became wife and then mother three times over and then—glory be –wife to a bishop who is just getting accustomed to his crozier.

We didn’t meet in 1989, crossed paths only tangentially, but this past week I felt as if I got to know her better. That’s because my husband was at the House of Bishops (his other domicile) in Texas (this time) and one day they voted on a resolution to honor Barbara Harris on her 25^th anniversary milestone. Hearing this, and perhaps feeling a bit nostalgic for those falling-in-love days in Boston, I set out to learn something more about this person who was getting another wave of recognition at the same time, coincidentally, that Gloria Steinem was turning 80. So I watched a series of recorded conversations with Harris chatting on a range of topics, provided by The Visionary Project.

Before becoming ordained, she’d worked in public relations for Sun Oil Company, meeting lots of folks of all stripes and having a turn or two managing conflicts. Registering black voters in Mississippi, she encountered real danger. When she was advised to wear a bullet-proof vest at her consecration, she shrugged off the suggestion. About the hateful remarks and threats she got at the time, she said, “I don’t take this in a personal way.” She was anything but demure, however, and also didn’t mince words when talking about people who spewed the nasty speech, saying, “Nobody can hate like Christians.”

What comes through, in these conversations and also in the descriptions of people who have worked with her, is a quality of forthrightness. Indeed, the website describes her as having a “forthright prophetic voice.” She tells it like it is, doesn’t pull any punches, shoots from the hip even. Fortifying as this quality is for leaders, it can also make life a little dicey, especially for women.  I’m no prophet,but I own up to a forthrightness in my own nature, too. Most of the time it’s OK, though occasionally it takes me into trouble. Once, for instance, I even tried to utter a correction to something my husband said during a sermon. It had to do with baseball, which is pretty sacrosanct territory to me, but still, I had no business saying anything. None whatsoever. I cringe thinking back on this moment. In fact, let’s just forget I even told you. If my husband heard me from the pulpit—I’ve never had the nerve to ask –I count my lucky stars that he forgave me.

My stumbles aside, I do take some comfort in knowing that Barbara Harris put her own kind of forthrightness to good use. Even now, I think she’s still speaking out on people dragging their feet over gay marriage. Speaking of dragging feet, however, can you believe that there are now only 13 women bishops among a total of 139 in the whole operation, and only three of these are full diocesan bishops? Read more about the numbers here.  The tally is  pretty shocking, especially when you consider how many women are in the pews on any given Sunday. You might call it a kind of dis-connect happening here. Maybe, in the next 25 years, there will be more women bishops and I’ll learn the beauty of keeping quiet in certain situations. Just maybe.