1999 Conference Speaker's Texts

 

Women Celebrating Eucharist: Path to Transformation
Kaye Ashe, O.P.

Kay Ashe is a Sinsinawa Dominican with a Ph.D in history living in Berkeley, Calif., who lectures widely on feminist thought and recently authored "The Feminization of the Church?"

The question of women celebrating Eucharist is a bristly one, a controversial one. It troubles, infuriates, shocks and scandalizes some, even as women's liturgies all over the country give joy, comfort and hope to others.

The question, however unsettling, isn't going to go away. it will follow us into the new millennium and will play a vital role in the church's slow transformation, because women celebrating Eucharist nudge the church toward the ideal of true Christian community. They remind us that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. They challenge understandings of Eucharist that serve to legitimate clerical control. They recreate liturgical space. They use images, symbols, and myths related to women's experience and their sense of themselves as images of God. Women preach without constraint in these settings. They find refuge from Sunday liturgies which function all too often to deepen their sense of alienation from the Church, because these celebrations are so thoroughly shot through with male centered language, male imagery, and male-inspired rubric.

Women's Eucharists rind their place ultimately in a wide-ranging reexamination of the meaning of church, sacrament, and ministry. They open out on questions that Mary Collins, liturgist and theologian, poses when she asks, "On what grounds and according to what criteria and for what purposes is any Christian, male or female, called to ordination in the church of Jesus Christ? How is church grounded in Christian baptism to be reconciled with clericalized ministry? If the theological tradition as it developed is historically intelligible, is it any longer theologically defensible? What is suitable church order at the end of the twentieth century? (unpublished manuscript) The emphasis Mary Collins places here on the baptismal theology of a call to discipleship broadens the horizons of the Christian vocation. Her questions invite us to bridge the great divide that separates lay and clerical, men and women, celibate and married.

It is within the theological and ecclesial framework that Mary Collins hints at that I rind the meaning of Women Celebrating Eucharist. Over the years I have taken part in many such celebrations. I'd like to speak of just two of them, one a Eucharist presided over by an Episcopalian woman, the second a public celebration of "A Critical Mass: Women Celebrating Eucharist" held in Oakland. They will serve, I hope, to illustrate not only the evolution of my personal experience but also, by extension, the evolution of this phenomenon in the church.

Sometime in the 70's I attended an event at Barat College focused on the question of women in the church. On Sunday, a woman newly ordained in the Episcopal church presided at the Eucharist. The assembly, it appeared to me, came together out of a strange mixture of motives: some were giggling and clearly uncomfortable to see a vested woman presiding; some, it seemed, had come to scoff; newspaper reporters gathered to exploit the novelty. By the early 70's I had already been profoundly affected by the women's movement. I was well-disposed, to say the least, toward women"s ordination, but I wasn't prepared for the flood of emotions that overcame me when I heard an ordained woman welcome us to worship, watched her preside, and heard her preach confidently, consolingly. She didn't mention Abraham without mentioning Sarah; Isaac without mentioning Rebecca. At the consecration she invited us all into the sanctuary. As this woman recalled the words of Jesus and invited us into a communion of justice and compassion, slow tears made their way down my face. "I'm at home," I told myself with some wonder. And I realized then how unaccustomed I was to feeling this way during a liturgy. After all, in my own denomination we were arguing about whether girls could serve at the altar, and it was still rare to see women as communion ministers.

Now, the Eucharist I've described was a "Women's Eucharist" in only a limited sense. It closely resembled the Roman rite. The only difference was the gender of the presider. Still, this was a huge and dramatic difference. It was a powerful symbol of women's changing self-concept, of women's radical equality with men in Christ, of changing patterns and understandings of the relationship of gender to issues of power and authority within church and society. And the presence of woman as priest suggested what the whole church had to gain by welcoming women warmly and fully into pastoral and sacramental ministry.

In the two decades following this experience, without abandoning meaningful parish Eucharistic celebrations, I have participated in many feminist liturgies. I love their fluidity and creativity. I rind in them an atmosphere congenial to women and consonant with women's lives and aspirations. These celebrations bear little resemblance to the traditional Roman rite. The women are not pretending to be priests. We are, however, commemorating the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, as we feel entitled to do. We reflect on our lives in the light of the Gospel and other meaningful texts, bless and share the bread and wine as symbols of the union of all of humanity with one another and in God. These celebrations are usually private ones connected with women's retreats, prayer groups or meetings.

In 1995 1 was invited to join a group of women in the East Bay to help plan a public liturgical event which we named "Critical Mass: Women Celebrating Eucharist." The first one took place in 1997 in downtown Oakland. It was featured in the NCR. Since then the celebrations have continued to bring together black, Hispanic, Asian and Whites; homosexual and heterosexuals; lay and religious; men, women and children; and people of various denominations. We gather in the open space that once led into the Oakland cathedral which had been razed because of earthquake damage. It now provides a gathering place for the homeless. It is a fitting place to gather in Jesus' name to break bread, share wine, and reflect on the Word. We are conscious of the symbolism of a new kind of church and Eucharist rising on the firm foundation of the old.

During the first anniversary celebration in 1998, we stood in concentric circles. We tied our multi-colored stoles together, connected them from circle to circle, and finally raised them above our heads and attached them to the trees growing in the elevated places around the plaza. They created a "web of life" above us in this church that had no doors, no wall. We watched as a woman danced around the plaza translating into movement Habbakkuk's lament over "strife, and clamorous discord," and his joy to hear that "the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint." In our shared homily I spoke with an African-American woman, an ordained Baptist minister, who spoke through tears of the struggle women face every day. She herself is in a minority among the ordained of her faith tradition. Just that morning she had experienced a humiliating put-down by her male co-pastor in front of her congregation. She drew strength, she said, from our celebration. Later she stepped up spontaneously to the microphone to sing a spiritual about everyone being free to step up to the welcome table "some one of these days." We followed her lead through several verses, accompanied by women on saxophone, bass, and keyboard.

Here was a celebration in which distinctions of race, gender, sexual orientation; religious denomination, class, and the line dividing lay and ordained were cheerfully ignored. I felt that we were engaged, like the prophets of old and those of our day, in seeing the present from the vantage point of the future. Like them, we were speaking and acting as if what was still only a possibility had already happened.

This was one experience of church and of Eucharist. Some looked upon it as a defiant gesture, a disrespectful ritual, a premature grabbing of a right that the Catholic church still reserves to men. And I regret that the central symbol of our faith, the sign of our unity in Christ's body, has become for some a source of division. We are a church in transition and in pain. But my experience of women's liturgies convinces me that they respond to an evident and crying need in today's church and they play a necessary role in the church's continued effort to renew itself.

I hope that as we enter the 21st century, people with differing views on Eucharist and on women's relation to it will stay in conversation. I hope that our Church will rind room in its spacious bosom for many expressions of Eucharist, and that each will be a lively, healing, inspiring, challenging event where everyone feels "at home." I hope the idea of a divinely sanctioned all-male priesthood will fade away. And I look forward to the day, as Bernard Haring's expresses it, when "all communities, however remote and tiny they may be, have a recognized right to a eucharistic minister ... from their midst or according to their legitimate desires." I suspect that legitimate desires will increasingly be fulfilled by ministers of both sexes, and that celibacy will not be an absolute requirement for answering the call of the community. Meanwhile, I shall continue to rind sustenance and good companionship both at women's eucharists and in parishes where staff and assembly are sensitive, flexible, inclusive, imaginative, and open to the future.