1994: Women Priests
March 16th 2022
EVERYTHING FALLS AWAY
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
William Stafford
Sooner or later, everything falls away.
You, the work you’ve done, your successes,
large and small, your failures, too. Those
moments when you were light, alongside
the times you became one with the night.
The friends, the people you loved
who loved you, those who might have wished
you ill, none of this is forever. All of it is
soon to go, or going, or long gone.
Everything falls away, except the thread
you’ve followed, unknowing, all along.
The thread that strings together all you’ve
been and done, the thread you didn’t know
you were tracking until, toward the end,
you see that the tread is what stays
as everything else falls away.
Follow that thread as far as you can and
you’ll find that it does not end, but weaves
into the unimaginable vastness of life. Your
life never was the solo turn it seemed to be.
It was always part of the great weave of
nature and humanity, an immensity we
come to know only as we follow our own
small threads to the place where they
merge with the boundless whole.
Each of our threads runs its course, then
joins in life together. This magnificent tapestry –
this masterpiece in which we live forever.
Parker J. Palmer
In the days when I was on a placement at St John's Hills Road in Cambridge, I found myself one Sunday morning having coffee with Rosemary Guillebaud and her sister Philippa.
Rosemary asked me what I was doing in Cambridge, and I told her I was training for ordination at Ridley Hall. She immediately swivelled in her seat and reached out for her sister, frail now, unable to speak and sitting in her wheelchair, on the other side of the table: “Philippa”, she said, tapping lightly on her sister’s knuckles with the ends of her fingers. “Philippa.This is Alex - and she’s training to be a priest!" Philippa’s head came up. Her coffee cup went down. She smiled, and slowly the smile became a beam, a benediction, for me, from across the table. From across a whole life.
Rosemary explained:
“Philippa and I were missionaries; I was in Uganda, and she was in Sudan. We both prayed every day for fifty years that there would be women priests in the Church of England….”
Last Saturday The Bishop of Bristol unveiled a plaque in the cathedral commemorating the first ordination of women priests on the 12th March 1994. Thirty two women were ordained that day. All of them standing on the prayers of Philippa and Rosemary Guillebaud, and thousands of others.
It’s a service I remember well because it was broadcast live on the BBC, and because I had skin in the game. I was invested in the lives of these women because of the vocation that was being nursed in me. I remember that they were so ordinary on every level, getting off the coach from their retreat , surplices over their arms, into a sea of flashbulbs. I remember the booming voice of Bishop Barry Rogerson asking the congregation for an affirmative “Yes” to his question “Is it your will that they should be ordained?” I remember the rugby scrum of clergy around each woman and the invocation: “Send down the Holy Spirit upon your servant Angela.. upon your servant Valerie...upon your servant Susan…”.
Out of the thirty-two who lined up by the west door of the cathedral that day, nine of them are ''gone-to-glory', including the two who I knew, Clare Pipe-Wolferstan, and Valerie Woods.
Clare, the owner of a flatulent Doberman called Sheba, would greet me at the door with a glass of wine and a rolled-up Church Times. Equipping me to deal with any canine effluvium that might be coming in my direction . A hilarious woman, with a powerful faith, she died of a brain haemorrhage in her forties, while I was training. I was reminded of the Communion of Saints, and I sought her there to thank her, on the day that I was ordained as a priest in 2003.
Val was a parish priest down to her ankle boots, and later a prison chaplain. A gentle faced woman with a rod of steel down her back. I lived in her spare room in her vicarage for eight months, observing my own vocation quietly as she came and went from festivals and weddings and burying the dead; to say I was scared of her would be a bit of an understatement. I always assumed I would see her again, striding purposefully towards me at a conference, but it was not to be. There is still a gap for me where that meeting should have been: But if I listen intently to the universe I can definitely hear her singing 'I Serve a Risen Saviour', slightly off-key.
Neither of those women took a single prisoner. Fierce resilience was their other baptism and their first communion. They wouldn’t have survived without those sacraments. I was ordained on both of their prayers.
In this way we are all connected. Everything belongs. Nothing wasted.
Below are the names of the first women priests in The Church of England
Ordained in Bristol Cathedral on the 12th March 1994.
Angela Berners-Wilson
Christine Clarke
Judith Creighton
Faith Cully
Brenda Dowie
Carol Edwards
Annis Fessey
Jan Fortune-Wood
Susan Giles
Jane Hayward
Jean Kings,
Karen MacKinnon
Audrey Maddock
Charmion Mann
Helen Marshall
Glenys Mills
Jillianne Norman
Clare Pipe-Wolferstan
June Plummer
Susan Restall,
Susan Rose
Susan Shipp
Margery Simpson
Sylvia Stevens
Judith Thompson
Anita Thorne
Sheila Tyler
Pauline Wall
Rosemary Dawn Watling
Valerie Woods
