To Be Ordained or Not To Be --
Living an Embodied Feminism and Spirituality

In 1996, after much meditation and a lot of thoughtful analysis, I decided I would not seek ordination when I graduated from the Cella program. Though my decision was based on myriad things, the challenges of the language itself, the medieval ecclesiastical constructs of 'rank' and 'order' at its roots, and the perception of the reality it "heralds and affirms," are at the core of my questions about the magic and reality of neopagan, Wiccan, and Goddessian "ordination" of priestesses (and priests).

Ministerial Credentials -- She Calls Where She Will
"You can't know until you know." -- the enchanting philosophy of visionary Mari Powers

My meditations and pondering on the ordination question led me to a totally practical consideration -- would I need ministerial credentials to do my Goddess work? As I conceptualized my work then, I could not see how having ministerial credentials would materially or spiritually support or boost my work. I came to believe that I did not need ministerial credentials. I think I was right, yet I was also wrong, as I learned several years later.

On March 25, 2001, I entered into a yearlong piece of priestessing when I accompanied a friend and circle sister to the hospital, where her husband was in the Intensive Care Unit as the result of an overnight automobile accident that left him with traumatic brain injury and what would be five months of existing in a persistent vegetative state before his death in late August.

As we approached the ICU, I was told to identify myself as the family minister so that I could go on the ward and into John's room with my friend. John was a self-styled heathen (what the European and new American settlers of North America had called his Native American ancestors). John also claimed pagan when he wasn't in an "in-your-face" mode about his spirituality -- a mode he exercised when necessary with his coworkers and sports buddies, most of whom were evangelical, proselytizing Christians. By the end of that first day in the hospital, I had interacted with several of those fundamentalist buddies at the hospital, a traumatized family, and a Shakespearean cast of other characters.

On the next day, I did what I had chosen not to do many years earlier -- I applied for ministerial credentials from the Universal Life Church. Many founders of churches and traditions worldwide were originally ordained by ULC, and many still carry their credentials.

Getting ULC ministerial credentials did help me in my priestess work. I used them to negotiate with various creditors and state agencies who had material interests in John's estate (modest as it was). This was a task that was beyond my friend's ability to do during John's hospitalization and after his death. This kind of help appears to be a traditional ministerial offering. The credentials, my willingness to take them seriously, and my friend's assertion that I was the family minister gave me some credibility with various family members that allowed me to support them through the challenges, the difficult decisions and inevitable conflicts that arise when a family member experiences traumatic injury and death.

It was my own spiritual practice, my studies, my deep listening skills, and my life experiences, however, that prepared me for and put me in the right time and space to provide grief and vocational counseling and support to my friend and her two sons. In this work, I was led by Goddess to do a six-week course of counseling with the youngest son, a pagan rite of passage that culminated in a manhood ritual. Certainly, nothing in Dianic Wicca or my Cella studies, per se, prepared me for this. The Goddess, however, works in strange and glorious ways if we are open to Her and have enough self-knowledge to stay out of Her way.

Somewhere between feminist and spiritual concerns about ordination as one of "the master's tools" (Audre Lorde) and the acute pressure for credentials to empower and give a culturally-understandable name to the work I did for my friend and her family, I became ordained. I make sense of this contradiction by seeing the hand of Goddess in it.

I honor the wisdom in this experience and claim my ministry as dating from my "ordination" with the ULC. I understand now that the ULC doesn't grant generic credentials; it empowers independent ministers to provide community services to their communities. There seems to be in the energy or philosophy of ULC an understanding of the communal health and deep wisdom of autonomous spiritual communities, independent of centralized mother churches and top-down administrative bodies.

The ULC claims to have ordained 20 million independent ministers since 1959. I notice that I have heard nothing in the news of sex or other scandals within ULC clergy, liability issues that worry the boards of ordaining institutions..

Ultimately, each woman chooses for herself, based on her cosmology, the environments and credentials appropriate to her work. I'm still in the middle of curiosity about the question of ordination in general, as I am about the more specific questions of the organicity of spiritual communities (autonomous local cells; grove- or beehive-organized communities; nationally-directed and authorized ministries).

Do you think about things like this? If so, and if you'd like to chat, please "Contact Me" (see the link below and/or above).