What Calling Looks Like

Against Presumption in the Conversation About Restoring the Order of Deaconesses

“We were both of us disturbed by a report suddenly reaching us that we were about to be advanced to the dignity of the episcopate. As soon as I heard this rumor I was seized with alarm and perplexity: with alarm lest I should be made captive against my will, and perplexity, inquiring as I often did whence any such idea concerning us could have entered the minds of these men; for looking to myself I found nothing worthy of such an honor.”

-St. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood I.6

We give water to the thirsty; we wash the bodies of children and people too weak or disabled to help themselves. But mostly, most basically, we are grateful for the water because it is given by God and through the blessing of the waters and the Lord’s Baptism, we get to know God more because of water. We are grateful for water because we were baptized and participate in the life of God through it! We do not look into the water to admire our own reflection. We do not take up the holy water given to bless us as a prop for pretending we are in charge.

Today I opened my email to find a deeply disturbing essay by a young woman whose canonical standing would prevent her by age and marital history from becoming a deaconess were the office restored, yet who has continually put herself forward as one who has a certain calling to diaconate ministry. If you have read my writing or listened to me talk, you know that I am a strong supporter of the restoration of the historical diaconate in general and women’s diaconate specifically. My reasons grow from an understanding of the needs of women and children in the church, a strong grounding in church history that allows me to see that the order was never dissolved in the Orthodox Church (though it was defined out of existence by the Catholic Church in 1205 at the Fourth Lateran Council, which effectively also shuttered the order in Orthodoxy since Constantinople was occupied by the Catholic Crusaders at the time), that the ministry was deeply important for catechism and inclusion of women in all stages of life and all levels of health and ability, and that much of the church’s long, deep ministry to persons and families with disabilities that was a hallmark of the first 1200 years of the Church withered with the neglect of the order of deaconesses. I am a disability minister. I am from a long line of Christian women whose faithful service has been along the lines of the historic diaconate; my great-great-grandmothers were called “the Deaconesses” by their Catholic community, and my Nana was called a deaconess by her Catholic community until her death in the 1990s; these titles were informal, though the work they did was formative for their parishes and neighborhoods. They fed the poor, were generous in distributing alms, assisted their priests in bringing concerns of families, taught and prayed for children, and organized others to do good works on behalf of the poor, sick, frail elderly, people with disabilities, and children. Diaconate ministry is my birthright, and I have practiced it guided my grandmothers, informally, my whole life. From them I learned to give alms, to help people with boundaries and dignity and truth, to love and accept and welcome people as they are and according to their needs. It is because of their prayers and examples, besides the examples I encounter in the scriptures, the lives of saints, and the patristic witness, all of which I have diligently studied since youth, that I have made such strides in making faith accessible to my own disabled children, to those in my local communities, and to many Christians around the world through speaking, writing, and teaching.

Yet there is one thing I would never presume, and that is to know what is not my place to know. I am called by God to a servant’s life, one poured out in motherly love to my children, in the love of a teacher and with motherly and sisterly compassion to the church, and in support of my fathers and brothers in ministry in the church. I live my calling, which sounds an awful lot to me like that of the historic deaconess, in whichever way is given to me, teaching when asked, prayerfully offering educated, tested advice when asked, giving whatever wisdom and pattern recognition and learning I can behind the scenes to other leaders and ministers, writing when I can to share what I have learned, and above all daily, hourly seeking God and seeking to love others as God loves them (though forgive me, I fail a lot). Should the bishops decide to reach for me for a deaconess if they restored the order, I would likely be given a heart so willing to accept by the grace of God, but mostly the idea is fearful to me, in the sense of awe. Now, as I am a layperson, though a highly trained one, a mature one and competent one, I speak only for myself and my family; my mistakes and misunderstanding are my own to repent of. I bear only the burden of image-bearer, not one of worthiness. I could not imagine presuming to be worthy to go into the most intimate spaces of women’s lives, to offer them the presanctified gifts. On the occasions that I have been invited to “preach” or rather to give a response to the Gospel as a layperson, I have been seized with literal trembling, with tears as I prepared and with great compunction and prayerful humiliation afterwards. When I am asked for advice and answer, it is always only after hours of deep reflection and prayer, though I also draw on a lifetime of learning and study and prayers. It would be easier for me to count on a hand the minutes I am not praying on purpose than to try to count my prayers. I am not boasting in saying this; though my grandmothers were holy women, my parents were abusive addicts. I survived a childhood of extreme and sustained traumas; my ACES is 9/10. Healing from my childhood wounds was the work of the Holy Spirit, through prayer and understanding given me from the time I was eleven years old and studied the Psalms and Prophets for hours a day, along with the Gospels. (I also have undergone professional therapy at different times to help me through rougher patches of healing.) Christ came and got me, not only bringing me back from the dead when I was emergency baptized by a nun-nurse after being born dead (placenta birthed first, cord wrapped three times around my neck, forcepsed out to save my mother), but also gently and persistently leading me forth from the pain and shattered image of my soul as I followed Him through decades of study, prayers, hymns, and above all, service. When my identity seemed like a broken mirror, I called upon God to shine His face upon every scattered part of me and draw me together in Himself. I knew because of my brokenness that I could only be healed and brought back together by being refined by the flame of the Lord. I have been willing to burn for God, and so by and by in His grace I have found a life in which I burn with God and am not consumed. This warmth of the Holy Spirit gives me strength to care for my high support needs children through the long hours of the night, to reach out to them and reach them and to communicate with them beyond what I was told by experts could be possible. I daily get to experience the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit because I am God’s handmaid.

Yet I am not God’s Deaconess, because the Church has not asked for such a ministry from me. I do not have any expectations on that score. If the office is restored, I would not likely be considered, for good reasons: I don’t speak the historic languages of Greek or Arabic, I am not politically facile, and I do not flatter or act deferentially to people in power (because I see myself as beneath everyone equally, but this is misunderstood because of my autistic directness). I earned my seminary degrees at Duke Divinity School and studied patristics with top scholars rather than priests. Besides which, I don’t have any standing from my family. I am a convert, and I was a bastard born dead to a teenaged unwed mother. I have no status, or wealth, or political acumen to put me forward. Also because I have long spoken on disability accessibility and inclusion, I have been targeted in smear campaigns by fascists for the past ten years. I still hear such terrible rumors of myself as I stand in my kitchen sipping tea with my husband and caring for my children that I wonder at how the fascists imagined such a bogeywoman. Strangers on the internet who seem to have never read a book, or at least not have ever read anything I have written, occasionally pop up to tell me that “the bishops” are all against me, for what reasons I am left to imagine, especially since the same bishops have had me speak at many of their conferences. Nonetheless, if reputations matter for such things, mine would surely be at least as checkered as the Baba Yaga-imaginers could invent, whether I had earned it or not. In short, I would not be noticed, much less reached for, should the order be restored in the United States jurisdictions.

This does not negate the calling of God; it is merely how things are. I am not discouraged by it, but rather I seek to educate people on the sanctity of women ministers in the Church’s prayers and to fill in the gaps in common historical knowledge about women deacons. I can think of a few older women who would be excellent deaconesses, and I would put their names in and endeavor to assist them if the order were restored. As far as this hypothetical restoration goes, though, it does not concern my daily life. I sometimes tell people with whom I work that I have the calling to the work but not the robes and power and calls of worthiness; if I were a deaconess, the church would rightly put me at the back of the church to help the marginalized, to teach, and to bring prayers up to the priests when no one was looking. I don’t care about robes or notoriety; I only care that the lack of the women’s diaconate keeps disability ministry in its infancy. In order to be inclusive, we need a dedicated, trained, competent diaconate that knows disability life and ministry; nearly all such qualified ministers are women, so the women’s diaconate is needed to usher in the inclusion of persons with chronic illnesses, conditions, and disabilities in the fullness of Church life.

I will not cease to serve merely because this need is unmet and, because there are no deaconesses, it is likely that I will have to restart the same basic work over and over and over as it fails to take root due to lack of clerical infrastructure; God’s faithfulness never fails despite how many times His Kingdom does not take root in my heart due to my negligence or my lack of restructuring my life in a timely way around His call to be His disciple and to feed His lambs; I will not stop getting back up and trying again to be faithful even though I do not see the restoration for which I hope.

Even so, I do this knowing that it is unlikely that someone like me would be called upon by the Church to fulfill such a ministry; without malice, I notice that God sees what even the Church does not. Perhaps my heart would break too much if I were so invited; only God knows.

When I first began to sus out the shape of my calling, I read the stories of many callings. What struck me most was how all of the great saints were unwilling to undertake their clerical positions. Many of the fathers were accosted and dragged into the church by mobs and made into priests or bishops against their protests. Others deeply questioned the Church’s judgment in singling them out, because they were merely beginners in the Way; how could they be guides?

Today, the feast of the Elevation of the Three Holy Hierarchs, I am reminded starkly of the fact that all three were made bishops more or less against their will and under protest. None of them sought the position of influence or authority or the burden of shepherding. They were all intellectually engaged, highly trained weirdos (strange for their degree of devotion and learning) who loved God and sought Him, all of them from families with faithful, influential women who passed along the faith. They delighted in seeking God and inquiring of Him. The burden of shepherding wore each of them out, though together and separately they guided the Church away from great heresies. Once they were ordained, all of them served with highly influential deaconesses, and in fact they were all friends with Saint Olympias the Deaconess, who was also their patroness. St. Basil’s older sister was an abbess, St. Macrina, and his younger sister was a deaconess, St. Theosebia the Deaconess. St. Gregory the Theologian, famous for preaching the Theological Orations that brought Constantinople back from one Orthodox chapel amongst a city of Arians to a city of Orthodox Churches with few remaining Arians, preached from and was supported by the patronage of the chapel of his good friend, St. Olympias the Deaconess. St. John Chrysostom was reared by his mother St. Anthousa and his aunt St. Sabiniana the Deaconess, and he served in the altar and in many ministries to the Church alongside his good friend St. Olympias the Deaconess.

I have been discipled by humble ministers and told again and again, “only teach when asked” and, “listen, and listen, and pray, and listen. Only answer when you must, to help others see God with them.” I have practiced Benedictine listening and formed my life around St. Benedict’s “ora et labora” teaching, that “they pray as they work lift their hearts to God with both hands.” I have listened through dangers and threats and illnesses and dark nights of the soul for the call of God towards joy, towards His presence, always to find God alongside me, setting me free again and again from not only external trials but also the idols of my own assumptions. I have learned from professionals in communication how to pause, to wait, to interpret and assess communication milestones for nonspeaking children, and through the combination of these ways of listening, I have, with God and energized by the Holy Spirit through great labors of vigil-keeping and attention, brought three nonspeaking children into the ability to speak. The mountains that faith has moved have been in my own heart. I climbed the mountain seeking God, but He was whispering always among the lowly, even in my lowliness.

What I am saying is that I know what it is to be called, to always hear the call of God, which is the birthright not of an office or a position or an ordination, but of all persons created by God, Whose voice His sheep hear, and follow. I am a shepherd or a sheepdog because I have learned (a little) to hear with those God has given me to guide.

That is what calling is: seeking God, seeking God’s face, seeking to serve because of the great love of God that makes service a joy, because you find the face of God in the face of each person before you, because you hear the voice of God giving speech to the little ones in your care, the kindness of God giving them boldness and safety. To heal, to protect, to guide, to teach: these are the works of God in which we participate mostly as those being healed, being protected, guided, taught. These gifts and works of God are also callings, but how they are fulfilled is not something the called presume to know. I do not know when I wake up which guidance God will give to my prayer for help in teaching, but I listen and receive and offer what I have heard. Most of the life of someone who answers the calling of God is a surprise. That is why the disciples we remember as saints tell us that they begin again each day.

The proper name for someone who answers the call of God each day, each moment, is “disciple.” I am a disciple. I have known myself as such since the scriptures opened to me when I was twelve that God was speaking also to me when I read Isaiah 50: 4 & 5 (RSV):

The Lord God has given me
the tongue of those who are taught,
that I may know how to sustain with a word
him that is weary.
Morning by morning he wakens,
he wakens my ear
to hear as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious,
I turned not backward.

Forgive me for so meandering. I am trying to show you that I have considered what it means to be called for over thirty-seven years, and what I have found is that our faithfulness does not rely on the obstacles or openness around us; if men rise up against me and slander me, I am not excused from sharing the talents God has given and increased in my life; if someone asks me to help in a church and then withdraws the request, my ministry and work offered was not less faithful because they changed their minds; if God sends me visions and saints to draw me into His service but the Church ignores me wholly, I will still minister to those He puts before me. I will continue to offer what I have freely received. This is because the great mercy of God and even the calling of God is freely given. Yet the consequences of calling and how the Church extends her calling to ordinations or consecrations (or not) is not a test of God or His calling. I believe and have witnessed the call of God to all people. I believe with Saint Augustine that we recognize what is good because God has graciously allowed us to remember the future/the eternal truth that we will only know fully in the Resurrection. If here I am “some woman” and ignored, it is enough, because it is God Whose face I seek and from Whose lips I wish to hear my name called.

If we presume to claim a position in the church that has not been offered (and for which we are likely for various reasons unqualified, though the pertinent point is not having been invited into it), we are not faithfully living out a calling to discipleship; we are bearing witness against ourselves that we set a test for God and tempted God by saying we would only answer His calling if such and such were first given us. The Shepherd’s staff of the Bishops and the teaching Rod of the deacons (men and women) long guided the church, it is true, and we should remember them both: The Staff of the Bishop to keep us from despair, and the Rod of the true deacons (Olympias, Phoebe, Mary, Martha, Stephen, Philip) to keep us from presumption. The neglect of the order of the deaconesses has allowed presumption to flourish amongst the church today: on one hand many clamor against the historic ordination of women because they presume their view of authoritarian hierarchies and their misogynistic failures of imagination ought to be the standard that God follows rather than acknowledging what God has actually done with and in the Church and the diaconate of women; on the other hand there are some women who presume to test God and their fellow Christians by demanding that they be made deaconesses merely because they have been called. Were these presumptuous persons to encounter a real Deaconess, their delusions would be dashed. The young women would learn that they know very little and that the considerations of ministry are manifold and by no means discerned mathematically by the mere recognition of the call to discipleship. The many clamoring ignoramuses would put their hands over their mouths if they could see for even one Lent, one Pascha, one span of September to September the fruitful increase of all of the Church’s ministries and above all her Paschal joy if the women’s diaconate were restored. Imagine: the little girls and young women and the clamoring misogynists all struck with holy awe and tears of joy if they were to hear a woman’s voice calling out that “Christ is Risen!” as the Church first heard from women’s voices. Yet, even if this is not to be in our lifetimes, we do not get to playact and apply for a position that has not been offered.

I am a professional writer, bookseller, editor, speaker, theologian, teacher, and my motherhood has been many times more demanding than most because of my disabilities and those of my children. Yet I do not go around critiquing writing or holding out my hand for payment whenever someone mentions that they read or telling strangers with no interest and in a disordered way about the way the Holy Trinity wishes to dwell fully in our hearts or burst in upon others’ classrooms and take over their whiteboards uninvited or deign to give other women advice on how to clothe or feed or guide their little ones. St. Benedict warned at the beginning of his Rule specifically against welcoming monks who presumed to travel around, because they were unstable, presumptuous, trying to bypass the diligent work required to bear spiritual fruit, and they would disrupt the brethren, and it behooves anyone desiring to be a faithful disciple to see the desire to spread themselves around as a temptation from the devil rather than an expression of love. I am only qualified to fulfill the calling that God has called me to, not to presume to go about and tell people they should listen to me. Prophets in the wilderness did not drag the people out to hear them; even the Lord Jesus Christ did not presume to heal where the people rejected His offer of healing.

To presume that hearing God’s voice means that, despite one’s lack of canonical suitability or training or maturity or stability of character or life situation, one gets to claim a clerical role and ordination which has not been offered, is dangerous and ill-advised and destructive of the soul. One time a friend of mine in a ministry was having a hard time, and I thought in my heart how I would have loved to be her assistant both to relieve her burden and to learn from her. I prayed to God for this and even found myself imagining where I could fit a little desk at the edge of her office if needed. Yet what transpired was wholly different; she moved to a totally different ministry and started a project that changed thousands of lives. Had I made the mistake of thinking that my vain imagination was the same as my calling, would I have been there to support my friend through her time of transition and to rejoice with her when her new role shone forth? Would I have been so preoccupied that I had missed the actual good works that God had called me towards in that time? Would I have ignored the tug towards Orthodoxy that our family was experiencing then?

I tell you this example because imagining a ministry, even a good one, even humbly, is not wholesome if you have set your heart upon it instead of upon God. If you cannot bear the humiliation of admitting that you are not qualified for a position canonically or socially or by the languages you speak or by your lack of political finesse or by your remote location or by the fact that the Church just simply has not asked, then you will never be able to bear the humiliating work of ministry. People will be at their weakest, and they might lash out; if they are kind, yet your own body and mind will fail you; your tongue will be heavy and you will not speak always well or with graciousness; you will offend and have to apologize to those you serve; you will be ignored sometimes the most and dismissed or treated contemptibly beyond your imagining *when you are serving most faithfully.* The works you prepare with diligence and care and expertise and love and prayerfulness and years will be rejected, and this will utterly crush you if you thought that your faithfulness was testable from the outside. Your faithfulness is in your love that will with God’s help allow you to get back up again, to ask again and again for the mercy of the Lord for yourself and those you serve and for all people.

“Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely

For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.”

-Excerpt from “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” by Seamus Heaney

I am not speaking as someone higher than the young lady whose dramatic posts have caused such an uproar in our circles of late; I am speaking as someone whose advice along with the advice of many other more mature (and wiser than I!) Christian women she has ignored; I am speaking as someone called and trained since childhood to be a deaconess, though I do not cling to any title or position or hope but that I get to see the face of God. I have written this, probably too much (forgive me) because we must learn to speak of what calling is and isn’t for women, and we must acknowledge the great harm done to those women trying to navigate their sense of callings in the absence of the women’s diaconate. The prayers of the Church used to ring out for all to hear the sanctity of women consecrated as scribes and librarians and chanters and sacristans and doorkeepers and exorcists and monastics and ordained as deaconesses; women used to have someone to guide them in what it is like to be wholly honest about one’s life and situation, what it is like to learn to bear witness to where God is with you NOW, not in your imagination (whether vain or prophetic), and how to live faithfully without putting God to the test by making childish demands of the Church.

We cannot prove our discipleship by playing dressup or point to ordinary acts of service as evidence that we should be elevated; this is not the way a servant reasons. Forgive me for claiming so, but though I am not exalted or popular or couth or politically savvy or connected or rich or influential or a clergy family legacy, I do know through discipleship and a life of service what it is to be a servant. And I can only bear witness with the unworthy servants in the Parable that even if I had done everything well, I would still be unworthy, because I had done only what was asked of me.

Let us pursue God, and then as God gives us and places before us, let us serve and do only what is asked of us. Then, whether the Church moves quickly or slowly or not at all in restoring her great company of women ministers in our age, we will have the one true reward of seeing the face of God and rejoicing no matter what He says to us when He speaks.