40 years on

 

We celebrated in Lincoln Cathedral on Saturday thirty years since the first ordination of women as priests there.  I’m not quite sure why the Pentecost and Trinity Sunday ordinations in 1994 (there were so many candidates that we had two services in successive weeks, first for the long established female ministers, then for the relatively new ones) were only now being commemorated in September.

One of the three ordaining Bishops was there and reminded me that even in the 1970s the then Bishop of Lincoln was licensing a lay woman to take charge of a parish (with priestly support on a Sunday) and praying with the Movement for the Ordination of Women protesters outside the Cathedral before each ordination he conducted.

So the pattern was well established when I came to a first incumbency in Scunthorpe in the diocese in 1989 and almost immediately a woman deacon came to villages nearby as Deacon-in-Charge.  She was among those ordained priest at those first services five years later, and she was there on Saturday among quite a number of that first Lincoln batch.

The main oddity about the thirtieth anniversary service was how small scale it was; the first ordinations packed the large nave twice over, the anniversary service did not fill the choir.  Quite a number of robed female priests were in the procession, but only a handful of male ones.

And the following day was the anniversary of my own ordination as a priest, Michaelmas Day falling on a Sunday in 2024 as it had done in 1985.  I preached on Jacob’s ladder, and the idea that his claim ‘God is in this place, this is none other than the house of God (Beth-el), this is the gate of heaven’ might as appropriately be carved, etched or written on the inside of church doors to be read going out as on the outside to be read going in.

And, a day later, today is the fortieth anniversary of my first being ordained - a new deacon ready to be ordained priest a year later, unlike those being made deaconess at the same service.  Having first been licensed as a Curate that day in 1984, I’m still enjoying the serendipity which I've mentioned before of having been so licensed (albeit with a short-term half-time licence) again in 2024.

Meanwhile, the art installation in the Cathedral is of paper doves, on each of which someone had written a prayer for peace.