Matt McAvoy Book Review

Jesus said: ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’

My first thought when I read this story about the woman caught in adultery was: Where is the man?  It is true, as the Reverend Susan Bowman discovered, that if you are one: a man, and two: not ordained, then you can get away with a great deal.  If you are a woman priest, then you are toast.

I come from Sydney, Australia, the home of the ‘S’ word: women’s ‘submission’ to men in the Anglican (aka Episcopal) Church.  It’s a hot topic so, when I came to review Lady Father, I was already aware that there had been a seismic shift from the first decades after the resurrection when ‘there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’, as St. Paul puts it.

Susan Bowman was the first woman priest in the conservative Episcopal Church of Southern Virginia.  She came from a diocese where women’s ordination was not widely accepted and she faced fierce opposition from women as well as men, who saw in her desire to minister as a priest a threat to their ‘cherished tradition’ of an all-male priesthood.

Her journey was an emotional roller coaster of joy, anxiety, despair and perplexity, and ultimately fulfilment in her pastoral work, the expression of her faith and a natural inclination to work with youth; I appreciated Susan’s honesty and objectivity.  To those allegedly ‘loving’ Christians who had deeply and unfairly wounded her, she strove to understand and forgive their harsh speech and actions.  In this way, the memoir is more than just a conversational account of Susan’s journey.

I found that I was saddened during the book, as I read how human beings love to hurt each other, how happy we are to destroy another person in order to justify ourselves.  So the book was a drama about human relationships, not merely the story of a person who has battled for a cause.