A Conversation with Carter Heyward, Pioneer Episcopal Priest

by Muffie Moroney

The Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward has been pushing the envelope all her life. From her youth in racially segregated North Carolina, through her years as a religion major at Randolph-Macon Womanıs College, and graduate studies during the civil rights and Vietnam War era in New York City at Union Theological Seminary, she has continually questioned the status quo and acted to change it. As one of the "Philadelphia Eleven" in 1974, she and ten other women deacons were ordained priests in a service that stunned the Episcopal Church, which would not until 1976 pass legislation explicitly stating that women could be ordained as priests and bishops. Several years later, she created further controversy in the church by coming out as a lesbian. A prolific writer and speaker, she divides her time between teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and directing a conference and retreat center in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina.

Carter Heyward is coming to Houston May 10 - 12 and will lead a number of events. Her visit was originally scheduled for September 14 - 16, in connection with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Episcopal Churchıs decision to ordain women, but the horrifying events of September 11 intervened.

Muffie Moroney: I'd like to start our conversation with an open-ended question about some of the milestones in your spiritual journey.

Carter Heyward: One is my childhood growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, where I had two rivers of awareness in my life. One was being out of doors with nature; I was an only child for six years and the animals in my life were like my friends. So were the trees and the mountains. I began to experience, and believe to this day, that the presence of the sacred, of God, was in everything, and there was nothing that wasnıt holy.

At the same time, as a child growing up in North Carolina in the '40s and '50s, I was acutely aware of the problems in those days called race relations. My parents even then told me this was not Godıs will for black people and white people to be living so separately and in such a tense and poor relationship with one another, with white people having most of the power. So I grew up knowing that we should do something about this. . .but what? Nobody around me seemed to know.

Then, in high school -- which would have been 1960 -- I was chair of the Youth Commission in the diocese of North Carolina and we came into a crisis. The Youth Commission differed with the then-bishop of North Carolina over the segregation of a church camp, which was segregated by law. For the first time the statewide youth group had among its members a young black boy. So that black kid and myself, who were about the same age, and the other white children all decided that we simply could not accept that [he be excluded from the church camp].

The Bishop of North Carolina told us at first that he completely agreed with us, but there was nothing he could do about it, because the law was law, and that it would be changed someday, but in the meantime we had to obey the charter of this camp. The more we pressed him, the more agitated he became with us. He said we had authority problems and we were not being patient enough with the way things actually happen in the real world.

Can you pick out a couple of incidents from Randolph-Macon [Woman's College] that you can point to as milestones in your spiritual development?

Simply learning intellectually, which supported the spiritual journey I was already on. Miss Thelen's world religion class is to this day one of the most important classes I've ever taken, because it broadened my spiritual sensibilities.

I wanted to go to Union Seminary in New York City because my sophomore and junior years at Randolph-Macon I had spent a summer working in New York City in a settlement house on the Lower East Side. That had been a mind-boggling and spirit-expanding experience, working there with predominantly Hispanic children in a really poor neighborhood in New York City and really wrestling with what it means for Christians to deal with poverty in the world.

Probably the most important years of my life in terms of spiritual journeying and vocational direction were 1967 and 1968, years of great turbulence. Columbia University, which was a neighbor to Union Seminary, shut down that spring around the assassination of Martin Luther King and then early in the summer the assassination of Robert Kennedy. We all recall that extraordinary spring when everything seemed to be flying apart.

For me it's like my life was always flying apart. You know how your life has to fall apart in terms of old descriptions and older hierarchies for some new things to happen? Well, the new thing that was happening for me was that I realized I really did believe that God is best known in the movements for a better world -- in inclusivity, in compassion, in the struggle for justice. I came out of that first year of Union Seminary a believer in what later I would learn was liberation theology -- that this is what God is about: justice and liberation.

From that point on, I could never quite go home again in the sense of simply returning to North Carolina to be the kind of girl or woman that once upon a time I thought I would be. Which was basically a nice, Southern lady -- a genuinely nice person, probably pretty liberal and open-minded -- but pretty settled, stay-at-home, probably not open her mouth much, probably marry and have children. From '68 on I knew that I would have to find my own path -- but that I didnıt know what it was.

At that point women couldn't think of being ordained.

The Philadelphia Ordination would be another of the primary seasoning points in my life. One of the wonderful things about the Philadelphia Ordination was that it was so collective; it was not one woman out there by herself, it was eleven of us. We had worked and worked for two or three years on trying to get womenıs ordination opened up by the general provisions of the church, and in both 1970 and 1973, the General Convention had said no to the interpretation of the canon reading women into the generic language. [Note: The canon used "he"when discussing priests, and the argument was whether this meant only men, or was it a generic "he," meaning both men and women.] And it is important to note that there was never, ever, a canon against the ordination of women. It's just that when the question got raised about whether we can ordain women, the first answer that was given in 1970 was no, that the canons meant men.

Those of us who planned and implemented the Philadelphia measure really came to believe that without some kind of force, some kind of radical act, the church was not going to come through on the ordination of women any time soon, maybe not for ten, twenty, thirty years. Sue Hiatt, the deacon among us who really was the mastermind behind this thing, said the church will not ordain women until itıs harder not to ordain than to ordain.

Let's shift gears for a minute -- I would like to ask about your growing understanding of who you are as a sexual person, and how that connects with your spiritual journey.

Being brought up as a Southern white middle-class female child, I never even thought about sexuality for the longest time because it was too scary to think about. Pretty much I was running away from sexual realities in my life even through college, thinking that nice girls don't do this and don't think about these kinds of things. By the time I was actually an adult and was aware of my sexual potentials and capacities, I would have said then I was probably bisexual in my basic sexual sensibilities. But I did over a period of maybe a decade move more into a lesbian direction.

And you know I often talk about "sexual identity" -- as opposed to "sexual orientation" or "sexual preference." "Sexual orientation" denotes that youıre sort of born gay or straight, and I donıt think itıs quite that simple for most of us, male or female. And "sexual preference" often denotes something that is too kind of superficial. You know, like you choose vanilla or chocolate ice cream, you choose to be gay or straight, and I don't think it's that simple either. I think our sexual identities get shaped by myriad factors, most of which we hardly ever know.

And they may change.

They may change and they often do change. I have many friends now who are lesbians who were once married women and in many cases happily married women. I don't have as many friends that moved in the other direction, but that too is beginning to happen, where you have friends whom you've known as lesbians for a decade or two who fall in love with a man and get married.

I believe hetero- and homo-sexualities are kind of an artificial way of looking at all of us; that in fact, [Episcopal theologian and lawyer] William Stringfellow was right, [in that] there are about as many sexual identities or sexual ways of imaging ourselves as there are people alive, if the truth be known.

It's hard to have this conversation quite frankly in church, even in progressive church circles, because most progressive churches have only gotten to the point where they will allow for the possibility that it's okay to be gay if you are born that way. But it's not okay to be changing. Or it's hard to have this complex and nuanced conversation about sexuality with most Christian people, as I think really needs to happen.

I'm reminded of the term spiritual journey. Is it fair to say that we are also on a sexual journey?

Yes, I think so. And I think we'd be on more of a sexual journey if we could really talk more openly with one another about sexuality, although not in a sort of voyeuristic, pornographic way. In many ways, sexuality is experienced by lots of women -- when it's not violent, when it's not abusive -- as a very creative relational yearning in our lives. I often in my own theological work talk about our erotic power as being really an image of our sacred power, because I believe it is the yearning to connect rightly with one another. Which doesn't mean that therefore we have sex with everybody. But it does mean that there is some kind of connection between friendship and art and poetry and music -- and these really lovely parts of our lives -- with our sex lives. They're along a spectrum of some sort.

Audre Lorde, the wonderful Afro-Caribbean lesbian feminist poet, talks about how she began to recognize how similar the writing of a good poem was to the rubbing up against the body of the woman she loved. I think all of that has to do with sacred power. I think a lot of art, religious art, religious music, is very sensual. Particularly in terms of the Catholic tradition, a lot of worship is very sensual. Itıs bizarre that the church on the one hand can celebrate a kind of sensual, aesthetically pleasing liturgical way of being, and at the same time deny sexuality -- making people deny what is so real, not letting them find a healthy way of experiencing their sexuality.

When did you come out?

That's another moment in the spiritual journey. Five years after the Philadelphia Ordination, I chose to come out by publishing a couple of articles in June 1979. I did that because the church was beginning to debate homosexuality, and I felt like I needed to be out there as one voice in that debate. And because another woman, Ellen Barrett, had been ordained as an openly lesbian woman and she had all but been crucified by the church, and it was just not right that she should be out there by herself. As a teacher and a preacher and writer, I really wanted to be more open and honest about my own life journey. It just becomes a very strange way of living when you're trying to stay closeted. So I did that in 1979 and I would gladly do it again. I think that began to shape my vocation also. It closed a lot of doors, but then it opened a lot of doors, too.

Where are you today?

I've been [at the Episcopal Divinity School] since 1975. I teach there half the time, and [the other] half I'm part of a small exceptional community of women who live in the hills of North Carolina and share commitments to justice. One of my passions right now is that I have founded a therapeutic horseback riding and horse care center for people with disabilities and others.

And whatıs your horse's name?

I have two horses, an old mare named Sugar and a younger horse named Red. Sugar is like a big lawn ornament, as they say -- she's so old, she's just like having a big dog in my yard. Red does go with me to Cambridge and has been very much a part of my journey there even in the last year, while I was working with my beloved sister [Sue Hiatt] who has terminal cancer. Red became my priest during this period, because I would go out three times a week and just sort of be there with her and take in the energy and her way of being in the world. That was wonderful.

Muffie Moroney met Carter Heyward when they were students at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. She is a native Houstonian, a lifelong Episcopalian (now a member of St. Stephen's), a lawyer (University of Houston Law Center), a founder of ROADWoman, and an all-around civic activist.

Editor's note: This interview is a collaborative project between the Women's Journal and OutSmart, the magazine for Houston's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community (and where a version of this article was first published).

Exploring Justice with Carter Heyward

Carter Heyward will give a lecture Friday, May 10, 7:00 p.m., at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 1805 W. Alabama. She will lead a workshop on several areas of justice, including race, gender/sexual orientation, and the environment Saturday, May 11, 9:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral, $45. A worship service will be held at 6:00 p.m. at Bering United Methodist Church, 1440 Harold, followed by a supper at 7:00 p.m., $10, reservations required. On Sunday, May 12, she will preach at the 9:00 and 11:00 worship services at Christ Church Cathedral, which will be followed by a lunch in the Great Hall of the Cathedral, price to be announced. For more information or to register for the Saturday workshop, Saturday lunch, or Sunday lunch, call 713/590-3333 or write brigidsplace@christchurchcathedral.org.