Like the
Wideness of the Sea: Women bishops and the Church of
England
Maggi Dawn
DLT £6.99
(978-0-232-53001-8)
Church Times Bookshop £6.30 (Use code
CT347 )
THERE are two ways of
reading this book. The first is to treat it as a compact history of
the ordination of women in the Church of England since the vote of
the General Synod in 1992, accompanied by a proposal for future
action and a personal narrative. The second is to see it as the
author's apologia for leaving the Church of England to take up a
post in the United States. The choice of interpretation will exert
a strong influence on different readers' evaluation of the
contents.
Maggi Dawn has given us what
must be the most up-to-date historical survey of the debates toward
the advent of women bishops currently available, incorporating the
results of voting at the General Synod in 2012. Her suggestion in
the second part of the book that the solution to the impasse might
lie in receptionism requires more exposition.
References to the treatment
of reception in the Rochester report on women in the episcopate
(2004) do not deal with the complexity of the idea. It might have
been better simply to state her own sense that, instead of waiting
for God, we should realise that God is waiting for us, and act
accordingly.
The final section is an
often painful account of a vocation pursued in the face of
puzzlement, humiliation, and insult in a degree not usually
reported by women who have trained for the priesthood since 1992.
It speaks of a personal struggle between love for the Church of
England and the impossibility of remaining in its ministry, but
without the clarity needed to persuade us that accepting an
invitation to Yale was sacrificial as well as providential. Perhaps
that is simply because the beauty of this book, like that of the
parish liturgy that the author yearned to refine and polish even
before she was ordained, "gets drowned out in the excess of text
that needs editing".
Dr Bridget Nichols is
Lay Chaplain to the Bishop of Ely.