After my ordination rite to the Transitional Diaconate, my family shared a laugh in my direction. During my vows I had become tongue-tied over the language about submission to authority.

I was the third woman in my family to receive a seminary degree and the first to be ordained. My graduating class of 2007 at the Seminary of the Southwest had more women than men, a first for the institution. This makes me the beneficiary of the toil of those women — ordained and lay — who went before.

A priest is not one who is ordained, but the one who is expressed and developed in her post-ordination years of ministry. As I live and move and have my being outside of parish life, I am blown away by an awkward reality. It is a backlash against women’s increased freedom and power the world over combined with a growing ease with which women share new levels of leadership in so many arenas of life and society.

If all tension can be creative tension, then I hope I can live into this particular one in the spirit of genderless kinship, soulful force and Godlike grace.