In 1976, after I had quit my job in publishing to write my dissertation proposal and prepare to move to Baltimore to finish my dissertation I worked briefly as at 815, headquarters of the Episcopal Church on 2nd Avenue in New York City. Terry R., from St. Mary the Virgin, who worked there part time as a file clerk, got me an interview for a secretarial job in the Clergy Deployment Office. The Human Resources functionary to whom I first spoke said that she didn't think I'd be hired because I was 'fast'. She immediately corrected herself. She meant, she said, that I was 'quick', and that Fr. Roddy Reid, who ran the Clergy Deployment Office, didn't like that sort of thing. But I was interviewed by Fr. Roddy, passed muster, and got the job.
Terry was a fixture at St. Mary the Virgin. A scrawny woman with transparent white skin, she looked unhealthy – but ageless: she could have been in her twenties or her fifties. Her father was a priest in one of the Continuing Anglican groups that were in the process of breaking with the Episcopal Church over women's ordination. In the years that followed they formed churches that periodically splintered, coalesced, and petered out. Years later I stumbled into a Continuing Anglican church accidentally when I was at a conference. Local congregations were coalitions of clergy who opposed women's ordination and laypeople who hated the new Prayerbook. Some Anglo-Catholic clergy, like the rector of St. Mary the Virgin who was on the Standing Liturgical Commission, which oversaw its creation, had no objections to the new Prayerbook, but opposition to women's ordination was non-negotiable. They wanted the Roman Catholic Church to take us back and saw women's ordination as the great stumbling block even though the Roman Catholic Church had shown no interest in taking us back even before women's ordination was on the table. There was however the perennial hope for a merger with Eastern Orthodoxy, a softer target and a source of romance – the drang nach abenland. We liked icons.
Laypeople at St. Mary the Virgin were onboard with the agenda. 40 years later when I was back in NYC for some conference I did lunch with a fellow St. Mary the Virgin alum. She still thought women's ordination shouldn't have gone through though she had no theological or other reason for her view on the matter. She'd drifted into the self-congratulatory contrarian mode which was part of the stance members of my cohort at St. Mary the Virgin cultivated. St. Mary the Virgin was not an ordinary parish that people fell into because it was conveniently located. People came in from New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs. Laypeople joined because they had special interests, as I did, or because they were contrarian and had axes to grind. People were into various pious practices and pious societies. There was a woman who went down the center aisle for communion every Sunday on her knees.
Terry was a Third Order Franciscan. She worked part-time as a file clerk at 815, lived in an apartment in the East Village (as yet ungentrified). She took in runaway girls and volunteered at the Catholic Worker. I was bothered by Terry's situation – she was an intelligent, educated woman who clearly had contacts in the Church and, I thought, 'all she could get was a file clerk job?' And a part-time one at that so that she couldn't afford to live anywhere but a miserable slum. This did not bode well for my own prospects. It was only years later that I realized Terry was working at a part-time menial job and living in a slum voluntarily. It was her idea of embracing Lady Poverty.
Terry took us to a service at the Catholic Worker which was near her apartment. There I met Dorothy Day, a tall old woman who was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and is currently being considered for canonization in the Roman Catholic Church according to Wikipedia.
The Catholic Worker Movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper, created by Dorothy Day to advance Catholic social teaching and be a neutral, Christian pacifist position in the war-torn 1930s. Day attempted to put her words from the Catholic Worker into action through "houses of hospitality"[4] and then through a series of farms for people to live together on communes. The idea of voluntary poverty was advocated for those who volunteered to work at the houses of hospitality… The Catholic Worker considered itself a Christian anarchist movement. All authority came from God; and the state, having by choice distanced itself from Christian perfectionism, forfeited its ultimate authority over the citizen… Catholic Worker anarchism followed Christ as a model of nonviolent revolutionary behavior… He respected individual conscience. But he also preached a prophetic message, difficult for many of his contemporaries to embrace.
I had no sympathy for this kind of program. As I later discovered the Catholic Worker agenda was a spinoff of Catholic Social Teaching, touted at the Catholic college where I work as politically progressive because it was directed against cutthroat capitalism, even though it is deeply conservative. The alternative it promoted to cutthroat capitalism was not soulless, efficient social democracy but an idealized medievalism, a world of wealthy peasants supervised by paternalistic clergy, where the paterfamilias provided for his family and there was always room for another little one at the table. In this scheme there would also be those who undertook councils of perfection, including Franciscans embracing voluntary poverty to live as the poor in serving the poor. Americans never quite understood that this program was deeply conservative because they assumed that any alternative to cutthroat capitalism was progressive.
The Catholic Worker house in New York was a dismal place that took in homeless men and assorted waifs and strays who, along with Terry and the other volunteers, attended the service. I tried very hard to be inspired but I was not. One of my problems with the Church was that you were supposed to be inspired by this sort of thing – to somehow put rationality and utilitarian calculations on hold, and kiss lepers. The Catholic Worker was certainly doing some good. There are and always will be people who fall through the cracks, even in a strong welfare state, which the US is not. But even given that the state couldn't take care of everybody there were non-profits that were much more efficient in delivering the goods. And I could never see the point of voluntary poverty as such: Terry could have gotten a job that paid much more than she was earning as a part-time file clerk and, if she wanted to be poor, she could have kicked in the excess to Oxfam. This, I knew, was a bad attitude on my part.
On my first (and only) day of work at 815 Terry gave me a tour of the place, from the Seabury Bookstore at ground level to the Empyrean upper story where the Presiding Bishop had his offices, and then to the Clergy Deployment Office, where I was installed. Besides Fr. R there was another manager in the office who was a layman, a receptionist, and another secretary. The receptionist was a college graduate; the other secretary, like me, had an MA. This, I thought, is all a woman can get with a BA: a receptionist job – or part-time file-clerking. A graduate degree qualifies you to be a secretary. And, as a woman, the closest I can get to the priesthood is secretarial work in the Clergy Deployment Office.
I got through the day reminding myself hour by hour that it still wasn't bad, still wasn't bad, and that I was coping – until I wasn't. When I left to go home, I knew that I couldn't cope. As I walked home across Manhattan there was a scream in my head so loud that it felt as though others on the street could hear it. It was like the sensation I got tripping on acid when the noise in my head seemed so loud that I felt as if it were publicly audible. Though even at the time, of course, I knew it wasn't.
I didn't need the job at 815. I'd gotten my proposal approved in the fourth draft (yellow covers, I had a different color for each draft) and was getting things organized for the move back to Baltimore. This was yet another job I took to see if I could handle real work, beginning with a waitress job at Scotty's Restaurant in Lake Forest when I was in college, at which I lasted for two and a half days. I repeatedly took these jobs hoping that I would be able to cope to test myself, to see if I'd finally managed to become unneurotic. But I failed every time. My failure at Scotty's proved that I was still neurotic because waitressing was completely different in character from the clerical work I couldn't handle earlier. The only feature they had in common was that they were women's jobs. This proved to me that it wasn't the work I couldn't stand but the fact that it was women's work – that my problem wasn't with the work itself but with being a woman, which meant I was neurotic.
I didn't need the job, but Terry thought I did. As I discovered from the St. Mary the Virgin alum with whom I lunched, neither she nor anyone else there knew that I had been working in publishing, that I was in grad school, or that I'd quit my job to finish my dissertation. I don't know what Terry thought after I'd left my job at 815 after only a day because I never spoke to her again: we left soon afterward for the UK and from there back to Baltimore. I suppose to Terry I was just another one of the waifs and strays she'd tried to help who couldn't or wouldn't get back on track – like the runaway girls she'd housed in her apartment for whom she'd gotten waitress jobs, who soon drifted back into prostitution and moved on, or the alcoholic derelicts the Catholic Worker catered for. Another failed charity project.