Liberating God, we thank you most heartily for the steadfast courage of your servant Pauli Murray, who fought long and well.*

This opening sentence from the Collect for Saint Pauli Murray, which the Episcopal Church celebrates on July 1st, the date of her death in 1985, perfectly describes her in her lifelong mission to fight against racism and sexism. In later life, Pauli attended Emmanuel Church, Boston.  Our ninth rector, Alvin Kershaw, played a decisive role in encouraging her to seek Holy Orders. And so The Rt. Rev. John Melville Burgess, Bishop of Massachusetts and the first African American, diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Church, accepted her as a Postulant for Holy Orders. Pauli was ordained to the priesthood on January 8, 1977, as the first African American, woman priest in the Episcopal Church. She remembered:

Whatever future ministry I might have as a priest, it was given to me that day to be a symbol of healing. All the strands of my life had come together…reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.

Pauli Murray may have struggled with her identity throughout her life, but it was her later identities that she may have never truly imagined.  And, yet with the kindness of hindsight, as Murray discerned priesthood, she was able to see how “all the strands of [her] life had come together.…[with] the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.”  In time, The Episcopal Church discerned that the holiness of her life entailed lifting her up as a saint.  Amidst feeling unknown to herself and yet letting herself to be fully known to God, she made herself vulnerable so that others could be strong in their own identities, their place in our society, and their being loved by the Creator.

Pauli Murray was perpetually challenged in her desire for interior peace.  This quest was played out in her restless tenacity in seeking justice for people whose identity had been used by society as a way to alienate and erase them from the community.  As an attorney and scholar, she strove mightily to find a rightful place for each of these people in laws of equitable rights.  Later as a priest, she sought to share the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, seeking to have right relationship with every part of Creation as taught in the law of love.  

At the end of her life, Pauli Murray may still have been grappling with who she was in relation to herself and others.  She may have felt fulfilled in how she challenged injustice, and why discrimination is anathema to a healthy society and its loving God.  Perhaps most importantly, she allowed her life to unfold so that she might understand what her life was about and for whom she lived it.  Out of her poverty of self and the wonder of justice, she opened up the storehouses of each person’s essentiality and utterly unique meaning in co-realizing the exquisite plan for Creation.  

*The Episcopal Church. The Liturgical Calendar for July 1.