Tag Archives: women

Getting Our Own Paragraph Right

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The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10B, July 12, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19 Michal…despised him in her heart.
Ephesians 1:3-14This is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of [God’s] glory.
Mark 6:14-29 What should I ask for?

O God of our future, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This is one of those Sundays when “Praise to you, Lord Christ,” just doesn’t seem like the right response after a Gospel reading. Actually, all three of our readings this morning get my dander up. In 2nd Samuel, what gets me is almost a throw-away line about David’s wife Michal, the party-pooper of the story, who saw him leaping and dancing and despised him in her heart. What’s Michal’s problem, you might wonder (if you noticed her at all). Well, Michal has been used and abused by her father King Saul and his successor King David, but according to tradition, she loved David and did not think he should be recklessly prancing around, scantily clad, before the throne of the Holy One. (I’m with her.) Continue reading →

And that’s not all.

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The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 8B, June 28, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27. Greatly beloved were you to me. Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
2 Corinthians 8:7-15. In order that there may be a fair balance…’the one who had much did not have too much and the one who had little did not have too little.
Mark 5:21-43. Do not fear, only believe.

O God of Healing and Restoration, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

What a week. What a week of so many tears. Tears of sorrow, of anger and despair, tears of amazement, tears of joy and relief, and tears of hope and brave determination. The people of Charleston, South Carolina are still burying the nine faith-filled people massacred in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church a week ago last Wednesday while they were praying together and studying the Bible. The families of the martyrs have declared forgiveness for the shooter. They are continuing to testify and demonstrate that love is stronger than hate, and more powerful than death. Wednesday Bible Study went on as scheduled this past week with about 100 people jammed into the room where so much blood had been spilled the week before. Pastor Pinckney’s lesson the week before had been about the parable of the sower. Pastor Goff’s lesson the week after was about the power of love – full of parables from both Hebrew and Christian Testaments that reportedly had the people in that gathering laughing and crying at the same time. What powerful seeds of love are being sown by Mother Emanuel. And that’s not all. Continue reading →

New Beginnings

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The First Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B, January 11, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Genesis 1:1-5 Beginning…
Acts 19:1-7 We have not even heard that there is a holy spirit.
Mark 1:4-11 He will baptize you with the[sic] holy spirit.

O God of beginning again, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

Today is a special day in the Church – a Feast Day called, “The Baptism of our Lord.” It’s a perfect day to celebrate Patrick Cheng’s ordination to priesthood in the Episcopal Church. (However, I will tell you that, any day would be a perfect day to celebrate Patrick Cheng’s ordination to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, which took place yesterday. Congratulations Patrick!) As most of you know, Patrick lives in New York City now and is working for the Church Pension Fund. He’s been commuting to Boston to serve Emmanuel for the last four months. It’s a long way to come to volunteer to help out at a church! On behalf of all of us, thank you for that, Patrick, and thank you for choosing Emmanuel, Boston as the place for your first Eucharist as Episcopal priest! This is nearly, but not quite goodbye, because Patrick will be back in two weeks to preach and preside while I am away at the end of the month. Patrick, we hope you’ll be back with us whenever your schedule permits. Continue reading →

2015

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April 4.  The New York Times reported that Pauli Murray’s family home in Raleigh NC had been named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

As part of the Pauli Murray Project a memorial mural painted on the brick wall of a former tobacco warehouse in Durham NC shows her flanked by panels that read:

 As an Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray used the pulpit to find the “spirit of love and reconciliation” as expressed in her ministry as the “goal of human wholeness”. — Karla Holloway

It may be that when historians look back on 20th century America, all roads will lead to Pauli Murray.  Civil rights, feminism, religion, literature, law, sexuality — no matter what the subject, there is Pauli. — Historian Susan Ware

Pauli Murray taught us that our lives are not defined by our race or our gender but by our striving to make the world a better place than when we found it.  — Elnora J. Shields, Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project

Murray mural

Pauli Murray mural (detail) on tobacco warehouse in Durham NC

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2014

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Dorothy A. Brown, 1963 (image credit: NQ, Boston Globe)

March 20.  Dorothy Addams Brown died in Gloucester MA.  She had been born on 29 May 1923 to parishioners Harriet Addams Young (1886-1952) and Lawrence Allyn Brown (1876-1937) and baptized here.  She resided for many year at 434 Marlborough St. with her brother Lawrence, Jr.. She served on our vestry (1962-4 & 1969-74) and our Finance & Budget and Long-Range Planning committees. She was a generous benefactor until her death at the age of 90.  She credited William Wolbach, President of the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Co., for hiring her as a clerk in 1944, when she graduated from Vassar.  She became the bank’s first woman trust officer and then Vice President.  Mary Meier of The Boston Globe (May 16, 1963) wrote an article about her entitled, “Banks Rarely Give Women Key Role.” When Dottie retired as chair of the New England Group of the National Association of Bank Women in 1965, she was the only senior investment officer in the Association.

Last issue of Voices was published with a farewell letter from its editor Margo Risk.

2012

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Photo credit: UNC. Carolina Digital Library and Archives via WikiCommons.

Photo credit: UNC. Carolina Digital Library and Archives via WikiCommons.

The 77th General Convention of The Episcopal Church resolved to add The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline Murray to Holy Women, Holy Men and the Calendar of the Church Year, which now commemorates her life on the day of her death, July 1.

Murray attended Emmanuel in the early 1970s and served on our vestry (1973-75).  In her autobiography (1987) , she credits former Rector Al Kershaw with encouraging her to leave her faculty position at Brandeis University and pursue ordination in The Episcopal Church.  In 1977, at the age of sixty-six, she became The Church’s first black-woman priest.

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1989

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  • April 8.  Emmanuel Music gave a concert in honor of Principal Guest Conductor John Harbison’s 50th birthday (20 Dec. 1988).  His wife Rose Mary Pederson Harbison opened with a violin concerto she had played at its 1980 premiere.
  • Katharine Ward Lane Weems died and bequeathed a pair of Spanish candelabra now standing in the  baptistery of our Sanctuary.  Born 22 Feb.1899, she was the only child of  Emma Gildersleeve and Gardiner Martin Lane, who was chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts from 1907 until his death in 1914. They lived at 53 Marlborough Street and were members of Emmanuel.

Katharine attended the Museum School from 1915 and began to show her work in 1920.  She designed the brick friezes and bronze doors of Harvard’s Biological Laboratories with two massive bronze rhinoceri (one pictured below) installed in the courtyard in 1937.

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Image by Daderot, WikiCommons, of her sculpture at the Museum School, Boston

1978

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  • 21 April.  Gov. Michael Dukakis proclaimed it to be Johann Sebastian Bach Day in the Commonwealth as “the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Church in the City of Boston…after seven years [had] completed for the first time in the USA the cycle of [his]194 sacred cantatas”.

  • Constance visited us in Oct. 2017

    Constance Hammond was elected our first woman (junior) warden. After ordination in our diocese, she served as rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Parish, Portland OR (1990-98) and then as rector and priest in other churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon Since 1998, she has been a practitioner and instructor in the Healing Touch Program.  See also:  1986.

1977

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January 8.    Pauli Murray was ordained a priest at the Washington National Cathedral by the Rt. Rev. William F. Creighton, bishop of the (Episcopal) Diocese of Washington. She was the first African American woman, and one of the first women, to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.

February 13.  At the invitation of the rector of The Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill NC, the Rev. James Peter Lee, The Rev. Dr. Murray celebrated her first Eucharist.   She read from her grandmother Cornelia Smith‘s Bible, from a lectern that had been given in memory of the woman who had owned Cornelia, Mary Ruffin Smith. This was the first time a woman celebrated the Eucharist at an Episcopal church in North Carolina.  In her autobiography (1987), p. 435) Pauli described her thoughts about the service, which our Parish Historian Mary Chitty attended:

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. Descendant of slave and of slave owner, I had already been called poet, lawyer, teacher, and friend. Now I was empowered to minister the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no black or white, no male or female – only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.

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