Torn Bread < Killing the Buddha:
My vocation is putting my ass in a pew, week after week. My vocation is the vocation of billions of people, in nearly every religion. It is the vocation of showing up.
That’s not the case for quite a few women I know. Either they leave Catholicism and pursue vocation in another church, or they stick it out with rage simmering under their skin, week after week. “Can you believe…” “Denied…” They cannot do what they feel called to do, so they go, or they rage, or they simmer. Or they give up: on their vocation, on religion, on God. Or they stay, and they push and they push in increments.
When I took the bread from the female priest, I wondered about the ontological difference. What difference did it make that her hands were female? That the breath she used to push out the sacred words was female? That her female soul had brought God into being in the yeast and wheat? Did she look into my eyes and see a Catholic woman who hears Catholic women suffering because women don’t hand them transformed bread?