Living the Contradictions

[Editors’ note: Allison Connelly is a 2018 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship for Women Discerning Priestly Ordination. This is the first of three in a series of reflections from our 2018 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year.]

“While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head. Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly. “Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

Mark 14:3-6, 7-9

“Why this waste?” the disciples asked Jesus. Aggressive. Confused. Well-intentioned, maybe, but upset by a woman’s actions that they could not understand. “Why did she do it?” they cry, when her anointing would have been more valuable, more practical, elsewhere. “What does it mean?” they wondered, for her actions upend the structure they thought they understood.

These questions are familiar to me. Because I am a queer woman. I will be an ordained woman. I remain a Catholic woman. I have discerned a call in the United Church of Christ. And the “why” behind this all remains a mystery to many, and some days, remains a mystery to me. The questions I hear from others are sometimes authentic. But more often, the questions I hear from others are demanding, condemning, full of undertones of “voting against my own self-interest.” “How can you stay in a Church that has caused deep harm to so many?” “Don’t you know what the Catholics have done to us?” Yes, I know what the Catholics have done to us. Have done to me. Still do to me. Yes, I know that being openly queer in Catholic spaces is being yelled at while I’m speaking on a panel, is being told my sexuality is heresy, is having Catholics tell me that it’s a beautiful thing I can never be married in the Catholic Church, can be a rejection of my call at seemingly every turn. But I know, too, that being Catholic means having an understanding of an embodied, continually incarnate God, present in the Eucharist, in a way unique from all other traditions. I know that being Catholic means accompanying the saints of Catholic Social Teaching and of liberation theology, the Oscar Romeros and the Dorothy Days, who have struggled and stayed in the same Church I have. I know that being Catholic means nuns coming out to me about their sexuality, joining Catholic theologians at Vatican protests, and looking to religious sisters as models of radical justice. 

Sometimes living at these seeming contradictions feels lonely, but sometimes companions come alongside to make the journey easier.

For example, this past year I was blessed to receive the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship from the Women’s Ordination Conference. This scholarship benefited me financially, as I was at the time unable to receive funds from any particular congregation due to my hybrid space of discernment and unconventional denominational positioning. The support of the scholarship, however, extended far beyond its financial footprint.

In the year since receiving the award, I was able to attend the inaugural Joan Chittister Institute on Contemporary Spirituality, where I mourned and celebrated and grounded myself in my tradition alongside other young, feminist Catholics. That Institute birthed a book, to which I contributed, titled Dear Joan Chittister: Conversations with Women in the Church; the book comes out this fall. In the same year I have been able to speak on a panel for National Catholic Sisters Week alongside Sisters Mary Boys, Elizabeth Johnson, and Maria Pascuzzi, and graduate students Logan McLean and Stephanie Puen; I have given a keynote response to Jamie Manson and facilitated a panel on Disability Theology at the Re-Imagining Catholic Vocation Conference; and have I preached, for the first time, at a Catholic chapel service.

The opportunities I have had this year were sponsored, in direct and indirect ways, by the presence, support, and community offered to me by the Women’s Ordination Conference. The knowledge that I was supported in my journey of discernment by my radical, devoted, Catholic feminist ancestors gave me solace and comfort in the times that I felt most isolated. Through the support of the Women’s Ordination Conference and so many others, I feel able to take on the questions raised by my very identities as I move forward in my discernment.