16 Now I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is also a minister [diakonos] of the assembly in Cenchrae, 2 that you may welcome her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the holy ones, and assist her regarding whatever thing she may need from you; for she has been a leader [prostatis] of many, myself included.

Thus spake none other than St Paul, in a Letter to the Romans. He spake also of Priscilla, Mariam, Jounia, Tryphania, Tryphosa, Persis and Julia, “who have labored in the Lord.” Of Jounia he added that  she was “of note among the apostles.” Apostle! The highest title of authority and honour in the early church.  The 4th century theologian and archbishop of Constantinople,  St John Chrysostom, said of his friend and correspondent,  the abbess and deaconess Olympias, that he was honoured as a man “that there are such women among us.” These were women neither silent nor submissive in those early assemblies whose leadership was acknowledged….and then are heard from no more. 

But, when I was reading about the history of Byzantium and the early church (research for The Prodigal Daughter) , I came across their descendants – from the late 4th to late 7th centuries – there, in the churches of Constantinople, their ordination as deaconesses provided for by liturgical manuals and analogous to the rite for male deacons. They presented themselves at the altar, bent their heads for the Bishop’s hands, received the prayers of consecration, and received communion. At the time of Emperor Justinian in the 6th century,  the staff of St Sophia consisted of sixty priests, one hundred deacons, forty deaconesses and ninety subdeacons. As late as the 12th century, Emperor Alexis I Comnenos concerned himself that “the work of the deaconesses be carefully organized” in the Church of St Paul, according to his daughter-biographer, Anna Comnena.

And so began my brief life as a fantasist of Byzantium: a deaconess in the great church, Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom], vested in embroidered tunic and orarion (stole), making  the circuit of its stupendous interior while I cense all the icons, clouds of burning frankincense billowing around me as I swing the gold censer in a fragrant arc. Then I step into the sanctuary, escorted by candle-bearers and fan-bearers and more incense, to hand the priest the bread for communion and  pour warm water into the chalice of wine for communion. The Divine Liturgy begins and I chant the long petitions of the Litanies, read the Gospel as worshippers crowd around me, help distribute communion, command the people, “Let us bow our heads to the Lord,” and dismiss them: “Let us go forth in peace.”

(Not so fast, Myrna.)

I wrote my book, became a member of the parish of St Elias Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Edmonton, and had entirely forgotten my fantasy until I wandered into a meeting of the St Phoebe Center for the History of the Deaconess one winter afternoon in New York City in 2014. It was their Women and Diaconal Ministry conference and I sat enthralled as I heard a succession of Orthodox women – a nun, a tonsured chanter, a couple of PhDs, a sophomore, a parish council president – speak of the possibilities of a revived “apostolic order of deaconesses” in the 21st century.

Never mind that the order disappeared  in the eastern church by the 12th century (in part because of a theological dictum that forbade women to approach the altar and carry out any service there during menstruation). Never mind that the role of deaconess never did include any of my fantasy: we did not fan the Holy Gifts nor distribute them to laity, we did not wear that lovely tunic – only the stole – nor participate in liturgical processions. We Orthodox have a long memory. For more than a thousand years deaconesses did serve, at adult baptisms, visiting the bedridden, chanting Matins, as educators. And here were women speaking of what deaconesses could do if the Order were restored (a petition, by the way, made of the Russian Orthodox Church back in 1855 by the sister of Tsar Nicholas I, of all people). Chaplaincy, spiritual direction, Ministry of the Word, Ministry of Philanthropic Outreach. A woman “learned Orthodoxy” by attending Liturgy and then joining the chanters in an Antiochian church. Another said that “as an ordained deacon I would have the Bishop’s blessing for what I already do: serve the poor in my neighbourhood. The deacon is the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman with the flow of blood, the Myrrh-Bearers at the tomb, and Phoebe.” A chaplain described the experience of praying the Lord’s Prayer over a woman in such pain that she could not  stop moving. “After the prayer, she fell asleep.” A nun gives spiritual direction to young people who approach her at the monastery, “becoming open to the transcendent.”

And so it went. What’s not to love about such women and their desire?

Yet they are a scandal to the Church.

I shall leave aside the crippling misogyny of early Church apologists such as Tertullian of Carthage – “Woman is a temple built over a sewer” – and repress the memory of my indignation when, as a secular feminist, I first encountered such texts, in order rather to take up the issue of current hostility to the idea of a revived female diaconate. The women and men of the St Phoebe Center are serious scholars who challenge “distortions and misrepresentations of the historical record,” “fallacies,” “detractors,” and “errors.” They retaliate by citing Byzantine traditions, 8th century Codeces, Ecumenical Councils, Canons,  Apostolic Constitutions, just to mention one of their published papers.They reference recommendations in 1976, 1980, 1988, 1997, 1999 and 2016 that call for” full restoration of the order of women deacons.”

It would not be correct to say they are met with resounding silence: they are met with vociferous argument. Holy Tradition has no place for deaconesses; God’s intended  “natural order of male and female” requires female subordination to men; the very idea is a plot by secular feminists to carry Orthodoxy down the slippery slope of female ordination, after which come acceptance of gay marriage, calling God “She,” ordaining LGBTQ priests and… schism. After all, look at those Anglicans and Protestants: you start with women who serve  liturgically, they are cross-bearers and candle-bearers, they help distribute the bread and wine, they read the Epistles, and before you know it they’re ordained deacons, then priests, then bishops (for example, Anglican Bishop Jane Alexander of Edmonton).

In the meanwhile, our Orthodox churches are bleeding members, (male) priests, and finances. “We can do so much more as a Christian community,” writes Valerie Karras, ThD, PhD, “if we do not shackle the talents of fully half of our body, if we do not ignore the spiritual gifts which the Holy Spirit bestows on women as well as men.”

There have been times when I have been deeply grateful for the Eastern Church’s treasury of her own antiquity. I think of the fragments of third-century mystical wisdom, of desert Mothers and Fathers, of the first hymnography and Christological theology. Of the icons and festal memory of women-equal-to-the-apostles such as Mary Magdalene. All of Christianity’s first texts, first liturgies, first councils and creeds are remembered and are even part of Sunday worship. Now I ask, with increasing bewilderment and impatience, why the Church doesn’t remember its own wisdom about the equal gifts that women and men represent in church life? Talk about selective memory! Here’s St Basil the Great in the 4th century, who wrote in The Human Condition of men and women, that “the natures are alike of equal honour, the virtues are equal, the struggle equal, the judgement alike.”

Because objections raised to the revival of the Order of deaconesses may hide their authors’ misogyny behind pious reverence of  man-made “tradition,” I’d rather remember the tradition of St Gregory of Nazianzus who railed against the hypocrisy of men who lay down laws directed against women but leave themselves unscathed. (Discourse 37) 

Carrie Frederick Frost, a scholar of Orthodox theology, makes an argument, in “Women’s Gifts and the Diaconate,” familiar from suffrage movements in the early twentieth century. She writes approvingly: “Even within the context of the Church’s conviction of the essential equality of women and men, there is no sense that the Church understands women and men to be perfectly equivalent” [her emphasis]. Suffrage rights had been claimed for women on the basis of women’s “essential” difference from men: Give us a broom and we’ll sweep the Augean stables clean of men’s disorder. We have babes in our arms: we will stop wars. Women are nurturing, pacific, family-fused, tenderly sentimental creatures. Frost’s case for the female diaconate in Orthodoxy similarly rests on the “incarnational reality” of women – by which I assume she means our embodied lives as females of the species . And so we have “a different perspective on authority, its judicious use, its abuse,” and because of our lived experience, as females, of violence, abuse and assault, “a different view of child-rearing, marriage and family life.” These are the “gifts” from which the church would benefit, if only women could be “theologically and pastorally trained”  into the diaconate. I can’t help wonder if their “different perspectives” might not eventually be trained on the Church itself, as an abusive institution that upholds patriarchy at the expense of so many women’s bodies and souls.

On a happier note: in 2017, His Beatitude Patriarch Theodoros and the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria reinstituted the Order of Deaconess within the borders of the Patriarchate, the entire continent of Africa, revitalizing “a once functional, vibrant, and effectual ministry.” Note the Patriarch’s hand on the woman’s head: what’s not to love?

Fast forward a decade and I was busy travelling around most of Slavic Europe, including Ukraine, in search of the history, politics and culture that explained my generation of ’68 under Communism. I had already written a book about the Sixties in Canada and now was eager to find out how my counterparts in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, sort of, in Ukraine experienced their 1960s. The book that resulted, Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993), my first real achievement of creative nonfiction, records the rather bruising reality check I experienced as a Western feminist and New Leftist. But the journey had taken me beyond social and political realities. I realized that, since my sojourn in Two Hills, I had been excavating successive layers of personal identity and now, far from having come to bedrock in the history of Eastern Europe, I had laid bare an unsuspected deeper layer, Byzantium.

In retrospect, I can see how it crept up. As mentioned in an earlier post, I had frequently sought peace and quiet of mind and spirit in Orthodox churches and monasteries as I moved around. But these were not yet “Byzantium” to me but simply sites of cultural familiarity. Then I picked up on the jokey contrasts made by local wits between the cultures of espresso vs Turkish coffee, wine vs vodka, Austro-Hungarian vs Ottoman Turkish streetscapes, Latin vs Cyrillic alphabets, right-bank vs left-bank Danube, and the barely-disguised desire of speakers to be associated with the “European” side of the equations. Most dramatically, in Warsaw, after interviewing a young historian of modern Polish history, I walked with him along the city walls above the Vistula River, and followed his gaze as he pointed eastward, across the river to the Praga district, and to the prominent silhouette of a Russian Orthodox church, and exclaimed, “There is Asia!”

I was stunned. “Wait a minute,” I wanted to protest. “My relatives live over there, way east, and they’re not Asians,” but I caught myself on the defensive: what was this anxiety that he and I shared not to be excluded from “Europe”? More to the point, why did an Orthodox church lie outside Europe in this historian’s mind?

In 1988 I was in Kyiv, capital of the fast-receding Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the commemorations of the 1000th anniversary of the Christianization – or Baptism – of Kyiv and the land of Rus’ in 988. Christianity was brought to what would become the Ukrainian people not from Rome but from Constantinople. It is an oft-told tale, of how emissaries of Prince Volodymyr of Rus’, still a pagan, had ventured into the great church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, stood under its immense dome and wondered whether they had been transported to Heaven. Their report convinced Volodymyr to establish Byzantine Christianity on his lands and it was this Baptism that we were celebrating in Kyiv with all the pomp and circumstance as could be mustered by clergy and politicos not to mention the faithful masses. It took me another decade to get started but I knew that I had to write a book about Byzantium, the matrix, the Mother Lode, the progenitrix of the spiritual and popular culture of the Ukrainians, including those emigrants 900 years later who built those onion-domed churches on the Canadian prairie and parkland.

But Byzantium is huge. A thousand years of imperial history: the Second Rome, after the fall of that other one, that endured until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. Immensely wealthy and powerful at its zenith, missionary to the southern and eastern Slavs, repository of Hellenic arts and sciences, interlocutor with neighbouring Islam, “The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor,” as W. B. Yeats had it – what would be my subject?

I tell that story in Prodigal Daughter, how I stumbled on the iconographic representation of St Demetrius of Thessalonica, Great Martyr and Myrrh-streamer, martyred in 304 AD in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica, in the last of the Roman persecutions of Christians. He returned in the sixth century to defend his beloved city by performing miracles that saved it from marauding Slavic tribes. Perhaps the even greater miracle was that these same Slavs would in their turn come to venerate him as one of their own, a saint of Byzantine Christianity safeguarded for them in the Orthodox Church. I knew I had my subject: I would follow Demetrius around the Byzantine world and tell the tale of my people and his.

And so I went back to church. For purely research purposes, you understand – to immerse myself in the world of St Demetrius’s legacy as lived by Ukrainian Orthodox Christians of Canada. I started in Saskatoon (where I was writer-in-residence for a year) in Holy Trinity Cathedral, I bought my first Bible, the Orthodox Study Bible Revised King James Version, I memorized whole swatches of Liturgy, belted out the ancient hymns…and began to write my book. The book was published in 2010 and I’m still in church.