What if I had been a boy?
This whole new (American) 69-year old Pope thing has really hit me surprisingly hard. He is just a few months older than I am. According to all the stories I have read, early in life he knew he had a calling to be a priest. He rose up the ranks in the Church, and now he will have what is surely one of the hardest, most delicate jobs in the world, but he will also live in relative luxury, surrounded by the most glorious art, architecture, music and sculpture ever created. He will be supported in everything he does, waited on, venerated by over a billion people, and listened to respectfully by world leaders, clergy and ordinary Catholics. Clearly his family, and Chicagoans generally, are proud of him.
This little American girl also knew her calling early. I knew by 6 or 7 that I wished to be a nun or a saint. (If I told my parents this, I suspect they just rolled their eyes over their cocktails or said, "That's nice, dear.") By 8 or 9 (you've heard this story), I announced to my mother that I loved the Episcopal church and its music and liturgy, and that I was a good Episcopalian but I was actually pretty sure I was not a Christian. She was driving me down to choir rehearsal, and she almost drove right off Nott Street into a telephone pole, and through clenched teeth told me never, ever, to say such a thing ever again! Within a few more years, by 11 or 12, I had thrown out my strictly spiritual dream and focused on English church music, wanting to become the first woman conductor of the men-and-boys Choir of King's College, Cambridge. And yet, by the time I graduated from high school at 17, I understood that even this would never happen. Without fully understanding that I was effectively in exile -- as a post-Christian feminist American woman beyond the structures of the patriarchy -- I sensed that fulfilling any of my original dreams was hopeless and impossible. Now at 69, forget palaces and cathedrals, I have never had a permanent home or any real security outside the love and concern of friends and occasionally strangers. I am painfully separated from family (this is partly my choice). And, darn it, I still cannot find a decent, wearable pair of summer sandals, so I continue to use a very worn pair of hiking boots in the late spring heat.
In the end, I could live without the glorious trappings of spiritual "power". Yet what would it be like to be heard, to be respected? To be embraced and lifted up? I cannot know whether, if I had been a boy, my path would have taken me to the top of the religious, church music, or spiritual world. But at least there would have been a better chance of not being invisible. I am grateful at least that I currently see such vivid signs of the birth of a completely new paradigm, one where women will play a prominent role!
I doubt I will ever have the opportunity to speak to the new pope. But if I do, these are the questions I would ask him: What if you had been born female back in 1955? Or what if hierarchies back then were all-female? What if when as a young boy you played "priest", your family chided you to remember that only women could be priests in your religion? What if, instead of encouragement, you had received only pushback? What if you were told over and over that only women had power in the religious aspect of society as well as all others? How would you have re-channeled all your spiritual passion? What kind of work would you have ended up doing? Where (literally and figuratively) would you be now?