Episcopal News Service October 14, 2006
Friends sustain each other, Anderson tells California seminary gathering
By Mary Frances Schjonberg
[ENS, BERKELEY, California] House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson told those gathered October 13 for the third annual St. Margaret's Lecture at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) in Berkeley, California, that friendship is a mysterious force that is part of our journey toward reconciliation with God.
Anderson said she has "come to understand that friendship, and the way in which we individually embrace it, contains windows into our spirituality and our soul and our relationship with God."
Using as a backdrop the friendships formed by the women who were trained at St. Margaret's House, a historic CDSP-associated training school for deaconesses and lay women, Anderson said friends sustain each other.
"What must it have been like for these women? How much their friendships must have meant to them and what value those friendships must have held for them," Anderson said, noting the 1934 refusal of General Convention to modernize and "regularize" deaconesses. (The deaconess canon was eliminated by General Convention in 1970 and women were included in the canons pertaining to deacons.)
"The God that called them into ministry gave them to each other for support and for sharing the joys and sorrows of life in friendship," she said.
"So there you are, a woman, called to minister, committed to a Church that is ambiguous, at best, about the ministry of women, the ministry to which you have been called," Anderson said of the women at St. Margaret's House in the mid-1930s. "You find your way to St. Margaret's House and there you find affirmation in your ministry from an institution. But you also find friends."
She told the more than 300 people attending the lecture and lunch that "on this life journey friends are guides, guardian angels, mentors, role models, truth tellers, comforters, comic relief and side kicks."
Full story and photograph: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_78655_ENG_HTM.htm
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