Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
We are standing on the broad shoulders of great women who've gone before us.
When I was in high school and elementary school,
I was taught about one woman, and that was Betsy Ross,
who sewed the flag, whoop-de-doo.
(Laughter).
Since then, I've learned about amazing women.
What I know and believe is that each of us has the ability
to live expansive, transformational lives
that make the world a better place and that are joy-filled.
For example,
I bet that Harriet Tubman had no idea when she was a slave
that one day she would lead the Underground Railroad,
that they would call her Moses
and there would be $40,000 bounty on her head,
and that she would bring 300 slaves to freedom,
and then later, because they were influenced,
thousands of slaves to freedom.
She didn't know that.
She just summoned the courage within her,
and she became an amazing woman.
And I doubt that Eleanor Roosevelt,
when she was an orphan, because both her mom and dad her died,
I doubt she had any idea that one day she would become the First Lady,
and in that, she would transform that role into something it never was before.
And then, after that, when her husband had died,
she became the first woman delegate to the UN,
and she wrote and she passed the Declaration on Human Rights.
She had no idea.
She just summoned the courage within her, and she became the amazing woman she did.
In my life, the three most important things to me -
being a parent,
being a pastor
and loving the person I do -
all took courage.
Let me tell you this story.
I was born in Washington state, in a small town, to a loving family.
I had a brother and a sister, both older than I,
and my mom and dad were good parents.
Pretty functional, all in all.
What I remember about my childhood was we went to church every Sunday,
and we used to get in the car and drive nine hours
down to a place near Salem, Oregon.
We would turn down Cummings Lane,
and across the street from Cummings School was my grandparents little, tiny cottage.
Tiny!
And I would jump out of the car and run to my grandpa,
who was in the field.
We called him Pop.
Overalls every day of his life, a poor, loving farmer
who fed the neighborhood from that garden during the Depression.
And he would take my fat, little, dirty hand,
and he would just kiss it.
He kissed my hand! Ah!
Then we'd go inside to my grandma's house,
and she'd make a banquet out of things she'd canned from last summer,
and amazing things.
Then we would go into the front room,
and Grandma would sit down at the pump organ
and she would play the hymns,
and we would sing.
Now, those hymns planted deep in me
the seeds of faith and courage I would need.
So I went off to college, I loved college.
I was a very good student, studied many long hours.
And I had a professor - she was the chaplain -
she said to me, "Come see me after class."
I said, "Uh-oh. Okay."
So, I went to see her and she said,
"Cathy" -
I was Cathy back then -
"have you ever considered being a woman minister?"
"Nope! I've never met a woman minister.
Women are teachers and nurses. That's what we do."
And she said, "Well, I want you to think about it.
Pray about it."
"Okay."
So I did.
Another professor, of psychology, called me and said,
"I want you to do something.
We're going to have papers on different subjects.
I would like you to write one in particular."
"Okay. On what?"
"On lesbians getting custody of their children."
"Interesting. Okay. Why?"
He said, "Well, I've been watching you,
and you are a leader, you speak out what you believe in,
and you've got a lot of courage."
And I said, "Okay, I'll be glad to."
So, it was in Seattle in the '70s;
the first gay couple in the history of America, these two women,
had gotten custody of their kids.
So I went and spent five hours with them.
They were amazing women!
They were loving!
They were Christian, they were kind.
So, we had dinner, they prayed,
they talked to their kids and read to them books,
and I said, "Yeah, I want to be a parent like that when I grow up!"
So, I went back and I wrote the paper,
and I wrote a letter to the editor of this Christian college.
And you would have thought I said,
"You should mangle babies at night," or something.
They got so upset!
"Well, how could they even be Christians if they were lesbians?"
Really?
So, later,
I saw God was giving me a coming attractions.
So, I married my high school sweetheart,
a guy that lived down the road from me.
We applied to and got into an Ivy League school.
Who knew! I got into an Ivy League school.
We went off to Princeton.
If you've never been there,
when you think of Hogwarts and those beautiful, beautiful places,
that's exactly what Princeton looks like.
During seminary,
I learned about more amazing women from history and church history
and how they had transformed the world,
and my courage deepened and deepened and I loved the experience.
So, after seminary, we came back to Washington state.
I was to be the first woman ordained in Central-Eastern Washington.
So we went into a church in - I think it was Wenatchee.
And my husband went into this room, with his ordination sermon.
They came out a few minutes later: check!
He got it!
I went into this room with my little group of people,
with my ordination sermon ...
One hour ...
Two hours ...
Three hours ...
Because I was talking about God being both male and female
and why that's biblical,
and that went over like a fart in a spacesuit in the 1970s.
(Laughter)
Finally ...
Finally, they relented,
"So, okay.
We'll let her be ordained."
So -
Our first church was in Southern California,
in a lovely, wealthy community.
And what I did there, lots of things,
but primarily, worked with youth.
The youth group was about this big, and it grew to be about this big.
And what we did with our kids was we took them on mission projects:
to Watts;
to Mexico, because Mexico's, you know, not far away.
One week in Mexico, we built 14 houses.
Bunch of kids.
Because no one told them, "Hey, you can't change the world!"
We said, "You can!"
No one told them they couldn't, so that's exactly what they were doing!
At these projects, it was always the young women.
"Hum, Sarah ... Hey, Jenny, it's 6:30, honey.
Everyone else's eaten dinner. You have to come down.
You've got to stop working, ladies. Come on, please."
Always the young women.
So diligent, so committed.
So I whispered in their ears,
"Hey, you can do anything you want to do.
You can change the world."
And I'll tell you what: that's exactly what they're doing.
They're at the UN, they're in DC,
they're doing all manner of things that only men had done in the past.
And they said to me, "Because we saw a woman who was a pastor."
I remember one wedding I did.
I was up front, I came out,
I had two of the most amazing human beings as babies,
and now they're grown and they're incredible.
But I came out and I was about this pregnant.
And luckily, the robe hides a lot of it.
So I just came out,
and this was a wedding of two African American folks.
They had nine attendants apiece,
all black, lovely people.
The whole congregation was basically black.
And I walked out and I stood there, and a man in the back row said,
"Ah!
It's a girl!
And she is white!
And she is pregnant!"
And I said, "You noticed."
So we went on with it.
When we left that, our first parish, I remember a man saying to me,
"I have three daughters,
and my three daughters now know that they can do anything in the world
because they had a woman who was a pastor."
So, the next chapter in my life was a big surprise.
I did not see this one coming.
I met and fell in love with who is now the love of my life,
a woman.
Her name is Connie.
And that sent everything into a tailspin.
And, you know, after birth, you don't remember how hard it was.
I don't remember those months.
It was hard,
because I was married,
I was a pastor,
and I had two beautiful children.
And it got very, very hard.
Let me just say this.
My children's father got very ugly.
Twenty-three years later, he still doesn't speak to me.
But what I had to do
was summon my courage within me and fight for my kids.
Absolutely.
I had 100 people write letters that I was a good mother.
Now, if any audience would understand this,
you all would get this,
not being with your kids:
two years of hell.
I took these letters into the guardian ad litem and said,
"Here are the letters talking about my parenting."
And he goes, "I've never had 100 letters about anything in my life!"
And I said, "Well, sir, you've never had me fighting for my kids before."
So we won.
All we wanted was equal custody. Remember that story?
Equal custody.
So we moved down to Gig Harbor, and we had equal custody.
I used to cry when I'd see the school bus come
because kids would get out and go to other homes,
and now, in Gig Harbor,
the kids got off the bus and they came to our house,
they came to my house,
and life was great.
I thought, "Life can't get any better."
So one day, a knock on the door.
I go to the door, letter, I signed for it.
Interesting. I signed for it. Okay. What could it be?
Connie puts down her briefcase,
"I think I'll stay home today."
"Okay."
The letter said this:
"You can now pursue any church you'd like to be a member of
because you're no longer ordained in the Presbyterian Church."
"What?
What?"
No phone call,
no conversation,
No "We'd like for you - "
No concern at all or compassion for me.
"You're defrocked! Because you're gay."
Over, game over.
So I sat on the kitchen floor in Gig Harbor, and I sobbed for hours.
I did get up,
and a few weeks later, I said,
"Hell no!
Hell no!
I am not going to let the church define who I am.
I'm ordained, I'm called by God."
So I started a gay-lesbian-bi-trans church.
We met all over the Puget Sound.
It was so powerful.
I remember Laura talking earlier about internalized suffering -
I heard so many stories that would break your heart.
I helped people write so many coming-out letters to their parents,
to their pastors.
I helped people decide what they were going to say to their teachers.
But mostly, I preached this,
and this is the chalice I had made.
This chalice says, "God is wildly in love with you.
God is wildly in love with you.
You are not an abomination!
You are not a spawn of Satan!
God is wildly in love with you!"
And people's lives were transformed.
The power of that group that met for a decade is so amazing.
I don't know how many people decided not to kill themselves because of that.
And today, those people are many married couples,
off doing amazing things,
in multiple churches all over the Puget Sound.
So here's what I know for sure.
We are called to live compassionate lives,
compassionate toward each other, but also, equally important,
compassionate for ourselves.
We are called to love justice,
to do kindness always,
and to walk humbly.
We are called to scatter joy.
And you, I don't know you,
but I know in your life there will be times
when you are called to summon the joy,
summon the courage within you,
so that you can go on with your life.
And this is my final word to you:
you can,
you can summon that courage.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheering)