Report from NAGA, Columbus, Ohio

Here in Columbus, Ohio, at the National Altar Guild meeting, I found “altar guild ladies” from all over the country telling me, “Oh, yes, we have men on our altar guild.” Well, where are they? I talked to the one other guy attending this triennial affair and he readily admitted he’s here because his wife is. Is he active in his parish altar guild? “Well, she asks me to do certain things that involve getting up on the stepladder,” he said. She laughed and nodded her head.

But things are changing, even if slowly. When the stirring preacher and Native American bishop Steven Charleston spoke to us yesterday, he would often end a sentence with the words “my sisters,” then add after slightly too long a pause, “and my brothers.” Maybe I’m beginning to sense how women felt women felt when they were relegated to the sacristy and allowed to do little else. (This week marked the 30th anniversary of the Episcopal Church’s agreeing to quit using gender as a bar to ordination.)

NAGA members already this week have heard some of the shining lights in the church. Ginny Doctor, a Mohawk educator and theologian, celebrated Eucharist on Thursday, followed by Bishop Charleston, who challenged us to be open to the Spirit in our lives. He stressed the centrality of the Eucharist in Anglican worship. Gathering at the Table “is what holds us together,” he said, and we on the altar guild need to keep that in mind as we set the Table.

A Latino bishop who was to celebrate Friday morning had to leave because of a death back home, and Mac graciously agreed to fill in, leading us in a moving bilingual liturgy. That was followed by an appearance by Richard Hooker – actually it was the noted Hooker biographer Philip Secor in the guise of the 16th century Anglican theologian.

Friday night, the downtown Trinity Church was packed to the gills (including many NAGA folks in the crowd!) for the Integrity Eucharist, with the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson as preacher. It was pretty overwhelming.

(But a glitch that only visiting altar guilders would tut-tut about. They put out at the oblations table a basket of a thousand or more wafers, in wrapped cellophane rolls of 100, meaning that at communion time the clergy were frantically trying to get them unwrapped. Also, they had several more communion stations than they had chalices. Uh oh. But it was still a pretty overwhelming, incredible service.) ~John Y