Hello, my friend. Come in. Sit down.
I am so glad you are here.
Last time, I took you back to the fourteenth century --- to a stubborn English scholar named John Wycliffe, who looked at the church he loved and said, quietly but firmly, that something had gone wrong. He paid a price for saying so. But he said it anyway. And the world was never quite the same.
Today I want to stay closer to home. Much closer.
No ancient manuscripts. No medieval courts. No Latin arguments echoing off stone walls.
Today I want to tell you about a woman I watched with great affection. A woman who drove a Volkswagen Bug. Who made soup. Who opened doors --- literally and in every other sense --- to anyone who needed to come in out of the cold.
She lived in Alaska. She was an Episcopal priest. She was one of the first women ever ordained to the priesthood in her church --- before her church said it was allowed.
Her name was Diane Tickell.
And I think, when you hear her story, you will understand why I have carried it with me all this time.
I want to tell you about a summer in Cordova, Alaska.
Cordova sits at the edge of the world --- or it feels that way. Tucked into Prince William Sound, hemmed in by mountains and water, accessible only by boat or by plane. No road in. No road out. A fishing town. A cannery town. A place where the seasons are defined not by the calendar but by the salmon run.
That summer, the canneries had put out the call for workers. And the workers came --- hundreds of them, young people mostly, from everywhere, looking for a season's wages and an adventure at the edge of the continent. More workers than the canneries could use. They set up tents. They made do. They waited for work that was slow in coming.
And then the rains came.
I watched the rivers rise. I watched the tents go down. I watched young people --- soaked, cold, bewildered --- clinging to hillsides and wading through shorelines, with nowhere to go and no one coming for them.
And then I saw the Volkswagen Bug.
It was not a large vehicle. It was not a rescue truck or a church van or anything that looked remotely official. It was a small round car driven by a small determined woman, and it was climbing that mountainside in the rain with a purpose that I recognized immediately.
I have seen that look before. Across centuries. Across continents. It is the look of someone who has assessed a situation and decided that someone has to do something, and that someone is going to be them.
She made trip after trip. She loaded in the soaked and the bedraggled and the bewildered and she brought them down off that mountain and off the beach.
She brought them to the Red Dragon --- a century-old building she had personally reopened for exactly this kind of moment, though perhaps she had not imagined it quite like this.
Girls went into the parsonage. Boys went into the church. Sleeping on the floor, packed in like cordwood, warm and dry and fed.
Because there was soup. Of course there was soup.
I don't know exactly how she did it. I'm not sure she knew either. But I watched bowl after bowl go out, and somehow there was always another bowl to send. A woman who never met a stranger, feeding a small city of strangers, in a building that had been a library and a community hall and a reading room and a refuge for over a hundred years --- and was now, once again, exactly what it was always meant to be.
I have seen many kinds of ministry in my long life, my friend.
That was one of the finest.
So who was this woman?
Let me take you back to the beginning.
Diane Tickell was born on April 11, 1918, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. A New England girl. East Coast educated. She earned her degree from Smith College in 1939 --- one of the great women's colleges of America, a place that had been turning out sharp, capable, independent women for decades.
She worked for the Red Cross in Boston for a time. Then, in 1944, she married and moved to Alaska.
Alaska in 1944 was not the Alaska of today. It was not yet a state. It was remote in ways that are difficult to imagine now. She was a young woman from Massachusetts who had chosen, deliberately, to build her life at the far edge of the continent. She raised her children there. She worked as a social worker for the state --- walking into people's lives at their hardest moments, finding out what they needed, trying to help.
That is not a small thing. A social worker sees what most people never see. She learned, year by year, what human beings actually look like when the comfortable surface of life falls away. What they need. What holds them together. What breaks them.
And then, in 1968, her husband died.
She was fifty years old.
I have watched many people arrive at that kind of crossroads. The death of a spouse. The children grown. The life that had been built around another person suddenly standing open, unscripted, uncertain. Some people step back from that edge. Some people step forward into something they had never imagined.
Diane Tickell stepped forward.
She enrolled at Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At fifty years old she went back to school --- surrounded by students young enough to be her children --- to study for a Master of Divinity degree.
And while she was there, in 1970, the United States invaded Cambodia.
The students at ETS took to the streets. Diane went with them. She was arrested. She spent a night in jail.
She talked about that night for the rest of her life.
"If you want to radicalize somebody," she said, "put them in jail for the night."
I smiled when I heard that. Because I recognized it. That particular clarity that comes when an institution --- any institution --- reveals itself to be capable of a kind of casual cruelty. It does something to a person. It does not always break them. Sometimes it simply removes the last of their hesitation.
She graduated with her Master of Divinity in 1973. She was ordained a deacon that same year. She was fifty-five years old and she was just getting started.
Her bishop in Alaska would not ordain her to the priesthood. The church's canons, as they then stood, did not permit it. She spent months --- she and others like her --- pressing, asking, arguing, waiting, and serving.
The answer kept coming back the same.
Not yet. Not you.
She had heard that before. In a different jail. On a different night.
She had learned what she thought of that answer.
Let me take you to Washington, D.C.
September 7, 1975.
The Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation. A Sunday morning. And something extraordinary was about to happen --- or something irregular, depending on who you asked. The Bishop of Washington had already decided. That morning, his pastoral letter was being read aloud in every church in the diocese. He asked his clergy and his people not to attend.
More than a thousand of them came anyway.
They came from across the city, across the diocese, across the country. They sat in pews. They sat on the floor. They stood along the walls. Fifty priests processed to the altar. The music rose. And four women knelt to be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church --- before the church said they could be.
One of them was Diane Tickell.
She was fifty-seven years old.
I want you to sit with that for a moment.
She was not a young idealist swept up in the heat of a movement. She was a widow. A former state social worker and crisis intervention counselor. A woman who had spent her adult life walking into other people's hardest moments and knowing exactly what to do. She had been to seminary. She had served as a deacon. She had asked, through the proper channels, for the proper permissions, for years.
And she had been told no.
So she knelt anyway.
I was in that church. I felt what moved through the room when the bishop laid his hands on those four women's heads. It was not defiance --- or not only defiance. It was something older and quieter than that. It was the feeling of something that had been held back for a very long time finally moving forward. Like a river finding its channel.
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church called it, afterward, a distressing and divisive act. Her own bishop, the bishop of Alaska had "forbidden" her to do this.
I have heard that kind of language before. I have heard it applied to people who fed the hungry on the wrong day of the week. To people who spoke in languages the powerful did not approve of. To people who said that every human soul deserved to be seen and heard and counted.
Distressing and divisive.
What I saw was a fifty-seven year old woman from Alaska, who had survived widowhood and a night in jail and years of being told not yet, kneeling in a crowded church with the absolute calm of someone who had long since made her peace with the consequences.
She knew what she was doing. She knew it was irregular. She knew it would bring anger and conflict and difficulty.
She believed she was acting in response to the Holy Spirit.
And I will tell you something, my friend, from my long years of watching.
The Holy Spirit has very little patience for the calendar of institutions.
What happened that day was not just about women's ordination. It was about something that runs much deeper in the human story --- the question of who gets to say who is called. Who holds the gate. Who decides when the time is right.
Diane Tickell had spent years as a social worker deciding that question for herself every single day. She walked into crisis. She assessed. She acted. She did not wait for the paperwork to catch up.
She brought that same instinct to the altar.
And when she rose from her knees that September morning, she was a priest.
Irregular, the church said.
She went home to Alaska and got to work.
The Episcopal Church changed its canons in 1976.
One year. That is how long it took after the Washington ordination for the institution to move. The fifteen women who had knelt before retired bishops in Philadelphia and Washington --- irregular, divisive, distressing --- had made it harder for the church not to act than to act. By January of 1977, women were being ordained canonically. The gate that had been held shut for so long swung open, and it has not closed since.
Diane went back to Alaska.
In 1979 she became Priest-in-Charge at St. George's Church --- a little red church with a spire and a bell that had a tricky pull cord, consecrated on Easter Sunday 1919, sitting beside the Red Dragon Reading Room, that had been the beating heart of that community for over seventy years. She would serve there for eleven years, until her retirement in 1990.
I watched those eleven years carefully.
Because what Diane built in Cordova was not simply a congregation. It was something rarer and more difficult --- a genuine community. St. George's under her care became a place where faithful people of every stripe and persuasion could find a spiritual home together. Not merely because Cordova was small and people had limited choices. That would be too easy an explanation, and it would not be true.
She built it. Deliberately. Welcoming one person at a time.
She had a gift that I have seen in very few people across all my years of watching. She genuinely did not sort people before she let them in. There was no category of person who arrived at that door and found it closed to them. The fishermen and the cannery workers. The people with nowhere else to go and the people who had plenty of other options and chose her anyway. The certain and the doubtful. The lifelong Episcopalians and the people who had never set foot in a church and weren't entirely sure why they were setting foot in this one.
She never met a stranger.
I think that phrase is worth pausing on. We use it lightly, as a compliment. But it meant something specific in Diane's case. She had spent decades as a social worker walking into the lives of people in crisis --- people at their most raw, most frightened, most difficult. She had learned, in that work, that there is no such thing as a stranger if you are willing to look at the person in front of you long enough to see them.
She brought that to the priesthood. Every single day.
She reopened the Red Dragon for the cannery workers in summer. She climbed mountains in a Volkswagen Bug during floods. She made soup when there was no earthly reason there should have been enough soup. She organized --- girls in the parsonage, boys in the church --- with the calm efficiency of a woman who had run a crisis intervention center and knew that dignity and order are themselves a form of mercy.
And she performed weddings. For a while.
Young couples came to her --- drawn by the beauty of that little church, the one that looked like a church, the one that would make good photographs. She performed those weddings with joy, in the beginning. She believed in what she was doing.
But over the years, the marriages failed. More than she could bear to witness. And at a certain point, with the honesty that had characterized everything she did, she stopped.
She was perfectly willing to keep doing funerals, she said.
Everyone she buried stayed buried.
That line made me laugh when I heard it. And then it made me think. Because it was not cynicism. It was the hard-won wisdom of a woman who had looked at the full sweep of human life --- birth and death and everything between --- and had decided to put her energy where it held.
She knew the difference between the form of sacred things and their substance.
She always chose the substance.
That is her contribution to the tapestry. Not only that she helped open the priesthood to women --- though she did, and that thread runs forward into every woman who has been ordained in the Episcopal Church in the fifty years since. But that she showed, in a small fishing town at the edge of the continent, what ministry actually looks like when it is done without reservation.
A community built together. A door left open. A pot of soup that never quite ran out.
Those threads are in the fabric too. And they do not fade.
Let me ask you something.
Think of a moment in your life when you felt it --- that quiet, unmistakable sense of something larger than yourself. Something that deserved the word sacred, even if you would never use that word out loud.
Were you in a church?
Maybe. Some people are. I have stood in enough cathedrals and temples and meeting houses across enough centuries to know that they can open something in a person that nothing else quite reaches. I do not discount that. I never have.
But I want to ask you to be honest with yourself.
Because in my experience --- and I have a great deal of it --- the moments people carry longest are rarely the ones that happened in a pew. They are the moments that happened in the middle of something urgent and human and utterly unplanned. A hand held in a hospital corridor. A meal shared with someone who had nothing. A door opened in the rain by someone who did not ask any questions before they opened it.
Diane Tickell fought hard for the right to stand at the altar. She spent years asking. She spent a night in jail. She knelt in a crowded Washington church while her own bishop's letter was being read across the city telling people to stay away. She paid a real price for the collar she wore.
And then she got in a Volkswagen Bug and climbed a mountain in the rain.
Both things were true. And she never saw any contradiction between them.
That is what I want you to understand about her. She did not fight for ordination because she loved ceremony. She fought for it because she understood that the ceremony --- the collar, the altar, the institution itself --- was never the point. It was the vehicle. It was what got her to Cordova. It was what gave her the standing to open the Red Dragon and fill it with soggy cannery workers and make soup until everyone was fed.
Cordova was the point.
The Red Dragon that summer was as holy a place as any cathedral I have ever stood in. And I have stood in a great many. I have watched the light fall through the windows of Chartres. I have sat in the silence of ancient temples. I know what sacred space feels like.
It feels like a dry floor when you have been wet for three days.
It feels like a warm bowl of soup that should not have been enough but somehow was.
It feels like someone looking at you --- soaked, bedraggled, far from home, uncertain whether you matter to anyone in this town --- and seeing you. Not a problem to be managed. Not a stranger to be processed. A person. Fully and without reservation a person, worthy of a dry place to sleep and a hot meal and the dignity of a little order. Girls in the parsonage. Boys in the church.
We live in a time when many people have stopped looking for the sacred in the ceremony. The buildings are emptying. The institutions are struggling. And I think --- I have thought about this for a long time --- that the people leaving are not wrong, exactly. They are looking for something real. They are just not always sure where to find it.
Diane knew where to find it.
She had always known. Long before she went to seminary, long before she knelt in that Washington church, she had been finding it --- in the living rooms of families in crisis, in the offices of the Social Service Crisis Intervention Center, in the cold and complicated lives of people who needed someone to show up and not look away.
The ordination gave her a new set of tools. It did not give her the knowledge of where the sacred lived. She already had that.
And so I want to leave you with this.
The door of the Red Dragon is always open. It has been open for over a hundred years. It was open the summer of the great flood, when a small determined woman in a small round car made trip after trip up a mountainside in the rain because someone had to and she was the someone. But there was more than just serving, Diane knew how to invite others into service with her. That skill, that earnest call to service allowed others to feel the spirit that she held so dear, and this calling became the rooted source of the community that was built around her.
The sacred is not hiding from you. It is not locked behind a ceremony you have not been invited to, or a building you are not sure you belong in, or an institution that has not yet found the courage to open its doors all the way.
It is in the soup. It is in the open door. It is in the moment you look at the person in front of you --- whoever they are, wherever they came from, however wet and bedraggled and far from home --- and you see them.
Diane Tickell saw people.
Every single one.
That is the sacred. That is where it lives.
That is where it has always lived.
I want you to sit with something for a moment.
Diane Tickell was fifty years old when she walked into seminary. Fifty-seven when she knelt in that Washington church. She had raised her children. She had buried her husband. She had lived what most people would call a full life --- and then she looked at what remained of it and decided that the most important work was still ahead of her.
I find that extraordinary. I have watched human beings across a very long time, and I know how easy it is --- how understandable it is --- to reach a certain point and decide that the season for new things has passed. That the risks belong to the young. That the calling you felt, once, was perhaps not meant for you after all.
Diane did not believe that.
And so I want to ask you, quietly and without pressure, as a friend asking a friend ---
Is there something you have been told to wait for?
Not by anyone in particular, perhaps. Just by the accumulated weight of circumstance and time and the reasonable voice inside you that knows all the practical reasons why now is not the moment. Why you are not quite ready. Why someone else is probably better suited.
Diane heard that voice. She heard it from her Alaskan bishop. She heard it from the presiding bishop of her church. She heard it from an institution she loved and had served faithfully for years.
She listened carefully. She considered it seriously.
And then she got in the car.
You do not have to climb a mountain in the rain to honor what she showed us. You do not have to make a grand gesture or a public stand or a sacrifice that costs you everything.
You just have to find your soup kitchen.
The place where the sacred is actually happening. The place where someone needs you to show up and not look away. The place where the door is open and the bowl is warm and there is, somehow, always enough.
It is closer than you think.
Diane found hers at the edge of the continent, in a fishing town with no road in and no road out.
Yours is waiting too.
Next time, I want to take you to twelfth century Japan.
To a young monk named Shinran, who spent twenty years on a sacred mountain trying to find liberation through discipline and study and the sheer force of his own effort --- and finally concluded that he was going about it entirely the wrong way. He left the mountain. He married. He called himself a bald fool. And in doing so he opened a path to the sacred that millions of people have walked ever since.
I think Diane would have liked him.
But before I go --- I want to leave you with one last image.
Easter Sunday. The most sacred morning of the Christian year. The church is full. The flowers are extraordinary. The congregation of St. George's in Cordova, Alaska is assembled and waiting, dressed in their finest, ready for the Resurrection.
And somewhere in the sacristy, a small determined woman is moving very fast.
She had been up since before dawn. There had been details, and preparations, and the ten thousand things that Easter demands of a priest-in-charge of a small Alaska parish. She pulled on her cassock. She straightened her stole. She gathered herself.
And she walked out to the altar.
The service was beautiful. Her vestments were immaculate. She moved through the ancient words and gestures with the care and dignity she always brought to that altar --- the altar she had fought, at considerable cost, for the right to stand at.
It was only afterward that someone looked down.
Pack boots. Lace-up, rubber-soled, thoroughly Alaskan pack boots. With Garfield laces.
She was mortified.
Her congregation was enchanted.
And I think --- I have thought about this many times since --- that it was one of the most perfect Easter sermons I have ever witnessed. Not the words, though the words were well chosen and lovely. But the boots. The Garfield laces on the most sacred morning of the year, on the feet of a woman who had climbed mountains in the rain and fed a small city of strangers and built a community out of nothing but open doors and genuine love.
The sacred is not diminished by pack boots.
It never was.
She knew that better than anyone. She had always known it. She just forgot, for one harried and hurried Easter morning, to change her shoes.
And her congregation loved her for it. As they loved her for everything. As I loved her, watching from my usual invisible corner, marveling as I so often do at what human beings are capable of when they stop waiting for permission and simply get to work.
Diane Tickell was ordained on September 7, 1975.
She died on April 24, 2002, in Auke Bay, Alaska.
She was eighty-three years old.
She never met a stranger.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.