So it begins with a mentor in ministry. She begins with her hesitancy. I’m somewhat reluctant to share this story, she says, considering the recent attacks on Rev. Wren Miller after she shared her story and struggles with Marie Claire. After a brief pause, she clears her throat and continues. Most people will either applaud me or think I'm headed straight to hell. I’ve decided that’s okay. I think more women, and especially clergy women need to share their stories—how they love, hate, embrace, despise, relish their bodies and sexuality.
This is the story of a ten-year old friendship that really gelled when a mentor took the young soon-to-be clergy woman to purchase her first vibrator. It was not the first time they met. As the mentor recalls, We became true friends over Flor de Cana in Nicaragua on a mission trip. From there we journeyed together, me through a painful break up and her through a discernment process.
This is that story.
I purchased my first vibrator after my divorce, at the age of 27, the mentor explains. I had strong women in my life, all on their way to ordination, who helped feng shui my apartment and my life after my ex-husband moved out. They helped me grieve and rediscover myself. I began to explore my own body without guilt and share for the first time in my life.
Years later, I met this young woman while serving the church of her childhood. As she contemplated seminary and life as a pastor, she saw my struggles, held my hand, wept and celebrated with me and I with her.
And she held mine, the young woman recalls. She assured me that ministry was much, much more than the horrified reaction that some of our church members will still have (even now) about the fact that either one of us own a vibrator. And use it. That horror was actually what inspired our visit to the sex shop in New York City’s Greenwich Village. I don’t remember what we were drinking at the time, but I do remember her shriek. “You don’t have a vibrator? ARE YOU KIDDING?!?” she demanded. There weren’t any more questions. She pulled out her calendar and started planning our visit to the city. This woman who served communion to me and baptized the children I taught in Sunday School stood beside me at the glass counter as the saleswoman explained each toy. She smiled. And, when enough time had passed, she asked me how I liked it.
While sexual discovery can yields intimacy in romantic relationships, these two women discovered that it gave them a deeper connection. They were able to talk about their needs and articulate their desires as two friends. It was something that they shared in their search for the divine, and something that they were able to give each other. As the mentor recalls, I have a “Mammoth Book of Erotica” given to me on my birthday in 2002. The note on the inside of the cover reads, “May all your wishes and desire be achieved—over and over again.” Indeed. The book is in tatters. And whenever I open my toy box and pull it out I thank God for the gift of a friendship that can offer this kind of expression.
This is what makes their friendship divine. The mentor explains: We both fully embrace life’s pleasures and adventures. Good beer, good food, good wine, good music, dancing, laughing. I love that she’s willing to feel and feel deeply. I often feel badly for women who can’t embrace pleasure. I listen to women laboring over a menu, counting every calorie and I want to cry for them. Be in your body and be kind. Just order what you want! Order the pasta! Order the osso bucco! Have another glass of wine! It’s about savoring the moment, enjoying the flavors. This is a young woman that is not afraid of pleasure! I love that about her!
And the young clergy woman responds: I can’t imagine a better mentor to teach me to genuinely—and yes, even erotically—love God and myself. With food, wine, and the movements of her own body, my mentor celebrates life. She taught me to take risks, to challenge the powers of the world and not take myself so seriously. She taught me that to love my self and my neighbor is to preach the gospel.
Yes, the story of our friendship involves a vibrator, but every friendship should push to explore all of the wonders that make this life precious. This shouldn’t be a story that my mentor or I are afraid to tell. Yes, there is a vibrator. Yes, we talk about sex as much as we talk about food, wine, justice and God. That’s all true, but I want it to be known. I want others to know that you can be a mentor to a young clergy woman by modeling self love. It’s what makes my mentor great and the one that I do call when life or ministry challenges my last nerve. She always knows how to answer that call.
The article is great… but the images are even better.
Thank-you Thank-you Thank-you!
As I prepared to pack and move to seminary, I smashed my vibrator to bits and threw it in the dumpster, figuring this was one more sacrifice I had to make in order to follow my still-developing call.
Oh, how I wish I’d had a mentor to tell me that being called didn’t mean amputating parts of myself.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article and I don’t know the two people involved, but I have to say my “inappropriate boundary” meter starting flaring. Maybe they had shifted from a pastor-student relationship to a peer relationship by the time the vibrator incident occurred, but I cannot IMAGINE having that same conversation with one of my former youth who is now an adult discerning ministry. I don’t think I’m *that* much of a prude, but maybe I am! Did anyone else find their intimacy discomfiting?
I did. It is definitely past my boundaries of mentor/mentee relationships.
Me three. And I guess a little past the boundaries of whoever wrote this piece – it is ‘name withheld’.
I think it is less about being afraid to talk about things (re: last paragraph) and more about modeling appropriate levels of disclosure.
Maybe I am a prude, too, Sarah. I’ve struggled with this article.
I guess I’m thinking about all the guidelines they recommend in Sexual Abuse Prevention workshops. I think a lot of them focus on the Male-Female power dynamic in the workplace, but I’ve seen young women really hurt by inappropriate closeness to female mentors, too. (Although that hurt has tended to be when the mentee saw the mentor as a mother figure and it went sour.) On the other hand, I found a frank conversation with a female mentor about what the expectations were around sex/chastity in seminary really helpful, since I wasn’t about to ask my Bishop! So, I’m not sure where the line is for me.
I find these comments interesting — especially as someone who has high boundaries in her ministry. Still, I find that there are places where those boundaries get complicated and somehow you make a choice together (intentionally and honestly) to break the boundary of what is expected. I wonder if that’s what happened here.
I think I understood the term “mentor” really differently than many commenters…as an associate pastor who has been able to form intentional friendships with other women in the church (I have a colleague who is their pastor, and we are explicit about that), I didn’t find this boundary crossing at all. I didn’t understand “mentor” to be a formalized thing, but a friendship with someone who can be a guide through various pathways. If this was a formalized mentor-mentee relationship, this would feel like a boundary violation. But that’s not the sense I get in this piece. I wish I had a friend who could mentor me in these ways.
I have to be honest – the main boundary violation I see is that it was published here. As an editor, I feel embarrassed that we posted an article like this. I think being provocative is not helpful and will set back healthy conversations about sex and the church. I think the author agrees – at least to some extent – because she didn’t use her real name.
Interesting. I didn’t see a boundary violation at all in an article about a friendship/mentoring relationship that includes frank, caring talk about sex and sexuality. It is provocative, true, but I found it refreshing that one clergywoman could offer another an open space in which to discuss her sexuality. Not everything needs to be right out there in everyone’s face – hence the anonymity, I’d guess – but I believe that one of the crucial things clergywomen can give each other is the kind of openness we can’t and shouldn’t have with our congregations and most of our other colleagues. I saw in this article a relationship that allowed for these women’s whole selves to be revealed, not to the whole world but to each other, which I think of as a healthy thing in a vocation where we so often have to conceal.
Stacey, you said what I was struggling to articulate. I wish more of us had these kinds of relationships where we can be frank and loving and open–this is an inspiration and a model in addition to being a little provocative.
I think too that keeping her name withheld could be a desire on the part of the author to keep those conversations about sexuality within trusted personal relationships, rather than being something people discover via google, often without ever meeting the author in person. Among the choices we have available to us in trying to open up issues of sexuality in the church are to take approaches like this–to anonymously bring things up to stimulate conversation–or the approach of introducing the topic after we already have trusted relationships with people and congregations. There’s not a lot of middle ground because if our names are on things that are out there in cyberspace there will be people and churches who will refuse to get to know us.