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Let's start off with the worst-case scenario. If, 500 years from now, the ordination of women has come and gone, and it is viewed by some scholar as a historical curiosity worth his further investigation, he will find in The Close a revealing hint or two as to why it failed. The book is a key piece of evidence about the minds of so many young women entering the ordained ministry at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Were it not for the fact that I know plenty of women who contradict the stereotype that this book unwittingly reinforces, I would consign the whole project to despair and transfer into a profession that earns more money.
The heartbreak of Chloe Breyer's book is that she should know better. There is so much about her to admire. Raised in a mixed-religion household, surrounded by skeptical friends and a supportive if somewhat uncomprehending husband, Breyer resisted all the forces that tried to pull her away from her faith in order to answer a call (genuine, it seems to me) to the ministry.
Throughout her first year at the Episcopal General Theological Seminary in New York, Breyer yearned to plunge back into her previous life of social activism and service, yet stuck it out in the tiny community of prayer that to all appearances wasn't terribly effective in the areas that mattered to her most. She struggled through Koine Greek, invested herself in biblical exegesis, fell in love with liturgy, and spent a summer doing CPE at Bellevue Hospital (the account of which is far and away the most interesting part of the book). In many ways her experience is utterly typical of seminarians all over America, that in-between lot which is neither lay nor clergy but to whom the entire church looks for its future.
Even more than that, Breyer embodies the spirit of Christians in the much-maligned Generation X, a spirit which perhaps has gone unrecognized by burned-out Boomers. The failed idealism of the sixties is rejected; Breyer wants the full brutality of the Christian experience, all the stops pulled out and no holds barred. There is a sense of longing for the pre-Constantinian days, when Christianity was really and truly a matter of life and death, gloriously countercultural.
Breyer is thus representative of a new breed of seminarian, caring not a whit for status, acceptance, cultural approbation, or social admiration. Indeed, achieving those things may well be an indication that you are doing something wrong or cowardly; the yeast of the Gospel should be exploding complacent comfort zones left and right.
Ironically, it is precisely this evangelical passion that raises the first of many questions about the book. I wonder who Breyer's imagined audience is. If it is the unbelievers and skeptics she cares so much about, I can't help but think that the title alone will be enough to steer them toward something different, Bridget Jones' Diary maybe. If it is everyday ordinary Christians, then much of the book will sound remedial. At the end, one rather wants to ask her, Who cares? What difference does your story make?
And therein lies Breyer's critical miscalculation. She has failed to recognize that what makes her book important, and potentially fascinating, is that it is written by a woman. Astoundingly, there is not the slightest mention of the peculiarity of women's ordination in the entire thing. No mention how recent a development it is; no mention how the motion almost failed in the Anglican communion and is still disputed; no mention that the vast majority of Christians still prohibit women from the ordained ministry. Breyer exhibits no awareness that her story is going to be poked and prodded by those on either side of the de bate as evidence in the case, pro or con.
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