When the Spirit leads:

...Harris, a member of the church, led the procession, carrying the cross...

...it is the body which proclaims to the world that God is alive in history...

...JANE REDMONT...

...all of us together in one body...

...The statements are cordial...

...The Right Reverend Barbara Harris, newly robed in bright vestments with Ashanti designs and symbols, presides at her first Eucharist as bishop...

...It is, much more, between haves and have-nots, between blacks and whites, between men and women, between the Northern and Southern hemispheres...

...Her brother bishops, Law and fear for the health and welfare of Christian unity...

...Harris's friend and mentor, he is rector emeritus of the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, which feeds, clothes, and sanctifies the poorest of the city...

...She speaks in the plural: her mother, her daughters, her husband, her women friends, all rush into the conversation...

...Christians do still need to speak with one another about Eucharist and ministry, about theological thought and ecclesial practice...

...Far deeper is the gap within each of our faith communities between fun-damentalists and nonfundamentalists...

...They also speak of the danger Harris's consecration presents for reconciliation among Christian churches, or what has be-come commonly known as "Christian unity...

...And when we say "unity," what do we mean...

...She is wearing a locket with a picture of her eighty-year-old mother, a member of St...

...She is a black woman who has had to struggle...

...Early in the service, the presiding bishop, Edmond L. Browning, asks if anyone knows of any reason why the con-secration ought not to proceed...

...The church which conducts this celebration is not apart from the world...

...Two men come to the mi-crophone...

...The celebration flows...

...It shows racial har-mony...

...All through the celebra-tion, the bishops have been purposeful, solemn, and excited, with the calm certainty that God, through them, is doing a good thing...

...Among the concelebrants are Carter Heyward, one of the "Philadelphia Eleven" ordained at the Church of the Advocate, and Florence Tim-Oi Li, the first woman ordained a priest in the Anglican communion, in Hong Kong, one generation ago...

...She is so clearly affiliated with the poor," Hayes adds...

...But it is, in its way, a step on the road to greater unity...

...In this church was held the first ordination of Episcopal women to the priesthood, in the summer of 1974, less than fifteen years ago...

...But as Barbara Harris's consecration shows, the context of this discussion has been enlarged, and so have the discussion questions themselves...

...It's beautiful for the country," she says...

...Bernardine Hayes, a computer systems analyst and self-described "dormant Catholic" and veteran civil rights and peace activist (she is currently Vice-President of WAND, Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament), had never before today "seen a woman offer the sacraments...

...Hayes feels something stir within her during the liturgy-"the realization that the piece of my life which is missing is the spiritual piece...

...Perhaps the two men will change their minds...

...Whose unity...

...and the unity of the Episcopal church around this celebration-the unity be-hind the liturgy-is not the easy unity of unreflecting liberals...

...He speaks of Mary.,/$he mother of Jesus, who was raised from her lowly estate and sang of God's power to raise up the humble and put down the mighty from their thrones: "Mary," he says after quoting the Magnificat, ,"was an oppressed woman...

...The intervention of the dissenters highlights the lack of unanimity in the church about the consecration (although Browning is quick to point out, at the postconsecration press conference, that the overwhelming majority of Episcopalians support it...

...This was, she says, "like a Pentecost...

...However token, this part of the ceremony honors difference...

...Not very characteristic of the Episcopal church," says one member of the congregation, Mary Shannon...

...she's been despised, she's been rejected....God has lifted up one who was at the bottom of society and has exalted her to be one of his chief pastors...

...At the distribution of Communion, Harris slips over to the far side of the auditorium and gives Communion to the people in the hearing-impaired section, who have been signing with their hands for three hours, " A bishop is, among other things, a maker of unity...

...Paul's African Methodist Episcopal Church choir alternates with the delicate melodies of the Chinese congregation and classical European harmonies of Trinity Church choir...

...This is no Tower of Babel: we all hear God speaking in our own tongue...

...Modene Dawson of Philadelphia speaks of another unity...

...I just felt so happy for all of us...

...That's how Holy Mary Mother of God felt!'' He weeps as he recalls the slavery and oppression of black people in this country...

...It has been hard won, tempered by prayer and struggle, and forged through the participatory process of decision making in the Episcopal church...

...We cannot," says Washington, "overlook the fact that this woman being consecrated today is not just an American woman...

...but not in the ways in which unity was previously understood or structured...

...The Episcopal church, a church of power and privilege, has chosen "a have-not," says Washington, but also one who "burns when others are offended," a "disturbing prophet...

...Only in understanding the past can we fully appreciate God's action in this event," he says...

...Barbara Clementine Harris, a woman and a priest of African descent, is consecrated a bishop by the laying on of hands, according to the tradition of the apostles, by fifty-five men, most of them white...

...Whoose unity, which unity, and at what cost...

...She strikes me as a true minister...

...At the consecration, the gospel music of St...

...The stately cadence of the Book of Common Prayer moves us forward, but in the musical realm there is a preferential option in the air: clearly, the day belongs less to Mozart and more to the music of the black church...

...But where are the real rifts in our lives today...

...As for denominationalism, it is no longer the principal intrachurch split...

...As Barbara Harris walks down the center aisle, a tiny woman whose voice and presence can fill a cathedral, over 8000 people burst into applause...

...Andrew's Parish in Seattle, who "still carries her white gloves with her in church yet has rolled with the changes...

...In describing the celebration, those who were there speak of unity...

...Harris has for years-in her public relations and policy work in the corporate world, in her parish, in her work with the Epis-copal Church Publishing Company, in her pastoral ministry- advocated racial and economic justice, taken up the cause of women, spoken out against homophobia...

...Washington speaks of Harriet Tubman, who "nineteen times went back into the land of bondage," thanking God for her freedom by helping to free others...

...The first calls the consecration "a sacrilegious imposture," the second "an impediment to the realization of the visible unity of the church for which Christ prayed.'' There will be a problem, they argue, with the validity of any sacra-ment celebrated by Harris...

...For her, as for many African-Americans in the assembly, the significance of the event extends beyond the church...

...Barbara Harris has already begun to make unity...

...WHEN THE SPIRIT LEADS BARBARA HARRIS, BISHOP A day or two before the consecration of Bar-bara Clementine Harris as suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mas-sachusetts, Cardinal Bernard Law and Greek Orthodox Bishop Methodios issue written statements of welcome...

...perhaps never...

...These rifts are the wounds in need of healing, in church and in society...

...The deeper chasm today is not between Protestants and Catholics, or Greek Orthodox and Episcopalians...

...Paul Matthews Washington, in his sermon, speaks about God and history...

...Throngs of priests, row upon row of beaming women and men', process down the side aisles of Boston's Hynes Auditorium...

...Mary Shannon repeatedly uses the term "body" to speak of the church and of her experience of this day-' 'finally being part of the body...

...she has, says Washington, devoted enough time to prison chaplaincy "to serve a two-year sentence herself...

...What is hopeful and healthy and makes a body strong is that their pain was not swept under the rug...

...I cried," she says...