In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Illumine our hearts, O Master who loves mankind, with the pure light of thy divine knowledge, and open the eyes of our minds to understand thy Gospel teachings. Implant in us also the fear of thy blessed commandments, that, trampling down all carnal desires, we may enter upon a spiritual manner of living, both thinking and doing such things that are well-pleasing to thee. For thou art the illumination of our souls and bodies, O Christ our God, and to thee we ascribe glory, together with thy Father, who is from everlasting, and the all-holy and good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Welcome to Search the Scriptures Live!, dear brothers and sisters, I am Dr. Jeannie Constantinou, and today is May 25, 2020. Can you believe it? We’re getting close to halfway through the year 2020 already. If you wish to call in with a question or a comment, the phone number to call is 855-237-2346, or you could submit questions in the chatroom or at ask@ancientfaith.com or searchthescriptures@ancientfaith.com. Eventually I get all those questions, but you can just call in and join us live right here, at 855-AF-RADIO.

Well, I have to start out by apologizing. If you’re tuning in to hear discussion about the canons, that’s not going to happen this week. Here’s what happened. Last week, I thought we were done with this subject about women in the Church and St. Paul, and we were going to move on to Philemon or something like this, and Fr. Costa said, “You know, you’re not done with the pastorals,” and I keep saying, “Father, this is not a comprehensive discussion of the epistles of St. Paul; this is just kind of an overview, just to give people a general idea of what they’re about. We’re not supposed to be going deeply into these epistles.”

But as I was thinking about the pastoral epistles—because we’re still on 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—there are instructions there that become part of the canons of the Church, part of the canonical traditions of the Church, and I said, “You know, the canons are really important, and we don’t talk about them very much. And people don’t understand them, that’s for sure. So maybe we should talk about the canons.” I would just want to explain to you how they function in the Orthodox Church, because they’re usually misunderstood. So I thought maybe we should talk about the canons.

So a few days before every program, usually by Friday, I get an email, and they’re asking me, “What are you going to talk about on Monday so we can let people know?” So I said, “The canons,” which was different from what I said on Monday. Okay, but then I started getting all these emails about different questions and comments about women in the Church, so it was clear to me that we couldn’t talk about either Philemon or the canons; we have to continue with our discussion of women in the Church, but I promise it’s going to be a very interesting discussion! I didn’t want to get kind of stuck on this, but since we’re talking about it, we might as well finish discussing various issues that do arise in the question of women and St. Paul and women in the Church. So hang in there; we will end up talking about the canons next week, God willing, unless we are able to begin this week, but I kind of doubt it.

Remember when St. Paul said, “For in the Church we have neither male nor female, nor slave nor free,” etc.? So we’ve talked about that. That’s in Galatians. In what context did St. Paul say those words? That’s Galatians 3, which we already discussed. We talked about Paul and the law of Moses, right? But in Galatians 3, he says this, verse 27:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

So it’s important for us to remember the context—always remember the context—in which St. Paul makes that statement. It’s in the context of baptism, and there in Galatians we actually have our Orthodox hymn of baptism: “As many of you have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Osoi eis Christon evaptisthite,” etc. So this is the context in which those differences or distinctions disappear. There is no distinction with regard to our opportunity for salvation; there is no status in God’s eyes. This doesn’t mean, however, that we’re the same, right? Even though those distinctions disappear in the Church, in other words, as we become part of the body of Christ being baptized, everything changes: we each have different gifts; we each have different roles.

And we may admire the gifts in other people, but that might not be our gift. So some people cannot sing. They love music; they would love to be able to sing, but they really cannot sing well. So a person who lacks that gift can’t perform that function in the Church, but they have other gifts. Everybody has a gift, and everybody is called upon, just like the parable, to put his talent to use for the glory of God. We’ve heard that so many times, the different gifts, etc., so many times, but the question is: Do we really believe that and do we really accept it?

Because there’s lots of different functions, lots of different roles in the Church, and some of them are not so obvious. Some of them might be more obvious or might be something that we see in the service, the divine service, like the chanters or the priest or the acolytes or something like this, but there’s a lot of work that is necessary behind the scenes. Even the things that aren’t necessarily that which bring on praise… For example, people might compliment somebody who is chanting for their voice. I personally am very uncomfortable with that, to tell you the truth, because I don’t have anything to do with my voice. I don’t have anything to do with my voice; that’s a gift from God. So I am really actually very uncomfortable if anybody compliments me because I sang nicely. I don’t really like that, to tell you the truth.

But all of us, it kind of detracts from all the other things that are being done in the Church and that are very important. So we have people who are the kidneys, the lungs, the nose, the veins—so many different functions that people play in the life of the community, and anyone who is part of a church community knows that. There’s so many things that need to be done, and there’s no part of the body that we’re willing to dispense with, right? This is why St. Paul used the image of the body, which, by the way, is not unique to Paul. That was actually a favorite image in antiquity, for the ancient Greeks, by the way, and for the ancient Romans, who used to talk about society like a body. In other words, everybody had a role to play, and everybody’s function was important.

But Paul also uses that, but he tweaks it, because in antiquity, in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, you had slavery, right? People were told, “You’re a slave. You have to stay in your place. You’re a woman; stay in your place.” So it was used in a different way. But Paul says that those distinctions which are part of the world disappear sacramentally and mystically when we join the body of Christ. All the parts are valued; they’re not a disgrace. So in the world there are different parts of society, but slaves are lower; they’re not valued the way they are in the Church, because now you’re not a slave in the Church; you’re part of the body. When everybody is part of the body, we have a beautiful, harmonious, balanced, functional person, with all the parts of the body. We have health when all the parts of our body are working properly. Paul makes that statement in connection with baptism, in our life in the Church.

I don’t think I shared this with you last time. Why did he say that? Why did he say there is neither male nor female, besides the obvious, what I just said, that these distinctions disappear within the Church? A lot of scholars are talking about this, and I think it’s pretty well-established that he may be echoing the prayer of Jewish men, the daily prayers of Jewish men, which were probably also being prayed during the first century at the time of St. Paul, a prayer that he would have known as a Jewish man, because it’s in the Talmud. So it was probably part of the oral tradition and the prayers at the time.

So what did Jewish men and what do observant Jewish men still say every day? They say, “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, for you have made me a Jew and not a Gentile, free and not a slave, a man and not a woman.” And then in some manuscripts, there is also, “...human and not an animal.” This is so interesting, because Paul is directly contrasting the attitudes in Judaism for the attitudes which we have in the Church, in which those distinctions melt away, essentially because the Church is the body of Christ. That means that we have different roles, but no one is more important than the other.

I also was very struck by the fact that that prayer, “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, for you have made me a Jew and not a Gentile, a man and not a woman…” it strikes me very similar to the prayer of the Pharisee in the Gospel of Luke, who thanks God that he’s not like other men: “I’m not like other men; I’m not like this terrible tax collector. I’m not like the men who are graspers and adulterers, and I’m not like them. Thank you, God, for making me not like them.” So that prayer was very much in keeping with the attitudes of a lot of Jewish men in their prayers. “I’m so great. Thank you, God, because you made me so great.” So they might say, “Well, I’m thanking God. I’m not taking credit. God made me so great!” But we can see what a different attitude that is than what we see by St. Paul, promoted by St. Paul.

We, however, say, because we are baptized, “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, you have put on Christ.” We all put on the same white baptismal robe. We are all cleansed. We all become new creation in Christ, and now there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, etc. Christ changes everything. If we’re part of the body, it’s not that there are no differences in terms of function, because we are different parts of the body, but we are one. We form together one body.

Notice that St. Paul did not use the word “equal.” He didn’t say that men and women are equal, slave and free are equal; he means that those distinctions which separate us in the world don’t exist within the Church. It mattered in Judaism: ethnic origin, social standing, male or female. It mattered a lot! So the Jews believed that they had a ticket to heaven, because they were descended from Abraham. We see references to that a lot in the gospels, that they believed that they would be saved just because they were descended from Abraham. We certainly know the status of women, and of course the Gentiles? Forget about it; there’s no hope for them. So Jesus, when he made comments like, “They will come from the east and the west and sit at the table with Abraham while the children of the kingdom”—he means the Jewish people—“will be left outside,” that was an outrageous statement! Christ has really changed everything; he paved the way for all of this, for the fact that there is no distinction in ethnicity and in gender or in social class.

Whereas it’s still the case in Judaism—it is still the case, which is pretty sad… Of course, it depends on the type of Judaism, the extent to which they still keep the laws, but still, in Orthodox Judaism—I think I mentioned this—only a man can get a divorce. A woman, no matter what her husband is doing to her, she cannot file for divorce, and if he really wants to punish her, he can send her away and not divorce her, and she is left in this kind of limbo state where she’s not married but she can’t get a divorce, and that’s the case in Orthodox Judaism in the United States. So this is a big problem, and it continues to exist, the status of women in Judaism—not all forms of Judaism, but it still exists.

Last week I spoke in a very direct, kind of blunt way about some of the realities for women, and I was kind of descriptive—maybe too much, probably too much—but I did that, not because women need to know that—we know all about that—but so that men would understand what this is like, so that they would have some sort of sensitivity to our experience. I’ve never been a man, so I don’t know what it’s like to live inside a man’s body, so if somebody could illuminate me about how men feel about things, I’m always very interested to learn about that.

So Fr. Costa mentioned last week about silence and humility, how these things that are sort of expected, maybe especially of women, but I would say of both, certainly of both genders, that these qualities are virtues. Of course, we women are not rejecting that. We’re not rejecting the fact that we’re called to acquire these virtues just as men are, but I brought up sort of the female experience, because I think it’s good for men to learn about this, because we love the men in our lives. We don’t want men to have an attitude of arrogance or pride; they shouldn’t be praying like the Jews: “Thank you, God, for making me a man and not a woman,” because that’s very bad for them.

When I talk about us staying outside of the altar, it’s not because I need to be in the altar, because I’m going to be chanting outside. Outside is where the psaltiri is, the chanter’s stand. I don’t really need to set foot in the altar. But nonetheless, when I’m standing outside the south door—do you know how we refer to the doors? When we look at the iconostasi, the big entrance in the middle is called the royal gate, and the door on the left where the processions come out of is called the north door, and the smaller door on the right is called the south door. So if I’m standing at the south door waiting for my robe to be blessed by the priest, because before we do any function in the church, whether it’s as an acolyte or a chanter or something, you take your robe to the priest and he blesses it and then you put it on—so as I’m waiting for my robe to be blessed, I’m trying to get the attention of the priest who’s in the back there doing something, men will just walk in: they don’t give it a second thought. They just walk in to the altar. They don’t think about it. They’re oblivious.

It’s not that they are uncaring about the women—maybe I mentioned that I can’t be part of the discussion about what’s going to happen in the service because I’m outside—it’s not that, but it’s that they can become complacent and casual, and that’s not good, because we should never have an attitude about casualness about going into the sanctuary. It’s really very, very important, because… At one time I called to—I don’t remember how this came up, but one of my nephews said, “It’s my right as an Orthodox male to enter the sanctuary,” and I was pretty shocked to hear him say that, but that’s the attitude that many Orthodox men have! Because they’re men, they can enter the sanctuary. I can’t remember—maybe very rarely—seeing a man staying outside the altar, waiting to get the attention of the priest, to hand him a note or ask him a question. They don’t wait outside; they just walk right in! And I’ve seen men stroll into the sanctuary, looking around with their hands in their pockets. It never occurs to them that they shouldn’t set foot in the altar. That never occurs to them.

This is why I’m bringing it up: because we don’t talk about rights. Men don’t have a right to enter the altar, but we have this idea that they do, because mostly we see men in the altar; we rarely see women in the altar, so it sends the wrong message. As I explained last time, no one can enter the altar without permission, without a tonsure, without a blessing, without an ordination or something like this. I can speak for myself as a woman that what we do, most of us, we don’t do it because we have to. We love caring for our families, we love providing delicious meals and clean clothes and a clean house and a welcoming environment. This is our joy. We’re not forced to do that, but it’s nice when husbands and children don’t take that for granted, just as a wife shouldn’t take for granted the kinds of sacrifices her husband makes, the kinds of burdens he takes on himself. We don’t want to take men for granted; men should not take women for granted—and no one should take for granted entering into the holy space, because that’s not for anybody except those who have received a blessing.

I’m going to read an email, one of the first emails that came in this week. This came from Susanna of Poulsbo, Washington, also known as Priscilla. Isn’t that beautiful? That’s her baptismal name. It says:

Question: Question about the altar servers being men or boys. These servers aren’t tonsured. What prevents the Church from—

Well, we don’t know if they’re tonsured; you don’t usually know.

What prevents the Church from allowing these servers from being girls and women, as well as boys and men? Or perhaps untonsured servers should not be allowed in the sanctuary at all. Is this up to the individual bishop or priest? Also, from what you indicated, there were many female deacons in the early Church. Presumably they served in the sanctuary. Is there anything written in our Church law to prevent women from being deacons again?

Thanks for the question, Priscilla. Let’s start with altar servers being men and boys. I think that’s become… There’s really no reason why a woman can’t be tonsured. I mentioned that last time. I have seen women serving in the altar, literally preparing the incense for the priest and that sort of thing. So I’ve seen that. There’s nothing to prevent that. It just requires the tonsure, which is done by the bishop. But it’s become the custom of having only altar boys in America. I’ve been to some parishes where they try to involve the girls, and they do, sometimes very effectively, very nicely, at Communion, that the girls are holding the antidoron, the bread, or they’re doing other things, trying to involve them, short of having them come into the sanctuary. Maybe we’re not really ready for that. I think it has become the custom, as I said, because we’re used to seeing men.

So there’s this idea that only men or boys can enter the sanctuary; that’s not correct, but it’s kind of become the custom. I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with that, because it is men who become priests. So very often in the life of a young man, it’s his experience serving in the altar, assisting the priest as an acolyte, that instills in him this desire to be a priest, so I think that’s a beautiful thing. I don’t necessarily think we have to have altar girls. To tell you the truth, the way the boys behave sometimes—which is not always good; very often they’re kind of messing around, they’re talking, and they’re eating bread and they’re not always behaving, so I don’t know that it will help to have girls in there, to tell you the truth…

Should untonsured servers not be allowed? That’s up to the priest and the bishop. I think it might be a problem, because usually the boys are not tonsured. Now, does this mean this shouldn’t be allowed or we should tonsure all of them? No, not necessarily, because a tonsure is… What can I say? It’s a grace, and we don’t want to tonsure people who aren’t really serious about the tonsuring. It’s not just like a formality, like you get some kind of certification, but there’s a real grace that comes upon you. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about this publicly, but when I was tonsured, I asked the bishop—it took me a long time to be tonsured; I kept asking him, and it was never the right time—I might have mentioned this; I can’t remember—so finally, I asked him and he said, “Okay, we’ll do it tomorrow.

So he tonsured me, and I knew it was the right thing to do, to be tonsured, and I was always chanting, so that’s why I asked for it, but I was not really prepared for the fact that I really experienced something very profound. It surprised me, because I didn’t expect it, and it lasted for a week. It wasn’t just me, but two other people were tonsured the same day, and after a few weeks and I was contemplating this experience, I asked each of them if they had had the same experience, and they had! So we don’t want to tonsure little children who, with that grace, will go out and—God forbid—live a life of sin. You see what I’m saying? We don’t want to just tonsure everybody. I think it’s best to tonsure adults who have really committed to living a certain life in the Church, because it would be to our further condemnation if, having received that grace, we go out and just live like any person in the world.

About female deacons in the early Church, there has been some discussion about that. There’s a lot of discussion recently about reviving the female diaconate. Did they serve in the sanctuary? Not really. They did go into the sanctuary. They were ordained like a male deacon at the altar. They received Communion from the chalice and put it back on the altar, just like the priests and the deacons do. But the function of the female diaconate was not really liturgical, except in assisting with the baptism of adult women, who were baptized naked. So you needed female deacons to baptize these women, because men—male priests and bishops—were not going to do that. So the priest or the bishop would pronounce the baptismal formula—“The servant of God, so-and-so, is baptized,” and it is the female deacon who would submerge her, you see? As more and more people were baptized as infants, and the Church had fewer and fewer adults being baptized, the role of the female diaconate diminished until it sort of disappeared.

Would we bring that back? Some want to, and others are opposed to it. Who wants to? Well, a lot of people think that we could really benefit from female deacons. I think that there’s something to be said for that. For example, if a woman, if an Orthodox woman, wants to be a hospital chaplain right now, or a military chaplain, for example, they cannot give communion. They could be a chaplain. You could talk to people, you can visit them in the hospitals, but an Orthodox woman cannot give Communion. We need to have a male deacon or priest come to commune that person. If we had female deacons, they could do that role. In a lot of big parishes, this could be very useful.

But we shouldn’t revive the female diaconate just because we’re trying to show something, like we consider women equal to men in the Church. That’s not a good reason, and it’s likely to be very controversial in the Church, so we shouldn’t do something that’s going to create disharmony just to prove a point. I think it could happen, but it’s not going to happen any time soon. The Orthodox Church moves very, very slowly, and that’s best. If it ever happens, if we do revive the female diaconate, then it will be at the right time for the right reason, and there will be consensus within the Church of the need for that. It won’t be one church acting on its own and causing this kind of disruption.

One of the reasons why some people don’t want female deacons is because they’re afraid that then Orthodox women will want the priesthood. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think we will ever be clamoring for the priesthood, because we know, as Orthodox Christians we follow the traditions of the Church, but this is what happened in the Anglican Communion, when the Episcopal Church of the United States, or the Anglican Church in England, first ordained women. They started with the diaconate and they said—this is in the ‘70s—“We’re not going to make them priests, just deacons, just deacons, just deacons,” but of course they made them priests, and then they said, “But we’re not going to make them bishops.” Of course, now there are female bishops in the Episcopalian or Anglican churches. So that’s what a lot of the more conservative or traditionalists in the Orthodox Church… They’re afraid of that. I don’t think they have any reason to be afraid. I don’t think that we would ever violate tradition, because that’s just not what we do. That’s not who we are.

We are at the bottom of the hour, so let’s take a brief break for a couple of minutes or a minute or so, and we will return to some of the questions that were raised by your emails.

Okay, so the next question is something of a personal nature, but I think it’s okay to discuss it. This also came from Susanna Priscilla, and she said:

If you are willing to share, could you describe how you see your husband as having authority over you? This is something I need to understand from a trusted person in an Orthodox context.

So I talked about how the husband is the head of the wife. This is what St. Paul says; it’s in the Bible. So that would be the only person that I would really accept orders from except for my spiritual father, but not because I’m a woman but because he’s a spiritual father, so they have authority over us.

What do I mean by that? When we talk about marriage, of course, I think it’s good for us to contemplate what Paul meant when he spoke about the husband as the head of the wife, and he compared this to Christ and the Church. This is a mystery; so this is a mystery. What hurts the one hurts them both; what helps one helps both. There’s no competition between the head and the body. You are one whole person. You don’t separate your head from your body. We don’t really speak about equality in the Church, and we don’t speak to be equal in the Church. This is a term that comes from the world for the most part.

If I think back about my life, I’ve never felt like my husband is over me, and to tell you the truth, the only time he ever orders me to do anything is for my good, because I tend to be a little bit stubborn, like recently when I injured my leg, he would say, “Now, you get upstairs right now! You elevate your leg! You go lie down!” So the only time he ever orders me to do anything is for when it’s for my good, not for him, and that’s a big difference. The idea of authority or the husband is the head does not mean that he dominates you; he’s not your master.

When we think about what is marriage, what marriage is about, the head takes care of the body, and the body also wants to please the head. They’re not opposed to each other. That’s why St. Paul called this the mystery and compared marriage to Christ and the Church. When we had recently moved to New England, we left a San Diego parish and went to New England so Fr. Costa could get his Ph.D., and that was in 1992. He demanded that I go for a Ph.D., too, and I looked at him like: you have two heads. Christopher was a baby; he was one year old. The last thing that I wanted to do was get a Ph.D. I imagined myself sewing quilts and making stew in New England as the snow fell down. I wanted to have four kids; Christopher was number one. [Laughter] Well, he turned out to be the only one, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I had my own ideas about my life, and my husband was ordering me, literally ordering me. He says, “Now, you go to Harvard,” because Harvard was very close to where we lived, “and you tell them you want to go to school there.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m going to show up and they’re going to say, ‘Yeah, sure, come on in.’ ” But he was so insistent, and why? I asked him the question: Why? Why are you insisting that I go back? I already had two degrees in theology, which I used in the parish, in Bible studies and things like this. Why do I need a Ph.D.? Maybe in a few years. He insisted, and he would not stop. So I had to give in, because he was very persistent. He said to me—I’ll never forget this—“Because you have talent, and I don’t want to see it go to waste.” So when he is insisting that I do this, which was a big sacrifice in the family—it cost money, it cost time, it introduces stress into our lives to be taking classes, because you don’t just go for a Ph.D.: I needed to have two other degrees before I got the Ph.D. I ended up with five theology degrees, because I didn’t know everything that had to be done. This is a lot of study, and it took away from him.

So he wasn’t ordering me to do something that’s going to help him. He didn’t say, “Now, I order you. You’d better give me this kind of food every day.” It was really something that was for me. It was not something that he did for himself. He didn’t order me to do something that would benefit him; he did something to benefit me, and that’s really remarkable. You don’t know how much respect I have for him because of this—and he’s a Greek man. That takes a lot, but he loved me more than cared about himself, because he wanted me to fulfill what was best for me, so I want to do this, too. When he had things that he wanted to do, I’m backing him 100%, not in anything that’s wrong, not if I think it’s wrong, but if there’s something that he feels that he needs to do, whether it’s to move to another parish or to go to Cyprus for a year, I don’t always agree with it, but: “Honey, if that’s what you feel like you need to do, go for it. I’m behind you.” That’s what it is.

I have never felt any kind of exercise of authority over me by my husband except when he saw that I needed to do something for myself, and then he insisted upon it, but I also do the same for him. I do the same for him. I say, “Listen, you better do this. You better go to bed. You better go prepare yourself.” And he listens to me. So that’s what it means when St. Paul says, “Submit yourselves to one another out of reverence for Christ.” What a different model of marriage that is than the Jewish model at the time of Christ, at the time of St. Paul, in which the woman was literally the property of her husband.

We don’t use the word “equality” in this passage where St. Paul is talking about the gender roles, but when I started thinking about that: Where do we have the word “equality”? What passage came to mind? Can you think of the passage where St. Paul does talk about equality? Philippians 2. St. Paul was encouraging the Philippians to show humility to each other, and then he quoted this passage, this hymn, which we call the Philippian Hymn. He said:

Keep this in mind amongst yourself, as with Christ Jesus, who did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and being found in human likeness, humbled himself to death, even death on the cross. And therefore God has exalted him…

Wow. When you think about that, that changes everything! Why would we talk about equality between husbands and wives? If we’re following the example of Christ, Christ did not insist on the equality of his status with the Father. Instead, he became a servant; he became a slave. He died on the cross for us. What a different attitude this is! That’s why we have to be so careful about not allowing the values of the world to infiltrate our minds, but to always conform ourselves to the mind of Christ. There’s no greater example in the history of the world than that of Christ or God, right? He humbled himself to become a human being, so how can we, as Christian women or Christian men, be unwilling to humble ourselves in relation to each other? Whether it’s a husband and wife relationship or just within the Church, we should not insist on equality, because Christ did not insist upon equality. Think about the washing of the feet. That wasn’t his purpose, in showing humility. That means if you’re showing humility, you’re not insisting upon your status as an equal.

I turn to St. John Chrysostom and his comments about Philippians 2, and it blew my mind, because he also talks about the role of husband and wife in connection with this. I’m going to read it for you, because it surprised me. It’s so interesting, because there’s no one place where Chrysostom talks about it. He wasn’t thematic. It’s whatever came to his mind as he was preaching extemporaneously. There’s so many different statements scattered in different sermons about men and women and things like this. Somebody had written to me and said, “I always thought Chrysostom was a misogynist, because I read this sermon about what he said once,” well, probably there he was talking about sinful women. But he has so many positive statements to say, but you don’t find them all in one place.

I was surprised, because I did not think about this. Here is what Chrysostom said about Philippians 2. He used this passage about the humility of Christ as not insisting upon his equality to talk about husbands and wives/

Just as the Son and the Father are equal, and yet Christ chose to humble himself and become a human being, so the husband and wife are equal.

He says this is why Paul used the image of husband and wife, and he actually used the word “equal.” This is what Chrysostom said. And this is a very good point. He said:

If they were not equal, there would be no point in asking for humility, because an inferior is expected to be submissive to a superior.

We already talked about this with respect to men and women within the Church. We already talked about this. We already talked about this, even with respect to husbands and wives, that if Paul was trying to say that the husband is the lord over the wife, that he gives the orders and she is supposed to obey, if that were the case, then he would not use the image of husband and wife; he would have used the image of master and slave or master and servant. But he doesn’t use that image; he used the image of husband and wife. So here is St. John Chrysostom, Homily VI on Philippians 2. Listen to this.

What, then, is humility? To be lowly-minded.

Notice he doesn’t say “lowly”; he says “lowly-minded.”

And he is lowly-minded who humbles himself, not he who is lowly by necessity. To explain what I say—and please pay attention (this is Chrysostom saying to attend)—he who is lowly-minded is when he has it in his power to be high-minded, is humble. But he who is so not because he is not able to be high-minded, is not humble.

Do you see the point? In other words, to have the virtue of humility, you have to be in a position where you’re not necessarily humbled by your status or your stature, but you choose to be humble. You’re not humbled by your place, by your position. Here is Chrysostom.

For instance, if a king subjects himself to his own officer, he is humble, for he descends from his high estate. But if an officer does so, he’s not lowly-minded, for how? For he has not humbled himself from any high estate. It is not possible to show humble-mindedness except if it is in our power to do otherwise. For if it is necessary for us to be humble, even against our will, then that comes not from the spirit or the will but from necessity. The virtue is called humble-mindedness because it is the humbling of the mind.

Elsewhere Chrysostom says this. If you have some kind of a quality, like, let’s say you’re very generous by nature, or you’re very forgiving by nature, that is not a virtue. That’s what Chrysostom says. A virtue is something you acquire by your effort. You’re not normally generous or forgiving, but you develop that within yourself. So if you’re humble because you’re a slave, you’re not humble-minded. You could be a very proud slave! You’re a very proud officer. But if you’re the king and you lower yourself, that’s humility, because you have the power not to be that. You see? This is what he says. It has to be something which you have the power not to be. So to the extent that a husband submits to his wife, when he doesn’t have to, or the wife submits to her husband when she doesn’t really have to, that’s humility. This is Chrysostom, continuing here:

When exhorting to lowliness of mind, Paul would never have brought forward a lesser one as obedient to a greater. If he were exhorting servants to obey their masters, he might have done so with propriety, but when exhorting the free to obey the free, to what purpose could he bring forward the subjection of a servant to a master, of a lesser to a greater?

Are you following this? In other words, in the Church when we submit to each other, when we show humility toward one another in the Church, it’s because we are all equal—and then it’s a virtue.

He does not say, “Let the lesser be subject to the greater…”

Obviously, right? Paul doesn’t say that. I mean, there are places where he talks about masters and slaves and things like this, but here we are talking about people who are of equal status in the world.

“...do not let the lesser be subject to the greater,” but “You who are of equal honor with each other, be subject, each counting the other better than themselves.” Why, then, did he not even bring forward the obedience of a wife, and say, “As a wife obeys her husband, do also obey”? Now, if he did not bring forward that state (the marriage state), in which there is equality and liberty, since in that the subjection is but slight, how much less would he have brought forward the subjection of a slave?

Look at what he says here. The subjection is the slightest; it’s the slightest! Only because the husband is the head and the wife is the body. That’s what he’s saying here. It’s quite remarkable when he says that in the married state there is equality and there is liberty, and that allows us to acquire the virtue of humility. If the husband were above the wife as an authoritarian figure and she is required to submit to him, which is something that we hear in a lot of these Protestant movements that talk about the submissive wife or whatever, in all of that, if she thinks that she is required to do it, it’s not humility, and there is no spiritual value to it. You see what I’m saying? That’s St. John Chrysostom. That’s pretty awesome. I think he’s unbelievable.

Susanna Priscilla, also in her email, she alerted me to an oration by St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration XXXVII, where he discusses the effect of Christ’s resurrection on men and women. Remember I talked about that? We don’t really hear people talking about that very much. There are areas in the Church—not just the Orthodox Church, but other churches—where men have the idea that women are all subject to them. It’s not about that. We have neither male nor female in the Church. Husband and wife, it’s a unique situation. But there’s no idea that women have to be submissive to men in the Church. That is really a distortion, an aberration, of the understanding of the Scriptures and even of the Tradition of the Church and the history of the Church.

I mentioned how, when Christ rose, he liberated both Adam and Eve, because people usually point to the sin of Eve as justifying the submission of women, and that is exactly what happens in Genesis, but Christ reverses the effects of the Fall. Women are not all subject to all men just because of their gender. Frankly, St. Paul does not talk about roles in the Church according to gender at all. When St. Paul talks about roles in the Church—I’m going to read to you what he talks about when he talks about roles in the Church—it has nothing to do with gender; it has to do with gift. It has to do with the spiritual gifts. This is in 1 Corinthians 12.

And God has appointed in the Church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles, are all prophets, are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing?

You know about his image of the body. Notice he doesn’t distinguish there between male and female, because women were doing all of those things. Women were prophets and apostles and teachers and healers and all of those things, administrators: they were doing all of those things. So there is no such thing as a distinction in gender role except to the extent that women cannot enter the priesthood. That’s where it stops. But those are gifts of the Spirit, and most Orthodox men are also not priests. The priesthood is different. Most Orthodox men are not priests and will never be priests, so they are at the same level as all the women in the Church, because everything has to do with your gift that was given to you by the Spirit.

During the last program, I responded to an email from somebody who had asked whether or not it was ever allowed for a woman to teach a man. Of course! When the woman knows more than the man, she should be the teacher; when she knows less than the man, she should be the learner. We’ve seen this in the Bible with Priscilla teaching Apollos, and other well-known women preachers and teachers within the Church. I also read from St. Gregory the Theologian who talks about his mother catechizing his father, because his father was a pagan. Gregory the Theologian’s father, who was also named Gregory, was a pagan, and his mother, Nonna, was very devout, and she convinced her husband to become a Christian. And he became a Christian and actually became a bishop, and he was also named Gregory, as I said. So Gregory the Theologian really admired not just the fact that his mother taught his father, but that his father accepted this instruction from his mother. We talked about this.

But I’m going to read to you St. Gregory’s Oration XXXVII, about the equality between the sexes. It’s quite interesting. In this sermon, he’s commenting on the question that the Pharisees asked of Jesus, when they asked him if it was lawful to divorce your wife or not. Now, this is very interesting, because I never really thought about this… Well, we’ll talk about what I never thought about later, but let’s just read what St. Gregory the Theologian says. He first notes that the Jewish law was unfair, because it had two standards, one for men and one for women. This is what he is talking about when he begins his comments.

Chastity, in respect of which I see that the majority of men are ill-disposed, and their laws are unequal and irregular, for what was the reason why they restrained the woman but indulged the man? And that a woman who practices evil against her husband’s bed is an adulteress, and the penalties of this law are very severe, but if the husband commits fornication against his wife, he has no account to give.

Here he’s talking about the Jewish law. Adultery only happened if a woman was married. That was an offense against the husband. But a husband could go to a prostitute, under the Jewish law—I don’t know if that’s still the case—and that was not considered adultery. Here is Gregory:

I do not accept this legislation. I do not approve of this custom. Those who made the law were men, and therefore their legislation is hard on women.

This is the Jewish law.

Since they have placed the children also under the authority of their fathers, while leaving the weaker sex uncared for. God does not do so.

In other words, God does not treat men differently [from] women, and Gregory begins to quote from the Old Testament.

God says, “Honor your father and your mother,” which is the first commandment with a promise: “that it be well with you.” And “He that curses father or mother, let him die” (etc.). See the equality of the legislation? There is one Maker, of men and women. One debt is owed by children to both of their parents.

How, then, do you demand chastity—(He’s speaking about the Pharisees)—while you do not yourself observe it? How do you demand that which you do not give? How, though you are equally a body, do you legislate unequally? If you inquire into the worse, the woman sinned and so did Adam, the serpent deceived them both, and one was not found to be stronger than the other, and the other weaker.

But consider the better: Christ saves both by his passion. Was he made flesh for the man? So also he was made flesh for the woman. Did he die for the man? So the woman is also saved by his death. He is called a seed of David, so perhaps you think that the man is honored, but he was born of a woman, and this is on the woman’s side. The two, he says, shall be one flesh, so let the one flesh have equal honor.

St. Paul legislates for chastity by his example. How? This sacrament is great, he says, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. It is well for Christ to reverence Christ through her husband and well for the husband not to dishonor the Church through his wife.

So that’s pretty powerful. That’s St. Gregory the Theologian. He talks about them. They’re one flesh. If you’re one flesh, you’re equal. You can’t have a head without a body, and you can’t have a body without a head. Here, look at how he talks about how the effect of the resurrection affects both genders. So anyone, in Orthodoxy or anywhere else, who says that women have to be subject to men because that is a consequence of the Fall—if we believe that anything was accomplished by the resurrection of Christ, that also disappeared, and that’s why St. Paul says… Remember, baptism is about dying with Christ and rising with Christ, and that’s why in the context of the baptismal hymn, “All you who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27), he goes on and says, “For in Christ there is neither male nor female, nor Jew nor Greek, nor slave nor free.” All of that disappears, because we die in Christ and we rise in Christ. We become part of the body of Christ. So any distinctions have to do with roles in the Church, and those are a matter of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, what we have been given by God and how we offer that to God in the service of other people and in the service of the Church.

Let’s take a break at this point because we’ve reached the top of the hour, and we will continue with our questions after the break, and our emails; more emails, coming up after the break.

So I started to say what is it that I never contemplated before, what is it that I never thought of before: when the Lord is discussing with the Pharisees about divorce, and they’re saying, “Is it lawful…?” This was a matter of debate at the time of Christ among different schools of thoughts among the Pharisees: Is it lawful to divorce a man or not? So Jesus said no, right? He says, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” etc., etc. Now, he doesn’t allow for it, and why is that? Of course, with the exception of adultery, and we understand that. Why is that? Is that to create some kind of a prison?

When you think about: What did that mean for women at the time? A man could divorce his wife in some schools of thought in the rabbinic tradition in the time of Christ for almost nothing, he just got up one morning, decided he didn’t want her any more. He can literally hand her a divorce, a writ of divorce, and just send her away, and she has nothing. So what if he doesn’t like her because he’s got his eye on some young chick, and she’s devoted her life to him? What is she supposed to do? This is a real serious problem, but it reflected the status of women who had no rights. A woman could not get a divorce from a man. The man had all of those powers, to get a divorce, and sometimes for no reason at all.

By saying that there shouldn’t be divorce, Christ is really protecting women also, and giving them a kind of equality and dignity. Now, in the Orthodox Church we do allow for divorce in some circumstances, because the purpose of marriage is for the kingdom of heaven, and if it’s not going well, if it’s something that’s going to hurt somebody rather than helps them, we don’t insist; we don’t have that kind of rigidity that is seen in the Catholic Church, where you can never get divorced, instead, we have to find some way that you didn’t actually give consent, so we have to annul it, this kind of a legal fiction that’s practiced by the Catholic Church. We just say, “Look, by oikonomia…” We can talk about this next time with the canons, “kata oikonomia, according to economy,” or the flexibility of the Church, we adapt the rules in the Church for the individual needs of people, because we’re not all about keeping rules; we’re about flexibility because the purpose is the salvation of the people involved.

We also had an email from Carmen from Poway, California. Thanks, by the way, Priscilla, for your email questions. They were really helpful. So here’s Carmen’s question.

The parts where St. Paul gives instructions for women’s behavior in church sound jarring to our modern ears.

I hope I answered that.

Zooming out to a bird’s eye view of the passages, are we reading about the first formal effort in antiquity to educate women? How rare was the education for women in antiquity? Can the words “learn” and “women” can be found together in the same sentence outside of the New Testament?

And I think that Carmen was thinking about where Paul was talking about where Paul says, “Let the women learn in silence.” Remember, we answered that, so I hope you remember that lesson; we’re not talking about that. But in terms of women learning and being educated in antiquity, this is a really difficult question to answer, because first of all, what do we mean by “antiquity”? Are we talking about ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Israel, Judea in the time of Christ? What do we mean? Secondly, did social class matter? It probably did, but even beyond education, again, what do you mean by “education”?

Did you mean could a woman read? That’s different by what we ordinarily mean by “education” when we talk about the Fathers of the Church being educated, or Jesus, by the way, who was said [to be] uneducated. He could read, but he didn’t have a formal rabbinic training. So the Fathers of the Church, before they went off to be educated, they could read, but when they were educated, they learned mathematics and science and philosophy and rhetoric and history and all. That’s what it means to be educated. That’s a very formal, extensive education. Most girls probably did not do that, but it was not unheard of. There was a very famous female philosopher in Alexandria called Hypatia [Y-pa-tí-a]; in English they pronounce her as Hypatia [Hy-pay-sha]. She was very educated. And St. Catherine is known as the all-wise, St. Catherine. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was not common.

It’s really difficult to know, because I don’t think it’s necessarily the beginning of general education for girls, but generally it wasn’t considered important to educate girls. We know that the Church definitely elevated the status of women to a greater degree, and we know that the Church of Alexandria educated girls. They had a school of Alexandria, and for Christian boys, and we also know that they also taught girls. Exactly how far that went we don’t really know, but the question about literacy in the early Church, in antiquity, is also a big question among scholars, and most people think that the general rates of literacy were quite low. We talk about education of girls, but what about the education of men? Did most men know how to read?

I personally think that, especially in cities, most people could read. I’ve sort of gleaned this or received this impression from the comments of St. John Chrysostom, because time and time again he tells his congregation to read the Scriptures—which they don’t have usually, because books were very expensive. Then he says, well, you should buy a copy of even one gospel, and you should read it. Never does anyone— He talks about the excuses that people give for not reading the Bible—never is it an excuse that “I can’t read.” If they do, the only time—there was only time that I ever heard him allude to the fact that somebody can’t read, and it might be because of cataracts or something like this. You see, Greek is pretty easy. Once you know the sound that the letters make, it’s pretty easy; you can sound out any word. It’s not like English where you have “ph” is an “f,” and we have silent letters and things like this. In Greek, it’s pretty straightforward, so it wouldn’t be that hard for somebody to learn how to read. Now, writing is more difficult than reading, because then you have to know how to compose a sentence. But reading, really, I don’t think… Especially in cities, I think the rate of literacy was a lot higher than most scholars believe, but we can’t really prove that, and it’s a matter of much debate, but thanks for your question, Carmen.

Now, we also got a really great email from Fr. Dimitri, my favorite Russian priest, who writes to us from Krasnoselsk in Russia. This was a very interesting email, and I really thank him for sharing this information. We’re talking about women’s roles in the Church.

Good day, Matushka Eugenia. Christ is risen! Thank you for your previous podcast. It was great as usual. I just want to make a little remark. Maybe you had said it, but I hadn’t heard, that women can make one sacrament: it’s baptism, in case where there is no priest and no possibility to baptize a person.

I thought about it, Fr. Dimitri, but I didn’t say it, and of course you are right. I thought that’s general knowledge. It should be general knowledge within the Church. Anyone can baptize in the case of an emergency. You don’t even have to have water. You can simply lift the infant, lift them up in the air and say, “The servant of God is baptized in the name of…” etc. And I will tell you something else which I found very interesting. My aunt was a registered nurse, and she worked all over the world—in Saudi Arabia, Navajo Indian reservation, in Alaska, in Vietnam during the war—she lived and worked all over the world. And she told me something very interesting. She received her nurse’s training in a Christian institution—I don’t know where; I wish I knew—but she said that—this would have been in the 1940s—when they were trained as nurses, they were told to baptize people if they were dying, and she said, “I baptized a lot of people.” I thought that was very interesting, especially since she worked in Saudi Arabia for a while. I don’t really know. She baptized a lot of people, so this was something they were actually taught. Of course, today that would be considered very inappropriate and politically incorrect and all this, but this is something that was… All Christians believed that they should try to baptize people. They weren’t shy about that, and this was part of the training of nurses earlier in the 20th century, at least in the middle part of the 20th century.

I’m going to continue with Fr. Dimitri’s wonderful email.

During the Soviet period in our country, it was a usual practice for women to baptize.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? Under communism, there’s no priest around; they wanted the child baptized: a lot of people were baptized by women.

And, of course, it was the usual practice for a woman to be in the altar. My first teacher when I was an altar boy was a woman, and not even a monk.

He means a nun. So look at that: his teacher and the person who trained him in the altar—this is now a Russian priest—was a woman.

But frankly saying, “I am glad to see no women there,” (he means now) because considering the majority of our parishioners are women, the only place you can hide from them is the place behind the icon screen!

[Laughter] So that’s his little humor. Thank you for that; you made us laugh, Fr. Dimitri. And he says:

God bless you and your husband. He has a very heavy cross—a clever wife.

Thank you, Fr. Dimitri! Here, look at the accommodations which the Church makes for circumstances like this, how many women who are unknown to us—we know all the famous saints or the famous martyrs, people who suffered under communism—but think of all the countless, ordinary faithful Russians, Romanians, Serbians, Georgians, Ukrainians: people who kept the faith alive in this way. Isn’t this something to ponder! We don’t know them; God knows them. God will reward them. That’s an awesome email; thanks again for that.

And we have another email about—you know we have to talk about this—headcoverings, of course. This email comes to us from Starling. It’s a beautiful name; it’s a beautiful bird. You know a starling? It’s a beautiful bird. And she’s writing to us, as she describes, “from the wilds of western Wisconsin.” Thank you for your question, Starling, and here it is:

Hi, Dr. Constantinou. I’m a convert with a Protestant background who originally left the Church with a misunderstanding over the role of women in the Church. Thank you for your rehabilitating my understand of St. Paul. One verse that has confused me since I was a teenager and I have struggled with is 1 Corinthians 11:10. I don’t have an issue with the covering of head or not, but I have heard so many interpretations and arguments over the years about this. I don’t understand his reference to the angels, and of course what does Paul mean? Is this applicable to us today? What’s this all about?

Thanks again, Starling, for a great question. So 1 Corinthians 11 says this:

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, the head of Christ is God. Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, but a woman who prays and prophesies with her head unveiled (that’s the word here in this translation) dishonors her head. It’s the same as if her head were shaven. For if a woman will not veil herself (cover herself), then she should cut off her hair. But it’s disgraceful for a woman to be shorn or shaven; let her—

It says, “...wear a veil,” but that’s not correct. We’ll get to that.

For a man ought not cover his head since he is the image and glory of God.

Etc., and then it gets to the part:

That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head… because of the angels.

That’s verse 10. Now, let’s talk about first of all what he means. The reason why Starling received a lot of answers to that question is because no one is 100% sure what is meant by “because of the angels.” One of the most common responses, or this idea has infiltrated the minds of some Christians, comes from Genesis 6, in which it says that “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair and they took wives.” And “sons of God” is sometimes interpreted as angels; the angels saw that the daughters of men were fair, and they took wives to them. And this is absolutely untrue. Let’s start with whether or not Genesis 6 referred to the angels so we can blow that out of the water. That’s not correct, and Chrysostom talks about this when he discusses Genesis, his sermons on Genesis.

Genesis 6, “the sons of [God]” is not angels who saw human women and were attracted to them. That’s not correct, because angels have no gender, dear people. They’re not male and female. They have no bodies. They’re holy, of course, and they’re not tempted by human women. We all have guardian angels who’ve seen us in all manner of undress, so they’re not tempted by us. The holy angels are not tempted by us. So anybody who says that this has to do with the fact that women might look too attractive to the angels, that’s totally wrong, and you can dismiss that completely.

When Chrysostom talks about what is mean by “and the angels,” he just barely mentions this, and he talks about the fact that— And look again at how he analyzes the statement on the basis of the context, and the context is the worship service. He says that when we worship, we have to behave properly, and that’s what this whole passage in chapter 11 of 1 Corinthians is about; it’s proper behavior during worship. Later he talks about how women are talking and we can’t have conversations in church and things like this. Everything is about proper behavior in worship.

When he says that a woman should not cover her head because of the angels, he doesn’t say to tempt the angels; he says because of the angels. He says that we have to remember that when we are worshiping, we’re in the presence of angels: we have to behave properly. We know this in the Orthodox Church. We mention the angels when we’re worshiping. We have icons in our churches, and the walls of the churches show angels, flying. When the acolytes come out of the sanctuary, they’re carrying that round thing. We call that hexapteriga, that processional fan: it has the image of the angel on it. And we sing, “We who mystically represent the cherubim…” and then after the priest reenters the sanctuary, we say, “...invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts,” so we’re very aware of the presence of angels.

What does this have to do with women covering their head? It means that we have to behave decently in church. We have to be modest in church. Because it’s appropriate. And men should be modest, too, but usually it’s not an issue with men.

Now the question is: What did Paul mean by “covering her head”? Because the translation which I just read, which is the RSV, Revised Standard Version, there is no word “veil” in the Greek. When it says, “a woman should veil herself,” the word “veil” as a noun, as a piece of cloth, is not there. Instead, Paul talks about women praying with their head covered or head uncovered. You should cover your head. Of course, we all automatically think about putting a piece of cloth over it, but I agree with you, Starling, I found this very puzzling from the time I was a teenager, too. I never understood it. I always wondered about it, because we know that in Judaism, the men are the ones who cover their head. Even today, they wear the yarmulkes; they wear a prayer shawl. I was very confused by this, and I asked a lot of people, and I never got a decent answer either. The men cover their head when they pray, not the women. So when Paul is writing this, we’re talking about the year maybe 53; that’s 20 years after the resurrection of Christ. How could there be such a difference between the Jewish practice in which Paul grew up, where the men covered their head but not the women, and now what is he doing? Is he telling women to put a piece of cloth over their head?

I want to tell you an interpretation. There’s varying opinions about this among scholars, because it depends upon what was going on in the Corinthian community. I’m going to tell you an interpretation that is really growing, and I think it may be correct. I want you to bear with me, and don’t reject this immediately, because I was on the internet once, and somebody was talking about this, and an Orthodox priest offered this interpretation, which, as I said, is really supported by New Testament scholarship, and he was vilified by the Orthodox people on the website. And it was not fair, because, listen, if you’re going to reject something, do it on the basis of knowledge. Just because it contradicts something which you might have always assumed, that women should put a piece of cloth on their head, don’t just reject that; listen to what I’m going to say. You can decide for yourself.

I’m not saying, by the way, that a woman should or should not cover her head in church. I don’t really have an opinion about this. This is a matter of piety. It’s a practice. If a lot of women find this very useful, because they find that as the cloth hangs down over their head it prevents them from being distracted, because they don’t have that peripheral vision; they can pray better. I totally understand that. It’s an individual thing; it’s an expression of humility. When I go to a monastery, I put on a headcovering, because that’s the practice in the monastery. If I belonged to a Russian parish where that was the norm, I might adopt that, but in the Greek parishes, this is not something which is ordinarily seen, so it’s not the way I was raised. I’m not opposed to it. I think it’s beautiful if a woman wants to wear a headcovering, but it’s not required by the Church. This is a practice that depends on the individual woman. You’re not forced to do it, but you’re not prevented from doing it. I can see why someone would want to.

So what is the meaning of St. Paul’s statement when he talks again and again about a woman’s head being covered? She should pray with her head covered. This may very well mean—I’m increasingly beginning to think this is the case—that her hair should be on top of her head and not hanging down loose. Now, before you reject that automatically, he doesn’t say she should wear her hair on top of her head; she should cover her head. He means with her own hair. Now, the reason why I think that this is the case and a lot of scholars are believing this to be the case, is because—remember, there was a lot of freedom allowed to women in the Church, in the early Church, and this was not something they were accustomed to, and women were prophesying, and they were speaking tongues, and if they were allowing their hair to fall down, and they were having ecstatic experiences in church, which we know they were doing, they might seem like they were more like the temple priestesses, the pagan priestesses, who were prostitutes.

So Paul really thought that this was inappropriate, because women, until very recently, always had long hair, and they always wore it up on top of their head. Just think back: When did women first start wearing short hair? About a hundred years ago, in the 1920s. That was the flapper era. This was a big deal at the time. It was kind of scandalous for women to cut their hair short and wear a dress to the knee; that was very scandalous. Just think back all the Western movies you see, A Little House on the Prairie, they have the mom with long hair, but then they put it on top of their head during the day. The Gibson girls, the Victorian era—women did not have short hair. That was considered shameful. Notice how Paul says, “If she’s not going to wear a veil, she might as well cut her hair,” because it’s shameful.

For a woman to have short hair was considered very embarrassing. Women did not wear their hair long and down, because that’s what prostitutes did. Now, think back. How did women dress? They wore long dresses, down to their ankles, and long sleeves. So the only thing that was kind of sexy about a woman was her hair. Prostitutes would have their hair down, and they would try to entice men to come in for a little visit. That was considered immoral, for a woman to have her hair down. It was sort of sending a message that she was a loose woman, and Paul didn’t want Christian women to be perceived that way.

The reason why I think that this is very, very possibly exactly what he was talking about is because he talks about “if she’s not going to wear her hair on top of her head, if she’s not going to cover her head, she might as well cut her hair,” because it’s suggesting a shamefulness. So women who wore their hair down, this was something embarrassing or shameful. Then the women of Corinth were saying, “Well, I’m free. We have freedom in Christ, so it doesn’t matter,” or maybe they were getting a little bit out of head.

Last year Christopher and I went to Italy, and we toured the Vatican Museum. I took a lot of pictures of Roman and Greek statues of women. In every single one, the woman’s hair was on top of her head. I said, “I’m going to take pictures of these, because I might give a talk on this one day.” Think back on all those classical statues. You don’t see the women with their hair down, whether it’s an ancient Roman statue, an ancient Greek statue, respectable women wore their hair on top of their head, and only priestesses and prostitutes and women of ill-repute, they wore their hair down. So I don’t think—and I’m not 100% confident in this, but I think that there is something to the possibility that Paul is not saying that women have to cover their head with a piece of cloth.

What does this mean today? What is Paul trying to encourage for women so that they be modest? because long hair was considered kind of sexy, because women didn’t show any skin. The only thing that they could show that was really beautiful was their hair. You see what I’m trying to say? Today, men aren’t really… don’t really spend a lot of time looking at women’s hair because women are showing other parts of themselves. Today, what the lesson is… We have to be able to look at what Paul was advocating. He’s advocating modesty, decency, propriety, respect for the fact that we are in worship service, so that when we come to church we have to keep that in mind and dress appropriately, not with very short skirts. So if you wear your head covered, but your skirt is very short, what difference does that make? He’s not talking about just covering your head; he’s talking about modesty and decency. I’m sure he would say the same for men. It’s not appropriate for men to come to church in shorts. He’s a man. It is about what is appropriate and reverent and modest.

Whether or not an Orthodox woman chooses to cover her head—some women feel that this is something that they’re called to do; they like it. I think it’s beautiful if this is what you feel. I haven’t felt called to that myself. Fr. Costa would really like me to cover my head, but in the Greek tradition it’s not something we do so much, but I’ll tell you one other kind of funny story and I’ll let you go.

One time we were on the island of Cyprus. I’ve found that there’s less strictness in Greece and Cyprus than there is in some places here in America, and not all monasteries have the same rules. You should know that. So there’s some monasteries that are very strict, and the women have to cover their heads, and others not at all. We were traveling on Cyprus, and his cousin was driving, and we were going near this very famous monastery called Kykko, very old monastery, most famous monastery in Cyprus. And the cousin said, “Let’s go to Kykko,” and I was wearing a sleeveless dress and I didn’t bring a scarf, because I didn’t know… We didn’t intend to go to the monastery. So I felt a little uncomfortable about that, but my husband wanted to see this monk that he had met before at this monastery. So we go meet this monk who was very nice, and the first thing I did was apologize to him, because I was wearing a sleeveless dress and I hadn’t covered my head. And he said, “That’s okay. I am not tempted by arms and legs.”

So you see what the point is? Once upon a time, for a woman to expose her ankle or even her elbow was considered very scandalous. These things are cultural matters. That’s why you have—remember the women in the 1700s: they have a very low neckline—you could really see their bust—but they always have sleeves, and they never show their elbows, and they don’t show their ankles. Then later, it became okay to show your elbows. So men aren’t really turned on by elbows and ankles any more, but they were at one time. So we always have to consider these questions in their cultural context.

That having been said, if a woman wants to wear a headcovering in church, I think it’s a beautiful expression of modesty, of humility. If she chooses not to, that’s up to her. Also you might want to ask your spiritual father whether or not he thinks that you should, or if there’s kind of a custom in your parish, the parish priest might… Most parish priests don’t require it, but sometimes if you’re in a parish where almost every other woman is wearing a headcovering and you’re not, you might feel a little uncomfortable, but you shouldn’t.

That having been said, I hope we’ve covered the issues having to do with women. I think we have. So next week, I think we should talk about the holy canons. Some of these statements about women and men are in the canons. I think it’s important that you understand how the holy canons function in the life of the Church, so we’re going to take a look at that through the lens of St. Paul. So join us next week. Now let’s close with our prayers. By the way, Christos anesti for the last time.

Lord, now let your servants depart in peace according to your word. For our eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all peoples: a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel. Amen.

Good night.