The ministry of men and women is a topic that is being discussed in many circles today. It is my intention to identify some of the significant issues related to women and to Church praxis (practice) that need to be addressed.

Dear Editor:

Just a note to tell you that I use the articles and interviews published in the St. Nina Quarterly as ‘jumping-off-points’ for discussion with my two teenage daughters. Being an Orthodox Christian in today’s USA can be very difficult, often confusing. Being an Orthodox Christian woman/girl is even more difficult. St. Nina’s provides some perspectives, ways to Orthodoxy into our lives.

Divine grace. . . which always heals that which is infirm and completes that which is lacking, ordains N., beloved of God, as deacon. Let us pray for her, that the grace of the Holy Spirit may come upon her.

This Byzantine ordination rite for the deaconess, dating at least from the eighth century and possibly from the fourth century, is just one of the many treasures Dr. Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald unearths in Women Deacons in the Orthodox Church: Called to Holiness and Ministry. Little-known marvels of the glorious history of women in the diaconate constantly surprise the reader. Dr. Fitzgerald also bids the reader to peruse twentieth-century documents relating to the female diaconate and introduces a subject heretofore pondered by select historians and theologians.

Among other legacies, Judaism bequeathed to Christianity the sacred number forty. In the Old Testament we read that after Noah built the ark, the heavens opened, raining hard forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:12). Moses remained on Sinai for forty days and nights, receiving from God the Ten Commandments (Exodus 34:28). To reach the Mountain of God, Elijah walked forty days and nights (1 Kings 19:8). The same sacred number determined the date for women’s purification after the birth of a male child (Leviticus 12:1–5). Considered twice as “unclean” as the mothers of males, mothers of females were “purified” eighty days after childbirth!

I was the eldest of four daughters of a priest, Fr. John Gerotheou, and, although it was a challenge to be a priest’s daughter because the community had very high standards for us, it also meant that I have always been involved in Church life. At about the age of six, my father took me into the altar to act as altar server.