For all of her professional life, Carol Reese has been ministering with people on the margins.
During the 1980s, for instance, she provided pastoral care to people living with HIV/AIDS and served as executive director of the AIDS Pastoral Care Network.
Now, Reese is an interfaith trauma chaplain at Stroger Hospital, the first paid one in the institution's history. There, she serves the poorest of the poor—54 percent of its patients are uninsured, and another 29 percent are on Medicaid, mostly young men of color.
On Friday, Dec. 3, Reese will be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church.
Hers will be no ordinary ordination.
Reese is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church in Ravenswood. But the ordination will take place at Stroger Hospital even though most ordinations are celebrated in church settings.
And the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church will ordain Reese to the priesthood. The Most. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori is the first woman elected to lead the 2.2-million member denomination, a mainline Anglican Christian Church with historic roots in the English Reformation.
How did a partnered lesbian and mother of two, raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, arrive at this extraordinary crossroad in life, personally and professionally?
"I learned to how to be in the world from the Southern Baptists—all about God's love," Reese explained recently over the phone. "They provided the foundation for my spirituality, my sense of how to move in the world to promote justice and love and concern for all people."
Born in St. Louis and raised in Kentucky, Reese attended a Southern Baptist seminary, earning a master of divinity degree.
"Carol grew up hearing about Southern Baptist missionary heroes, those great women who were doing great things in the Church," said Bonnie Perry, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, also a partnered lesbian.
"Carol wanted to be one of those missionaries, Perry said. "That was her childhood vision."
But along came a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptists in the 1980's. "I was not going to be ordained in that tradition primarily because I'm female," Reese said. "Being a lesbian came up later."
During the 1990s, she found her way to the Episcopal Church and to All Saints. Over time, "I fell in love with the liturgy," Reese said. "All the things we do as Episcopalians made liturgical sense out of the faith I hold," she added. "I still remember when I first understood as a grown up what the Eucharist meant—to be out in the world doing what God expects us to do."
As the only chaplain paid by the Cook County system, Reese worked to create and fund her position, first with grant money, now with county funding. Through research, trauma department doctors and nurses learned from patients that faith was a key dynamic in sustaining them through a crisis, whether dealing with chronic disease or healing from a painful physical injury.
"My ordination will allow me to be present to the people I serve at the hospital in a fuller way, offering sacramental actions, communion, anointing people, other ritual kinds of things that I can't do right now," Reese said.
She also hopes her ordination calls "attention both to the plight of the medically under-served and to the crucial role of healing played by clergy and other persons of faith in health care settings."
Reese added, "I work with people who believe the church has abandoned its mission in the world."
Meanwhile, back at All Saints Church, Perry said parishioners first think and know of Reese as a mother: "She's down-to-earth, compassionate, gritty, lovely—an awesome mom."
The ordination of Carol Reese will be held at 3 p.m. Friday, Dec. 3, in Stroger Hospital's Hektoen Auditorium, 627 S. Wood. The celebration is open to the public. All are welcome.
Copyright 2010 Chuck Colbert. All rights reserved.
