The Long Journey of Li Tim Oi
Li Tim Oi. First woman ordained to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion. Commemorated in the United States on January 24, the date of her priesting, and in Canada on February 26, the date of her death. Most of us are still learning about her, still, as it were, getting to know her.
And as we learn we are discovering that, while need and circumstance may have made her a priest, it was her own gentle determination and her faith in appalling circumstances that made her a role model for all of us.
Little is known of her early
life. She was born in 1907, into a culture that so markedly favored sons that her father named her Tim Oi (Beloved One) so she might always be reminded of how welcome and cherished she was.
We know little of her girlhood, only that at the time of her baptism she was a student and old enough to choose her own baptismal name, old enough to have already formed a strong bond of admiration for Florence Nightingale. Her choice of Florence for her baptismal name was inadvertently prophetic: Nightingale had been ignored, misunderstood and frustrated by the church in the 19th century, just as Tim Oi would be in the 20th.
We know too that she attended the ordering of a British woman as a deaconess in Hong Kong Cathedral in 1931: Tim Oi would then have been 24 years of age. During the service the bishop expressed the hope that Chinese women might also consider being "set apart"--the terminology of those days---as deaconesses. Typically, Tim Oi said nothing, but went home and thought long and carefully, wondering if she too might be called to such service.
She consulted with her
family. In later years she would remember, with the affection we have for something long in the past, how
her sister teased her: "So...you want to become a Bible Woman?"
Indeed she did. She attended
a four-year theological school in Canton and in 1941 was made a deacon-- it had taken her ten years from that moment in Hong Kong Cathedral to achieve her goal. Even as she was ordained, China was in the midst of a brutal invasion.
With Hong Kong and much
of mainland China taken over by the Japanese, the Portuguese colony of Macau remained neutral and was quickly flooded with refugees. Brand new deacon Li Tim Oi was charged with their pastoral care, a duty that she apparently fulfilled with grace and compassion.
It was soon evident that
Anglican priests could no longer travel from Hong Kong to Macau to provide the sacraments,. Bishop Ronald Hall began making plans to ordain Tim Oi to the priesthood.
There is some evidence that
Bishop Hall had begun thinking along these lines even before the refugee crisis became severe in Macau, and had discussed the issue with his friends Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr; the three of them had met in 1942 and in the course of their conversation, had agreed that, if women were ever to be ordained in the episcopal traditions, someone would need to take the first step; someone would have to "simply do it."
Shortly afterward, Bishop
Hall wrote to his brother bishops in China, telling them of the deacon in Macau he planned to ordain in order that the refugees--a large and still growing number--might receive the sacraments. Even so, it was 1944 before Li Tim Oi and her bishop could meet--after a long and dangerous journey--in Guandong province in unoccupied China. There, in the Anglican church in the town of Hsinxing, Li Tim Oi, through the laying on of hands by Bishop Hall, became a priest in the church of God.
There is little doubt that both Bishop Hall and
Li Tim Oi were aware that they were breaking tradition--yet later Tim Oi would recall that they spoke only of the meaning of priesthood and of its lifelong, even eternal, commitment.
The fog of war can be very thick; most of the
world neither knew nor cared to know what had happened in a small church in Hsinxing. After the war, however, what had been done became known and there was an explosion of anger and outrage. The Archbishop of Canterbury denounced the ordination. Bishop Hall was censured and there were calls for his resignation.
To his great credit, Bishop Hall never pressed
Tim Oi to relinquish her Holy Orders, insisting throughout the rest of his life that in ordaining her he had only affirmed what the Holy Spirit had already done. It is thought, however, that it was in an effort to diffuse the attacks on Bishop Hall that Tim Oi agreed to give up her license to function as a priest--though she always insisted she had surrendered only her license, not the priesthood that was hers forever. She continued to serve the church in a small congregation in Hepu until the Communist takeover in China.
Under the Maoists, religious practices were
forbidden, churches and temples were closed and clergy were imprisoned or sent away for what was called "reeducation," an experience so terrible that Tim Oi later confessed she had seriously considered suicide.
Later, however, she would remember not the
darkness of those days but the light that shone through them. It seemed to her, she later wrote, that she heard the voice of God speaking in her mind, saying "Are you a wise woman? You are a priest," and that afterward she never doubted that God was with her.
Later, when she was asked how she had managed to pray under such circumstances, she replied, "I went up the mountain. Nobody knew."
For the next 35 years, as she worked in a factory and later on a farm commune, she was sustained by her belief in the God she met on her--perhaps real, perhaps metaphorical--mountain. At last, after a long wait, she was able to obtain a visa to visit her sister, who had emigrated to Toronto.
She was then 76 years old, and when her family suggested she remain in Canada, she agreed. In 1984, 40 years to the day after her ordination in Hsinxing, China, she was reinstated as a functioning priest in the Anglican Church.
By this time her story was becoming known,
and Tim Oi found herself becoming a rather reluctant celebrity. She received honorary doctorates, her return to visit Hepu in China was filmed and released as a video, Return to Hepu, and her biography, Much Beloved Daughter by Ted Harrison, was published. Her reinstatement to the priesthood was celebrated not only in Toronto but in the rest of Canada and in England as well--despite the fact that England had not at that time moved to ordain women.
Amid this growing recognition, Tim Oi gently
continued her ministry as associate at St. Matthew's parish in Toronto. "I am only an earthen vessel," she said, "but an earthen vessel with God's light inside." She died, as quietly as she had lived, in 1992.