As I said, the year was 1970. Very few Christian churches permitted the ordination of women at that time. Billie McClure filed a federal gender discrimination complaint under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—claiming that she received different pay, different benefits because of her sex; claiming she’d experienced a retaliatory firing. She took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, the lower courts having opined that because Mrs. Billie B. McClure was a minister, they could not even consider her claims.

The courts blamed the Wall—the tall wall separating Church and State. That Wall, the courts have said, “must remain high and impregnable.”

June 1967, Billie McClure completed her two-year ministry preparation at the Salvation Army’s Officers Training School. She went on to serve as a Corps Commander in Pascagoula, Mississippi, near sea and shipyards with hull numbers five hundred to five-hundred-and-ninety-nine assigned to Pascagoula in 1943 by the United States Maritime Commission. They build boats in Pascagoula. All kinds of boats. Barges, Tankers, and Standby Boats. Tugs, Dredges, and Assault Ships. They built Gate Lifters, Forebodies, Oilers and Icebreakers.

For three years, Billie McClure worked for the Salvation Army earning $35.50 a week. During those three years, she worked as a Welfare Casework Supervisor and a secretary, a worship leader and a Bible study teacher. She also worked as a newspaper distributor, a fundraiser, and a janitor—a jack of all trades. Later, the courts would deem her, unequivocally, a minister.

Today, I read about McClure (Mrs. Billie B.) v. Salvation Army as my own case is at bar. I’m playing Armchair Attorney here. Writing rebuttals and sending them to my lawyer. Tomorrow, I’ll hope she doesn’t read them. I’m writing rebuttals based on Google and JSTOR, based on French press and boiling lifeblood, and no legal knowledge whatsoever. I fear that I am, as sailors would say, pissing into the wind.

Footnote 35, George Washington University Law Review. Commentators wondered if the 1972 Ministerial Exception would survive. It did.

In 1970 Billie McClure had recently transferred to the Salvation Army Territorial Headquarters in Atlanta after Pascagoula’s work proved too much. Couldn’t keep up, she said. She had requested a demotion from Commanding Officer to staff duty, and her demotion was granted.

So it was in Atlanta, Georgia that Billie McClure brought suit. “As Atlanta goes, so goes the South,” reported Look. The people would have seen the Confederate Flag hoisted full-mast, its red head flapping in blue sky, atop a silver pole—a venerable general in city center. A general above the Vine City slums; above Rich’s Magnolia Room and sit-ins, above Morehouse College and the emerging black bar of the 1960s. Such change today! the people must have thought. Blacks at our lunch counters! Women in our mills! Such disruption everywhere!

“Do you think I might be considered for a raise?” Billie McClure likely said to her superior officer, Denny White, one January day, 1970. Or maybe she ventured, “Paul and I were talking the other day, and it seems that he is making more money than me.” She would have stopped and cleared her throat. “I believe we hold the same rank and authority don’t we, sir?” Denny’s abdomen rests on his lap as he pushes back from his desk. Blank stare. Or possibly this: “I’ll look into it and get back to you.”

I imagine Billie waited a week, then two, or three. Her superior officer would not get back to her so she re-approached. Knock, knock. She pushed open his door. “Yes,” Denny said.

“Did you have a chance to look into my rank and pay?”

“Uh, yes,” he cleared his throat. He shuffled some papers on his desk, didn’t look up. “It seems that you are correctly ranked and paid. There will be no changes.”

Something about his words reminded Billie of butter and coarse salt about to turn. “What about my benefits?” she asked. Denny looked up at her in the doorway, her pale right hand on the doorframe. “Are you certain about that?” she continued. “Because The Position of Women in the Handbook says—”

“Billie, I’m in the middle of some travel arrangements right now,” he lifted his index finger, almost to his lips, and shook his head. His blue eyes blinked hard. “Would you mind closing the door on your way out?”

I imagine Billie McClure going home that day, closing and locking her front door, her children Darryl and Carrie gone to bed, or huddling around the radio in the kitchen. She falls onto the couch, takes out the Orders and Regulations for Officers, and reads: “Women have the right to an equal share with men in the work. A woman may hold any position of authority or power in the Army, from that of a local officer to that of a General.” She lets out a long sigh.

A woman General, Billie McClure holds this phrase in her mind. The radio hums. She stares at the wall—its shadows and light—and imagines Deborah seeding justice beneath the Palm of Deborah, sitting in the long blue shade just outside of Bethel. The year is 1120 B.C. Her palm is broad, broader than most, but not boastful; its trunk layered, like a waterway facing forward, like an aqueduct stone-stepping into a city full of thirsty women and men. Burnt orange dates cluster, gather and listen. They hang like luminaries, overhead. They sugar and drip, ache and listen to the voice of Deborah. What sound is that? What phonemes, what waves, does wisdom throw? The people below, in the shade, murmuring, shouting, and praying; whispering, prying, and pleading. The people, endlessly, making their case before their judge.

November 23 and 24, 1970. A two-day hearing was held and evidence presented in one downtown Atlanta, Georgia courtroom.

I picture District Court Judge William O’Kelley—a wooden ruler at hand, pencil, and pink eraser nearby. I picture him with a running tally of hours kept; the question before him, scrawled on a white legal pad: “Minister? Yes or no.”

Billie McClure likely donned her best suit for court, a navy blue, acrylic skirt suit, the skirt falling just below her knees. She’d cut and sewn this suit ten years ago and hadn’t had much occasion to wear it since.

The judge leans in and listens. Billie McClure is on the stand. She’s been sworn in. “What were your weekly activities at Pascagoula?” the defense attorney asks. “And how about Atlanta, at Territorial Headquarters, Mrs. McClure. What duties did you perform there?”

As Billie McClure answers, the court stenographer types and the judge jots. He jots: four hours in “corp activities,” (What are “corp activities”? The defense drills. Can you explain “knee prayer drills”?); one hour teaching Sunday School class, one hour working in Bible class. (What, exactly, does “working” mean?)

“I spend a little over an hour in band practice and another hour in song practice,” Billie McClure says.

“Every week?”

“Yes, every week.”

Weekly, Judge O’Kelley jots and underlines. He draws a long line down his yellow legal pad, a plus and minus column on the left-hand side.

“Have you ever dedicated a baby?”

“Yes. Once.”

“Performed a wedding ceremony? Sworn in a soldier? Led worship? Officiated a funeral?”

The courtroom flanked by wooden walls, like the hull of a boat. The crest of an eagle in gold above the judge’s head, a blue velour curtain rippling behind the bench.

“Mrs. McClure, are you ordained by the Salvation Army?”

“Yes.”

“In what year were you ordained?

“1967.”

On March 8, 1971, District Judge William O’Kelley rendered his decision. While Mrs. Billie B. McClure was trained and commissioned to dedicate babies, the number of babies so dedicated: none. While she was trained and commissioned to conduct wedding ceremonies, the number of ceremonies so conducted: none. And while she was trained and commissioned to officiate funerals, the number of funerals so officiated: none. In Little Rock, she swore in one church member, Judge O’Kelley noted. In Atlanta, she participated in knee drill prayer meetings, conducted welfare assistance interviews, and typed letters.

“To decide whether the duties which a member of a religious group performs fall within the category of ‘religious activities,’” explained Judge O’Kelley, “is not an easy matter.”

“But more to home,” he continued, “the Court feels that any allowance, salary, or funds received by the Officers, their work assignments or their places of assignment, among any other grievances Mrs. McClure may have, are matters of religious activity into which the Court may not inquire.” Case dismissed.

Mrs. Billie B. McClure’s defeat is a mooring, a drop-anchor, a boat anchored at sea (held fast and sincere)—a mooring generally a vessel’s permanent home.

III

“It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer… to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

— Title VII, Civil Rights Act of 1964

June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress, urging the Legislature: give this your attention. “These legal remedies,” President Kennedy reasoned, “are the embodiment of this nation’s basic posture of common sense and common justice.” These legal remedies “involve every American’s right to vote, to got to school, to get a job and be served in a public place without arbitrary discrimination—rights which most Americans take for granted.”

The original bill, as it read, protected only four classes: race, color, religion, and national origin or ancestry—sex clearly missing.

Opponents of the bill rose up. “That dog don’t hunt,” said some Southerners.

“I’ve an idea,” said Congressman Howard Word Smith of Virginia. “Let’s include the minority sex. Let’s amend.”

The House erupted. “Women, too?”

“Gaw, surely not!”

“Listen. Let’s create a Civil Rights Act as full of booby traps as a dog is full of fleas,” said Congressman Smith.

James Roosevelt stood up and said, simply, “My mother would have opposed it.”

I know of one political lobbyist, Nina Avery of Virginia, who wrote a letter to members of Congress pleading with them to kill the bill by adding “sex” to it. “Thank God for the Members of Congress who are from the South,” she wrote, “and for those Members from the East, North and West who will use their brains and energies to prevent a mongrel race in the United States and who will fight for the rights of white citizens in order that discriminations against them may be stopped.”

Nonetheless, the amendment—the Sex Protection Clause—passed 168 to 133 with twelve women seated in the House. The House of Representatives added women as a protected class, and pushed the bill into the Senate.

House Bill 7152 arrived on the Senate floor. The bill is “a punitive expedition into the South,” argued one senator.

Others jack jawed. “What about religious freedoms?”

“What about a religious organization’s right to discriminate based on their beliefs?”

“Do they have to abide by these civil rights laws?”

Ships can be pirated under the correct conditions. To pirate, one must bluff and puff and fill oneself with blustery air. To pirate, one must embolden a crew—an entire crew with sturdy sea legs—a crew blustery enough to board another’s boat, and take wind from another’s sails.

“Won’t this force churches to hire women clergy?”

“Can the State tell the Church what to do?”

“This title shall not apply to a religious corporation, association, or society,” some senators said. “Let’s grant religious organizations an exemption.”

When you filibuster, you hold the Senate floor—you command the vessel—you run it aground or you send it to sea. The ship at your command.

Religious institutions should not be allowed to become “instruments of invidious and unreasonable discrimination,” reasoned Senator Williams.

“If there is to be an exception for religious organizations,” House sponsor Congressman Erleborn agreed, “then this is a very narrow exception.”

Back and forth they went. There were precisely two women among ninety-eight men seated in the Senate of America’s 88th Congress.

Pirates board and seize assets, valuables—gems and plates, shekels and gold, spoons and lampstands. Pirates of the Seven Seas, they pray to the Three Fates, board the vessel, and take what they believe is rightfully theirs.

The Senate Majority Leader, Hubert Humphrey, amended. Amendment No. 656 unstitched the blanket immunity. “Religious organizations can discriminate in employment matters,” he red-lined, “but only on religious grounds.”

Others agreed. “A Presbyterian church would, for example, not be liable if it refused to hire a Mormon choir director.”

“Yes, but the church would be liable if it refused to hire a black minister if that refusal was based on race and not on any religious doctrine or practice.”

For 60 working days in the Senate, a filibuster—the longest prolonged, unceasing, torrent of human speech in American history—prevented a vote on Bill 7152.

On June 10, 1964, the Senate gathered the sixty-seven votes, the two-thirds majority needed to invoke cloture. The filibuster finally broken. Less than one month later, the Senate sent the bill to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ signed the bill because JFK was dead, and Southern Congressman Howard Word Smith of Virginia stood before the House and declared, “You have sowed the wind. Now an oppressed people are to reap the whirlwind.”

Then, just eight years later, came Mrs. Billie B. McClure to test the waters. Will this thing hold? This hand-crafted hull, this wooden vessel—is it seaworthy?

Prior to bringing suit against one of America’s most venerable institutions, my only courtroom encounter had been jury duty in Southern California. Called to the wooden juror box and seated on a murder trial. Juror Number One. The two-week trial considered the culpability of Elliott Blake, 67, drunk beyond the legal limit for operating a motor vehicle or a vessel under power, had taken a .57 Magnum in his left hand and shot into the night. Blake shot his sixteen-year-old employee, Mark, who’d been coming through the back fence on Blake’s property at two a.m. to pick up his dirt bike for the weekend. Mark had been storing his dirt bike on Blake’s property for some time.

As I said, Blake was drunk. He shot Mark through the right eye, “on accident,” he said, defending his property. Manslaughter, or first-degree murder, or not guilty—this was given to the jury of twelve to decide. We went into deliberations, seated around a heavy, six-foot table, listening to two or three people dominate the opinion-making. After a couple of days of this, I ventured downstairs to the court’s legal library and found myself a heavy legal dictionary. I reported back to the jury foreman what I had found: definitions, clarifications, words.

The next day, the judge called me into his chambers. The judge, coming from court, was robed in black and white like a yellow-faced, stout-bodied bumble bee; an electrical current, a buzzing moved through chambers as if the walls sizzled and throbbed with honey and light, darkness and secrecy, the hive hidden—twenty miles from any poppy field—the bees hovering, lifted on a golden chord of light, their legs laden with circles of packed, orange pollen.

The judge had probably entered his dark chamber earlier that morning. Daily, he pulls the golden chord of his desk lamp. The light snaps on. The chamber lights. Stacks of books stacked on his desk, two winged open (the air does not move, nor disturb them)—they are the black-veined wings of a honeybee. Are these the words of ancient scribes handed down? Case law, copied and codified? He touches the words and takes them on wing—he eats. They drop into his abdomen.

Any judge that knows not her own guilt, I read once, is not fit for the bench.

I entered chambers that day and took a seat in a small chair, like a small child, flanked on either side by all this legal expertise—the prosecution and the defense, the court stenographer, the judge, the books lining the laddered walls. The dim yellow lamplight.

We sat, the five of us, huddled around golden light and hammered golden chords. Wings fluttered. The stereocilia of our ears, the hairs of our arms, stood up. There we were, the five of us, tabernacling with God, unaware.

Turns out, as a juror, you’re not permitted to consult any outside sources. You’ve got only what the lawyers and judge choose to tell you; you’ve got only these two pearls at hand: your own common sense and common justice. Apparently, I didn’t think those adequate. Or I hadn’t remembered those instructions, or more likely, thought them stupid.

The judge peered over his reading glasses, his black compound eye, his double lense. “Young lady,” he said, “did you consult a legal dictionary?”

“Yes, I did.”

That week, in The Ventura County Star, a three-hundred-word article: “Juror Dismissed for Consulting Legal Dictionary.” I clipped it out and pasted it into my journal.

Late 1971, Mrs. Billie B. McClure filed her appeal, a Writ of Certiorari with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Circuit included seven Southern states—Florida, Texas, and Alabama; Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia, plus the Panama Canal Zone. At that time, the Fifth Circuit had twenty-nine seats for active judges. The first female judge, Phyllis A. Kravitch, wouldn’t appear on the Circuit until seven years after Billie McClure’s case had come and gone.

Billie McClure’s appeal went before Judge Coleman, Judge Simpson, and one Judge John Minor Wisdom. Judge “J.P.” Coleman from Mississippi wrote the opinion. I picture J.P. Coleman writing at his desk, dusk settling just outside, his fingers flying across the legal pad—his silver hair like a drawer full of silver butter knives, half-tarnished and glorious. “Only in rare instances,” Judge Coleman jots, can a court “uphold state action which imposes even an incidental burden on the free exercise of religion.”

“We cannot,” he writes, then scratches out “cannot.” He stops and stares out the window. “We must not,” he continues, “unduly infringe the protected freedom.” Jotting, striking, re-reading, and done. He rips the paper from the pad, and places it inside his secretary’s basket. “First thing today,” he scrawls up top, barely legible, and closes the office door.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “the State bears watching,” and the Church should be that watchdog. Might the reverse also be true? That the Church bears watching. That any power without balances and checks on that power is a lampstand without a base.

“It has long been the practice of The Salvation Army, as with many other religious denominations,” wrote Judge J.P. Coleman, “to determine these matters which deal with the very terms of a minister’s calling. Such a practice must be classified as both basic and traditional.”

I am a chamber filled with fire. A queen bee buzzing.

The determination of “a minister’s salary, his place of assignment, and the duty he is to perform,” reasoned Judge Coleman, belongs to the Church without interference from the State.

My eyes alight on all these gender pronouns, all this place holding and posturing. The masculine fingers at the lips of the priest women. What, in God’s name, is going on here? (What is going on in God’s name?) The quiet, so disquieting—the male clergy at the head of every Lutheran banquet table where I plated and served. His place, his command. This, our white, tucked tradition, its four-bedroom corners and sheets; a housewife and her duties, these are such lines that must be kept. The right to decide who leads the church, Judge Coleman, Simpson, and John Minor Wisdom all agreed: these practices must be classified as both basic and traditional.

“Should this decision hold,” wrote the National Organization for Women later in amicus curiae, “thousands of women will be without civil rights protections.”

Constitutional Law has been called by some, line drawing. Pencil drawing here, pen and ink there. Erasers and pencils up-ended, up-ended pencils sketching lines then erasing. The left-handed among us smudging and back-tracking, lifting the hand for a look—is it adequately drawn? Will it do? Is there an identifiable character? An arc, a line, a shape? A shape, a form, a trajectory?

We architect a vessel; we design a hull. Others come along and color in the lines, and set it to sea. We watch. Will it rise to meet sea conditions? Congress and the Courts architecting our very lives, right down to the last jot and tittle.

Here she is. All over the footnotes for 47 years: Mrs. Billie B. McClure. McClure v. Salvation Army, (5th Cir. 1972), cert. denied. No, we cannot even inquire into the matter that Mrs. Billie B. McClure is broaching (the tall, tall Wall, don’t you see it? they cry). Order of Certiorari is denied. Down in U.S. legal history she goes, one Mrs. Billie B. McClure.

And so she goes to take her place among the dispossessed. She is ghosting, as sailors say—making headway when there is no apparent wind—

the dispossessed will inherit the earth. After they have reaped the whirlwind, the earth will be theirs.

VII

When Mrs. Billie B. McClure filed her lawsuit on behalf of herself and other women similarly situated, she was acting as a private Attorney General looking out for the public interests of others.

“Above the Law?” asks Attorney Carolina Mala Corbin years later, “The Constitutionality of the Ministerial Exception from Antidiscrimination Law.” And Attorney Martha Minow: “Should religious groups be exempt from civil rights laws?”

I think, perhaps, Billie McClure might have written her own legal notes (penned with lifeblood and a tongue of fire at hand): “The Religious Patriarchy and the Judiciary in Collusion: The Undermining of Civil Rights for Priest Women in America.”

VIII

“Religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. The year was 1802. What George Washington instituted—national days of prayer and fasting—Thomas Jefferson reversed. Given that, some considered their Head of State a foe, not a friend, of religion. Surely, we are all going to hell in a hand basket now, they said.

So when Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, and Stephen Nelson of the Danbury Baptists wrote the President a letter expressing concern about state encroachment upon religious liberties, Thomas Jefferson jumped at the chance to expound upon his views before the nation. Being a religious minority in Congregationalist Connecticut, the Danbury Baptists felt surveilled (cramped, limited, attacked) by the Congregationalists who controlled much of the state.

Gentlemen, wrote President Thomas Jefferson, the American people in 1776, with one voice, declared that their Legislature “should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

In 1988, the FBI analyzed Thomas Jefferson’s original draft and found an extra word, a descriptor, for the famous wall lodged there. Eternal, he had written then struck out. “An eternal wall of separation between the Church & State” were Jefferson’s exact words. The FBI excavated this word, like a kingdom buried beneath a water table—written then red-lined, drafted then struck. The Head of State reconsidering his choice of words in the ordering of the world. Jefferson perhaps thinking to himself, who am I to imbue eternality on such a world, on such a wall? Or, can such a construct hold?

This Statesman’s metaphor, this “wall of separation” would lie dormant in the ground—quiet, rupturous as a seed—until 1947 when Justice Hugo Black of the Supreme Court would excavate. To it, he would add his own descriptors. This wall, wrote Justice Black in Everson v. Board of Education, must remain “high and impregnable.”

From 1972 to 2000, the Fifth Circuit “took the lead in clarifying the law,” drawing lines, architecting the doctrine of the Ministerial Exception. Each time a ministerial function employee filed an action, the Fifth Circuit held for the church. The law hammering stone. Attorney Janet Belcove-Shalin: “Clergy is one discrimination class that did not secure protection” under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I want to sit the judge magistrates before me. I want to call them to the dock. Basic and Traditional, they write, holding the line even though it’s 1972 and so-called housewives have taken up factory posts, built weapons, worked the line. Does tradition not change? I want to ask. To what constitutional lines will we hold fast? Are we not Americans? The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America on July 4, 1776, written by one Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Gentlemen, I would like to state for the record, the world is no longer Basic and Traditional.

A fleet is the largest organized unit of naval ships grouped for tactical or other purposes. The fleet admiral is the highest-ranking naval officer, the senior-most officer, the most senior commissioned rank. One Mrs. Billie B. McClure, Fleet Admiral since 1972.

Other vessels make their way toward her now. Assault Ships, Tankers, and Standby Boats. Gatelifters and Barges, Schooners and Iceboats. There, at her mooring, they make berth, my vessel among them, stretching chain and line to meet hers.

The Code of Hammurabi from ancient Babylon contains 282 edicts. Two-hundred-and-eighty-two “If, Then” statements. Scribes etched the Code at Hammurabi’s behest, a portrait of King Hammurabi and the god Shamash etched atop.

King Hammurabi is bearded. Actually, he sports a warrior’s mesh for a beard—link after link protecting his throat, his Adam’s apple. His eyes are lidded, framed by a thick-rimmed helmet; his cheeks and jawbones protected by jowls of silver mesh. The god of justice, Shamash, is seated on a throne of stone and stands almost as tall as Hammurabi, facing him. Hammurabi’s angular arms are folded in front. His right elbow rests on his left arm, as if he wants to place fist to chin like Rodin’s Thinker. They appear to be brothers—this god and this king. Hammurabi’s right hand glows, like a torch, all five fingers pointing up, held together like bound straw fit for a tongue of flame. Hammurabi’s demeanor like Moses on Mount Sinai: upright, at-attention, resolute and stiff. Shamash hands Hammurabi a thin scroll and Hammurabi, with his right hand, reaches to receive it. This portrait of King Hammurabi was etched in diorite slab, a four-ton, seven-foot finger of black, stone stele, the Code below.

“If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out,” reads the Code. Lex talionis. Eye for an Eye. Tooth for a Tooth. “If a married man has sex with his slave or his maidservant,” reads the Code, “there shall be no consequence. If, on the other hand, the married person is a woman and she has an affair with a man—slave, free, or otherwise—she and her lover shall both be bound and tossed into the Euphrates.”

A cantankerous opinion rendered in the Seventh Circuit in 2006 dismissing a plaintiff’s claims under the Ministerial Exception: “If Hammurabi himself appeared before us and desired to weigh in on the matter,” wrote one Judge Richard Allen Posner, his brow likely deepening in furrow and fold, “we would not listen. And furthermore, if the parties of a lawsuit requested that a religious issue be resolved by the court, we would refuse to honor that request, as we, the courts, cannot resolve such issues intelligently.”

Hammurabi himself appears on the southern wall of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Hammurabi chiseled there, carved in white, standing in good stead with the other lawmakers who worked, the tribute reads, “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak and to see that justice is done to widows and orphans.”

For almost one thousand years, scribes-in-training prepared for their profession by copying Hammurabi’s Code. Akkadian and Cuneiform chock-full of illogicalities and contradictions, yeses and no’s—the most complete legal compendium in Antiquity. The scribes copied it all down, erased, then began again and quickly forgot what they’d written only a moment before.

I figure the minute the scroll is passed from Shamash to Hammurabi, from the mind of the god to the hand of the King, we’ve got interpretive challenges. We’ve got blind eyes and dim laps, fogbound vessels, bats hitting cave walls and sonar malfunctions—vessels flying through the dark without instrumentation that works, reliably, every time.

They are harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd, says Christ, up on a cliff looking out over Jerusalem. Their leaders are crafting wooden rules, he says. Wooden rules short on facts and long on law office history. They are letting people be hurt because the actor is religious. The venerable institutions, the Temple, above the Laws of God. Here, primum non nocere does not apply, say the men with scrolls in hand, with gavels knocking on wooden knees and benches.

After losing at the district court level, and then again at the appellate level, Mrs. Billie B. McClure filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, asking the Supreme Court of the United States of America to hear her case. It was the October Term, 1972, the Burger Court at bench—five male justices including Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun seated at bench. They considered the matter (but briefly, for a moment?) and declined to take a look.

This high court is arbiter of the seas, maritime guard of justice. For who is in charge of the seas? Certainly, no single nation for the boundary lines are not fixed, they are fluid and flowing. Settlement of Disputes Between States, Tempering Justice with Mercy, and Maritime, all fall to the Supreme Court with its fiery sword and silver scales—the Woman, The Contemplation of Justice, seated there in her marble throne.

Courtrooms are shaped planks fitted over a keel with ribs—they are wooden hulls, designed for acoustics, for sound. Reflective materials at the bow and absorptive materials at the stern. The cases must be heard. The words must bounce in the proper direction, off the proper walls, and land in the ears of the Justices.

Mrs. Billie B. McClure’s case was refused entrance to the Supreme Court’s ear. Billie McClure’s footfall kept to the courtyards, the exterior walkways of flaked Georgia marble; her footfall kept to corridors flanked in Alabama marble. Past doors and floors, and paneled walls of American quartered white oak she walks now, like a ghost, her vessel tacking toward the blue eye of the wind, heading up.

The Supreme Court denied review of the issue stating: Mrs. Billie B. McClure’s petition was “not timely filed,” when, by a count of the calendar’s moons, it clearly was.

That same year, in 1972, the raised mahogany Bench of the Supreme Court, where the five Justices sat, was “altered from a straight-line to a winged shape”—this new shape, they hoped, would provide aural and auditory advantages over the original design.

The shaped planks of a vessel can, over time, slide to the edge of the hull and lose their rigidity, their shape. The USS Constitution has changed shape in this way, built as it was in 1794 and so named by Head of State, George Washington. Today, boat-building tricks have been applied in order to bring her back into shipshape condition. The USS Constitution was “blocked up in dry block until it was straight and then given elaborate (very modern) diagonal braces to keep it straight.”

In their legal claims, women employed by religious organizations state, quite matter-of-factly, the strong evidences and fact patterns of gender discrimination. Yet their cases do not prevail over the Wall. Attorney Leslie Griffin, Ministerial Exception expert, explains: “All these women who could not be ordained by their churches were made ministers by the courts” just long enough to “dismiss their lawsuits.”

The court “cannot” even look into the claims, maintains the judiciary. Why not? one wonders. Is it that the court must avoid looking not at the claim but at the claimant? For once you look at her—really look at her—the world will appear different, the world will somehow be different. What would they see if they looked? A creature so fearsome to behold that, once beheld, she must be either caged or shot dead?

XII

I sail after Billie McClure now, running wing-and-wing. I find, not a single vessel but a fleet, hazy and blue, shimmering. Billie McClure, Darreyl Young, Reverend Pamela Combs, Cheryl Perich, Kristen Biel, Agnes Morrissey-Berru. Too many to name.

They’ve hung their life vests on the lines running from the mooring, on the gray lines rising up out of blue ocean—I catch a whiff of air, it is a crocus cracked open, split through with orange blossom and honey. A blood orange tree blooms on the center deck of Billie McClure’s Schooner, as if rooted in the sea below, in the sky above. I had heard they were out here somewhere. An entire fleet of priest women, and one man, an entire fleet dropped anchor, mid-sea, and moored. Are they singing?

All this orange and honey and salted air.

I am excited to see her, Billie McClure. I want to ask her this one question: You still believe? (And to ask it again and again and again)—you still believe? After all this trouble, after all this—belief? It holds fast? It held you fast?

Billie, answer me this one question, I want to say.

I trim my sails and press toward them. Their sound travels, it bounces off the wall of water. They are a bunch of off-key Christmas carolers let in the front door. She’s let them in her house, and they sing, half-lunged, and stung. They sing.

These carolers inside her living room tell me I’ve got my answer. They’re packed in tight—no wiggle room. From afar, I glimpse only a bit of Billie’s dyed red hair, faded to almost pink, shoulder length and thinning—I cannot see her face yet. The smile I imagine on her face is a Cat-Swallowed-The-Canary kind of smile. This pleases me. She is parked under the Palm of Deborah just outside of Bethel now, seated in the long, blue shade and the heat and the light are rising.

Hi.