Intellect, Intuition, and More

by the Rev. Scott Walters

I just came across a quote from Lucille Clifton, which the universe was clearly dropping into my lap as blog fodder. So here it is:

“You can murder poems, I mean, I’ve done it, when you start thinking too hard in your own way and you start intellectualizing, because I think a poem has to come from intellect and intuition. If you get too much intuition you have sentimentality, which is not good, and with too much intellect, it has a whole lot of stuff that nobody knows nor cares. But a poem, it’s about a whole human and speaks to the whole human and it has to come from a whole human, so you involve all of yourself.”

The reminder that intellect and intuition are both important ways of engaging the world isn’t useful only to poets. When our daughter Kate was 14, she had intense stomach pains one night. We took her to the ER at Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, and the first physician to attend to her asked her some questions about her pain, then pressed her abdomen here and there, moved her legs about a bit, conversing with Kate and listening to her all the while. After a few minutes, she said, “It’s her appendix. It needs to come out.”

But Kate’s appendix did not come out. Not right away, at least. Presumably, the first doctor’s shift ended, and a series of specialists, who all happened to be men, came through. I noticed immediately that these physicians did not touch Kate. They ordered ultrasounds and X-rays and such, looking to their expensive machines for the source of our daughter’s pain. But none of the scans was conclusive, so she writhed on into the night. Early the next morning, another (male) physician rushed into the room and said, without explanation, “OK. We’re going to take her appendix.” And off Kate went to surgery. A few hours later, they let us know that everything went fine but that the appendix was almost gangrenous. Which is to say it was more than a little infected.

Everything turned out well in the end. But the experience remains vivid and instructive to me all these years later. While I don’t think it’s helpful to close up anyone in a box made of traits and tendencies usually associated with a gender, it is true that the curiosity, touch, and intuition of one woman that night made a straighter path toward the truth about what was going on in our daughter’s body than the intellects and equipment of the men who followed.

Again, the point here is not to say that women live by intuition and men live by logic. I mean… have you met a man? It’s just that when we diminish certain ways of knowing that may have arisen in part from a person having different experiences of the world, perhaps because of their sex or gender, we may be keeping the wisdom or insight we most need locked out of the room.

This weekend we’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first ordinations of women to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. It’s not wrong to frame the exclusion of women from this role in terms of justice and basic fairness. It’s not right that the stained glass ceiling remained intact for so many centuries and still does in many Christian traditions. But surely an even bigger tragedy is all the wisdom that might have come into our lives and communities and the world if we hadn’t made half the human race ineligible for the peculiar ministry of a priest.

I could fill up many more blog posts with stories of women clergy who changed my life very much for the better and how it’s difficult even to imagine who I’d be and how I’d see the world if not for them. Rather than ramble on, I’ll leave you with the prompt to think about the impact women clergy have had on your life. Giving thanks to God for their ministry would be one appropriate response. Picking up the phone or typing an email to give thanks directly to one of those women might be another. Looking around for what other sources of wisdom and perspective we’re missing out on by excluding whole categories of people and then setting ourselves to changing this might be the most important response of all.