Standing with a candle on the Women’s Ministry timeline ringing the walls of Trinity Church, I felt the patient witness to Christ of centuries of women all around me in the glimmering dark.

It’s tempting to think that progress is linear and moving steadily forward. But the breath of the Spirit “bloweth where it listeth.” And often it listeth in a disorienting, circular motion before the forward impetus can be discerned.

Take women’s ordination. Things have moved at a pretty fast clip in the past 30 years, from “irregular” to “regular” ordinations, to women in the episcopate, to a woman presiding bishop-elect.

At first glance, it looks like a natural outgrowth of the women deaconesses of the late 19th-century suffrage movement.

But in the first half of the 20th century, that ever-rolling stream of justice roiled and churned and looked as if it might turn back on itself. The Lambeth Conference reversed an earlier decision and asserted deaconesses were not in holy orders after all. In 1919, General Convention inserted the word “male” into the qualifications for being a deputy, rejected licensing women as lay readers. And even as late as 1949, women deputies, elected by their dioceses, were refused voice and vote at Convention.

Yet by 1970, women were once again accepted as deacons and lay deputies to Convention, as priests in 1976, and bishops in 1985. Pam Chinnis became the first woman President of the House of Deputies in 1991, and by 1998, there were 11 women bishops among the more than 700 at the Lambeth Conference.

Reflecting on this history in the candlelight at Trinity, 15 years into my own ministry as a priest in the church, I took a deep breath and thought, “OK, chill, amiga. Let’s trust the Spirit. We might not know where it’s headed. Worse, we might think we can control it. We often get in its way. But sooner or later, God works God’s purpose out.”