Preaching in My Yes Dress

After a series of childhood misfortunes--her father's death, her mother's ill-advised love affair, her disabled sister wrecking the family GTO--self-avowed church-geek Jo Page decided it was her job to figure out how to stay on God's good side and maybe spare the family any more tragedy. But she was a girl. And a Lutheran. That ruled out the Roman Catholic sisterhood as so quasi-erotically portrayed by Audrey Hepburn in Page's favorite movie, The Nun's Story. Though women were ordained in the larger branch of the Lutheran church, when Page's own pastor handed her a brochure enumerating all the ways in which she, as a female, was to be silent and submissive, she gave up on the church and went off in search of sex and drugs and rock-and-roll like any rejected adolescent Lutheran girl would.

Eventually Page found her way back into the church and ultimately into ordained ministry, spending twenty years in the ecclesiastical trenches, presiding over life's rituals and preaching compulsory weekly words of hope she wasn't sure she even believed.

Comical, provocative, and heartbreaking, Preaching in My Yes Dress tells several stories: of a child's need to cleave to the very God who instills mortal terror; of the shape-shifting that a public "pastoral identity" entails; of the power of ritual and the weight involved in presiding over it; and of the rise of the religious right and the patriarchy endemic to both scripture and faith traditions. Page also raises the question of whether or not faith can heal the wounds the life of faith has itself inflicted.