Recently James over at Random Thoughts has recounted parts of a conversation that he and Simeon from Simeon’s Hit and Miss of Theological Thought and I had at my home last Thursday evening.

One of the things that I enjoy most during our Thursday evenings is the oppurtunity to sit around with some coffee and discuss whatever is on our minds at the time.  This specific occasion was a very interesting one indeed; one point of clarification though.  The quote from me is not entirely correct, I did not say that “the Orthodox would say that since all matter is good nothing is unclean”, what I actually said was that since the Orthodox view the human body, and yes all of creation as inherently good:

As far as this world is concerned, the Orthodox believe that although it is essentially “very good,” created this way by God, it is ruined and spoiled and in the power of evil. It needs to be healed and purified. In a word, the world needs salvation in order to be what God made it to be.

 — from Meeting the Orthodox

Then a natural process of the body such as menstruation, cannot be viewed as unclean and cannot be used as a disqualifier for ordination to the office of Deaconess.  I still posit that it has more to do with the idea of “With age comes wisdom”, and a level of maturity that is required.

One of the jobs of the Deaconess as I understand it is was the purity and virtue of the younger women in the parish.  As well as classically they attended the women who were being brought into the Church, and in that function they were protecting the virtue of the women as well as the Priest.  Again from the OCA website:

St Paul saw women as loyal coworkers. He depended on them to help spread the gospel. He spoke of consecrated virgins and widows. He wrote that in Christ there is neither Greek [Gentile] nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female; all are one in Christ.

Phoebe was one of the first to be called deaconess. St Paul wrote that she was “a helper of many and myself as well.” The role of the deaconess in later years was to help clergy with the administration of baptism to adult women, and to reach out to women in institutions where men were not allowed [prisons, hospices for women, etc.] or where some of the faithful could be scandalized by the presence of men [e.g. bedrooms, isolated homes of the sick or elderly women].

 — from Women’s Role in the Church: One Woman’s Perspective

I agree with Fr. David Rucker (my Spiritual Father) that the office of Deaconess should be officially resurrected in the Orthodox Church in America.