THE LADY ISA PRIEST

IT’S EASY TO miss her in the procession of white-robed clergy at Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church. But when she reads the gospel or prepares Communion, people generally take notice and start asking who she is. Her own formal answer to that question would be “the Reverend Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, M.D.” Her name does not appear on the church bulletin because she is not on the full-time staff – her main job is with the faculty of Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She performs only the duties of a deacon at Mass since the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas is conservative and doesn’t permit her to officiate or to preach. But she is a full-fledged Episcopal priest -one of about 500 women priests in the country and the only one in the Dallas area. Even before her ordination in 1980, she had established a long and distinguished career as a psychiatrist (hence the medical part of her title).

Among High-Church Episcopal folk, it’s common to address a member of the clergy as “Father So-and-So.” But so far, few parishioners address Ruth Barnhouse as “Mother Ruth,” which is what she would prefer. So she settles for “Dr. Barn-house,” a comfortable compromise suiting both of her sets of credentials. Names have always been something of an issue for her. She is still likely to be asked if she is related to the Tiffanys. (She is – a somewhat distant cousin.) But in earlier years, virtually everyone asked her if she was related to the Rev. Dr. Barnhouse. She is. Her father, Donald Grey Barn-house, was the first nationwide electronic preacher in the United States, with a coast-to-coast weekly radio show on the NBC Blue Network, which originated from his sermons at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia starting in 1927.

Barnhouse’s childhood as the daughter of the renowned fundamentalist minister was itself remarkable. Her father had met her mother in Belgium after World War I, where both were doing religious work. They were married in London; and Ruth was born near Grenoble, France, where her father had a church. By her parents’ design, her first language was French; she didn’t speak English until she was 2, when her father returned to Philadelphia to take a small church and teach history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Throughout Barnhouse’s childhood, there were long forays to Europe. Her father always insisted that his churches agree to allow him the summer off to travel, and the family found cheaper and more exciting ways to live in Europe than they could have at home. Ruth could speak four languages fluently by the time she was 16.

Since her famous father “was a nut about education,” she and her younger siblings -two brothers and a sister -were schooled at home by their grandmother Tiffany. Each morning they would put on their coats, bid goodbye to their grand-mother, walk around the block and come back to the house, greeting her as “Mrs. Tiffany” and starting the day’s work. They were not allowed to play with other children. This hothouse atmosphere encouraged early blooming -the Philadelphia newspapers featured stories about the Barnhouse children’s precocities and their soaring IQs. If an unusual word was uttered at the dinner table, the children were expected to look it up in Crabbe’s Synonyms. Afterward, at evening devotions, Donald Barnhouse would read a biblical passage in the original Greek or Hebrew, and the other members of the family would read the same passage from transiations into other languages such as French and German and several in English.

Barnhouse remembers that her mother, who held a master’s degree in modern languages from Cornell, “had a lot of strength.” But a stronger influence on Barnhouse’s choice of careers was her mother’s older sister, Neoskoleta Tiffany, who graduated from medical school at the University of Chicago and rode back in knickers on a motorcycle to open a practice in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Barn-house spent the summer of 1926 with her Aunt Neoskoleta, who taught the 2-year-old the names of the bones in the body and taught her how to read. Later, her aunt went to Kuwait to practice medicine (Barnhouse still wears a pearl originally given to her aunt by a sheik for saving a wife and son in childbirth). There were strong women in both families; an aunt on Barnhouse’s father’s side was the first white woman to cross the Andes Mountains on horseback.

But Barnhouse’s earliest ambition to become a doctor soon had competition. The great pianist Jorge Bolet became a friend of the Barnhouses when Jorge was 13 and Ruth was 3. Bolet’s older sister, Maria, became her first piano teacher at that time; Jorge himself later taught her. It seemed to Ruth that she was bound for a concert career until she failed her auditions for the Curtis Institute of Music. She finished private secondary school at the age of 14; she entered Vassar College in 1940 at 16.

Rebelling from the “muscular Calvinism” of her childhood, she left Vassar when she was 17 and eloped with a medical student, Francis Charles Edmonds Jr., which scandalized her family. During her short-lived first marriage (which ended in divorce in 1947), she had two children and went back to school at Barnard College in New York City. While at Barnard, she felt far removed from the religious training she had grown up with but surprised herself by accepting an invitation to attend a service at the Columbia University chapel. She had never been to a sacramental-style service before, and 20 minutes into the Episcopal Mass she found herself “hooked.” She regretted that she felt she couldn’t come back because, as she told the celebrating priest, “I don’t believe all that stuff.” When he replied that she should come back, anyway-God would see to it that she eventually believed what she was supposed to believe – she was converted.

“I became an Episcopalian-I would have joined up any place where they told me that,” Barnhouse says. “One of the great things about the Episcopal Church is that it is a little uncouth there to ask someone else just what they believe. If Episcopalians fight, it is on some practical issue and not a theological matter. I like the inclusive attitude -trying to see whom you can let in rather than whom you have to keep out.”

After Barnard, Barnhouse went to the Columbia University Medical School, then did a psychiatric residency at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts.

The patients at the private psychiatric hospital apparently didn’t know what to make of Ruth Barnhouse. In 1950, she had remarried, this time to a fellow medical student, Dr. William F. Beuscher, and by 1960 had five more children, all sons. When she was pregnant with her third son, Barnhouse and another female resident (who was also pregnant) took to making rounds together. One day they went into the ward for the most disturbed patients, where the women – who were very far out of touch with reality -lived in rooms with linoleum floors rather than among the genteel antiques found in the rest of the hospital. But when the patients saw the two pregnant doctors enter, their behavior changed immediately: It was instant sanity. “You shouldn’t be in here,” one patient said. “It’s bad for the babies.”

Among Barnhouse’s first patients at McLean during 1953 and 1954 was Sylvia Plath, who later became the poet laureate of the American feminist movement. Barnhouse is immortalized as the sympathetic Dr. Nolan in Plath’s autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, and in her published letters as “Dr. B.” Barnhouse stayed in touch with Plath after her recovery from the breakdown described in the novel, and Plath wrote to her from England shortly before her suicide in 1963, telling her doctor that she had begun to have problems again but was seeking medical help. Barnhouse did not reveal her relationship with the poet until her identity was disclosed recently in the voluminous Plath scholarship. She still doesn’t divulge those patient/doctor confidences, but she does speak of her admiration for Plath as a person and as a writer. Barnhouse practiced psychiatry in the Boston area for 20 years and was a clinical assistant in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School during the same time. After her second divorce in 1968, she was left to balance the demands of her practice against the responsibilities of single parenthood. “I knew enough not to raise the boys to be kings of the walk just because they were male,” she says, and she faced criticism from some of her psychiatric colleagues for refusing to allow her sons to play with guns and other war toys. She is pleased with the way her children have turned out. Some of the boys are in noticeably non-macho careers: One is an elementary schoolteacher in Houston; one, a headwaiter in a Boston restaurant; another, an acting student at Bard College in upstate New York. Barnhouse thinks that they have done well in preserving their masculinity without succumbing to stereotypes.

Despite the demands of her duties as a doctor and a mother, Barnhouse also found time to be active in the small suburban Episcopal parish of which she was a member; she was even drafted as a kind of unofficial psychiatric consultant. She noticed that it was purely a cultural accident whether someone with a problem sought out a doctor or a minister; the mutual turf was a very nebulous area. Someone, she thought, should be teaching the clergy when to call the shrinks and the shrinks when to call the clergy. So she enrolled in a few courses at the local Episcopal theological school to try to build some bridges. Little did she suspect that she was embarking on a new career.

After a year, she became a part-time special student at the Weston College of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a Jesuit Roman Catholic institution. She transferred there because the students were older and more interesting to her. She was studying the doctrine of the Trinity one night in 1970 when she experienced something that astounded her. As she slugged through some works of disputatious theologians, she found herself becoming furious at their arguments that attacked several orthodox doctrines: ” ’My God,’ I said to myself, ’you really believe all this stuff.’ ” That was a revelation, since her religious views had always been tinctured with a certain distance and skepticism. When she enrolled for a year of full-time residency at Weston in 1973, she had no thoughts of becoming a priest. It was a master’s of theology degree that she was after. She still had sons to support, so she needed a scholarship. “Being a woman was not nearly so great a handicap as being over 40,” she says. “Nobody wants to give financial aid to people over that age.”

She says that the spirit of intellectual interchange at Weston reminded her of her years of growing up. “My father’s style was a cross between that of a Talmudic scholar and that of a Jesuit. We had had a graded Sunday school at the church where we had to memorize the Bible -as much as a chapter a week in high school – and write a weekly essay. I later realized that the course I had taken in systematic theology then was a watered-down version of St. Thomas of Aquinas.”

Some of the Jesuits – known as the most liberal of Catholic priests -became her close friends. She even credits some of them for telling her, a few years later, that she was resisting a call from God -to the priesthood. At first, she had both intuitive and intellectual misgivings about women in the priesthood, but the more she explored the priesthood and what it stood for, the more she was convinced that it was necessary to give expression to what she calls “the feminine face of the church” by the symbolic presence of a woman at the altar. After the canons of the Episcopal Church in this country changed in 1976 to allow for the ordination of women, she was ordained a deacon in 1978 and a priest in 1980 by the authority of the Diocese of Massachusetts, to which she is still officially attached.

In 1978, she uprooted herself from New England (“It was time for my sons to be on their own -they wouldn’t leave home, so I left”) and took a job at the Virginia Theological Seminary near Washington, D.C., while continuing a private psychiatric practice and serving as deacon at St. Columba’s Church there. It was at the National Cathedral in Washington that she was actually ordained. Her brothers, her six sons and two of her three grandchildren were there for the occasion, though her sister and daughter were unable to attend. Her oldest son, Pete, came all the way from Europe for the ceremony. “I wouldn’t have come just for a wedding,” he said. “That’s something that could happen again. But I figured that this was once in a lifetime.”

While Ruth was in Washington, D.C., Dr. Joseph P. Quillian Jr., then dean of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology, approached her -although she had no thought of moving at the time -and, as she says, “made me a Texas offer I couldn’t refuse.” She came to Perkins in 1980 as a full professor to teach pastoral care. “I was hired to help re-theologize the pastoral care program – to help get ministers out of the mini-shrink business and into what they are supposed to be doing.” The liaison with St. Michael’s was arranged, and it was agreed that she would be able to practice psychiatry privately for a maximum of 10 hours a week. “My value to each of my professions is increased if I practice both of them actively,” she says.

Her training as a psychiatrist was mostly orthodox Freudian, but she has increasingly been drawn to the ideas of Carl Jung, whose theories are more compatible with religion than Freud’s.

Texas has been something of an adjustment for Barnhouse. To someone born in the Alps, most of America can look pretty flat; Texas can look positively steam-rollered. The relative hilliness of Oak Cliff is one reason she bought a condominium there. She misses the intellectual ferment of Boston but not its “sophisticated, elegant finders of darkness to curse -the hand-wringing, I-told-you-so pessimists. A small amount of what might be called vulgarity in the East is a small price to pay for the rampant optimism here. I fit in better here, really, because, basically, I’m an extroverted soul.”

She has little time for a social life, but she has made a few friends here, including Margaret A. Bolinger and Mildred G. Tip-pett (the arts patronesses who gave major backing for the production of Das Rheingold to the Dallas Opera last fall). They taught her a card game called “Spite and Malice,” and they bring her pots of chili and bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream when the driving of her stick-shift Volkswagen Rabbit aggravates her sciatica and gets her down in the back (which happens too often to suit her). Undaunted, she sometimes sees her women patients while lying flat on her back, though she cancels her appointments with the men.

Most of her recreation is solitary. She plays Rachmaninoff and Bach on her grand piano and has an entire upstairs workroom devoted to her needlepoint, with skeins of rainbow-colored thread hanging on the wall. Her condominium has floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of murder mysteries (she is convinced that Agatha Christie is a great writer). “I can’t read most of what passes for modern fiction, though,” she confesses. “I keep thinking I should be getting paid $90 an hour to listen to all that stuff.”

Mostly, though, she devotes herself to her work. Her son, Tom Beuscher, a teacher in Houston, remembers the time she was seeing patients all day long (in order to earn the $300,000 necessary to put him and his brothers through school), followed by nights of reading and writing until 2 a.m. She is still driven. (Tom says: “I tell her not to worry so much about being famous. She should put her feet up and relax and let her ideas speak for themselves.”) She has written one book, co-edited another and is at work on two more. “My writing is a lot like having a baby,” she says. “It gestates a long time and then it has to come out.”

Barnhouse has also gained a reputation in Dallas as a fervent political activist. She was one of the founders of the Dallas chapter of Ground Zero, the anti-nuclear-war group. She also takes an active role in Physicians for Social Responsibility, a group largely devoted to the same issue. Last spring, NBC News filmed her in Shreveport saying Mass and at SMU speaking on disarmament. The local media also featured her prominently, and she received many calls accusing her of being a dupe and, worse, a Communist.

This spring, at a banquet of the conservative Institute for Religion and Democracy, she was scheduled to respond to a pro-armament speech. “I got up and said, ’At Perkins, I am always telling my students-especially my women students – that you shouldn’t leave emotions out of decision-making. I want to say that I am outraged and on the verge of tears because of what I have just heard.’ ” She believes that women should infuse ideas with feelings. And sometimes with passion. “The difference between men and boys,” she says, “is the cost of their toys.”

So Ruth Barnhouse has a still-growing national reputation in three areas: psychiatry, theology and anti-nuclear protesting. In many respects, she has followed in the footsteps of her famous father, despite her rejection of much that he stood for. “From him I learned that you figure out what you want to do, then get somebody to pay you to do it. And my upbringing – after the years I spent getting over some of its less fortunate effects -meant that I really did get a much better education than most, and I am not nervous [about being] the only person to think something. All that traveling meant that I am not provincial, either; I don’t make the mistake of thinking that my way is the only way to live.”

Donald Barnhouse mellowed somewhat as he got older, before his death in 1960. “It was interesting to watch,” Ruth says. “He had been a strict creationist, but Carbon 14 dating got to him. He published a Christmas editorial in the mid-Fifties that said that he realized that he had made a mistake looking for the places where people disagreed. . . he should have been looking for those where they did agree. I credit some of the change in him to my wonderful stepmother. My mother had died in 1944, and my father remarried 10 years later. She was very good for him.”

Some of Ruth Barnhouse’s friends detect a little mellowing in her. Her friend and fellow psychiatrist, Dr. James Hall, remembers that at an evaluation session of the Isthmus Institute she had been reproaching people for a sexist use of language when talking about the Deity. He was happily surprised when she called God “He.” She still doesn’t like it, though, when Hall calls her a “priestess” instead of a priest.

Maybe being one of the first women priests in the country- and making something of an issue of it – is the most natural thing in the world for someone with Ruth Barnhouse’s background. Her brother Donald is now a Presbyterian minister (after careers as a professor and a journalist), and her brother David is a surgeon and has served as a medical missionary. Even her son Bob, the oldest child of her second family, who is pursuing a career in computers, says he will probably be a priest eventually. Maybe there is a kind of destiny for the members of this family who, as Barnhouse’s sister Dorothy puts it, “grew up wrapped in the cocoon of eternity.”